Word: infernos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Capa might have found a kindred spirit in James Nachtwey, the intrepid photojournalist and five-time Capa medal winner whose book Inferno chronicles suffering from a sometimes uncomfortably close perspective. Nachtwey, whose photographs have appeared in Time magazine and in a previous collection, 1989's Deeds of War, chooses as his subjects the spoils of war, genocide and social stigma. He is an "anti-war photographer,'' says the writer Luc Sante in Inferno's brief introduction; his photographs record the horror of war rather than the valor...
...take part in their amazing deal, you're intelligent enough to use a microwave without starting a fire. Not only that, but proctors and other university officers are apparently viewed by the administration as responsible enough to toast a slice of bread without turning Canaday into the Towering Inferno, Part...
...Inferno (Phaidon; 480 pages; $125) is the record of what Nachtwey saw in the 1990s. After the fall of the communist dictator Ceaucescu, he visited the ghoulish places where Romanian orphans were warehoused. He moved on to Somalia and the Sudan--where famine was used as a weapon of mass destruction during civil war--and he photographed in the refugee camps. In 1994 he worked in Rwanda and Zaire during the unsupervised ferocities of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis and the regional chaos it set in motion, including what may have been the largest refugee exodus in history...
...would be hard to call this book hopeful, but it does at least end in Kosovo, the place where the West finally found the will and the means to intervene effectively in a regional calamity. Inferno is a book with the weight and density of one of those great 20th century works of broken-hearted testimony, of the Holocaust documentary Shoah or the string quartets of Shostakovich. With 382 black-and-white pictures spread across oversize pages, it has the heft of a gravestone, which is not so different from what it is, a cenotaph for the last victims...
...last year, a rainy day in Kosovo, should really have been the last of Besim Kadriu's life. That morning, in the Albanian sector of the town of Mitrovica, Serb paramilitaries torched the house the 21-year-old economics student shared with his pregnant wife Valbona. Watching the inferno from a distance, Kadriu was confident Valbona had escaped but was unsure where she had fled. He set off on foot for the village of Zaza, a few miles away, on a hunch she would be there with her two brothers. She wasn't, but a large number of Serb militiamen...