Word: nachtwey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Picking the photojournalist for this project was easy: Jim Nachtwey has shot wars and famines and revolutions for TIME since 1984. When I called him last week to congratulate him on his photos, he was on assignment in Jakarta. He faxed his thoughts about what this story meant to him, and I'd like to share with you what he wrote...
...what haunts me equally about Nachtwey's work is how strikingly beautiful all these photographs are, and I'm not talking about beauty in some sick voyeuristic sense. The book itself is huge and heavy, with thick paper stock and stylish layout. Moreover, the photographs are finely printed and composed with an infallible eye for human misery: few of us could ever imagine the horrors that Nachtwey's subjects have seen, but he is a virtuoso at evoking pity. The line between a bad photographer and a good photographer of these horrors is drawn where the photographs stop making...
...brief but insightful introduction, Luc Sante points out that it does feel almost obscene to see hundreds of deaths packaged so elegantly. "Maybe we expect that the photographer faced with grief, trauma or starvation will be rendered incompetent by the sight,'' Sante muses. Nachtwey's work, however, manages to avoid the luridness of a snuff film by being laced with sympathy. There is no doubt in flipping through these photographs that they are taken with the utmost concern for the afflicted, that they are taken, as Nachtwey says in his afterword, as "an appeal to the reader's best instincts...
...side of the story, but we distrust it:anyone with the slightest cynicism regarding today's media-which is to say, anyone with a pulse and half a brain-regards such reporting with healthy skepticism. We never know how staged and contrived these events really are. But with Nachtwey, our cynicism gives way to empathy, and our skepticism to sorrow. The special place of Nachtwey's photography is the realm beyond the contrived, where even jaded media-hounds cannot escape the pathos. The starvation in the Sudan and in Somalia is impossible to stage, and the subjects are too weak...
...Nachtwey's photography will be featured in New York City at the International Center for Photography, from May 23 to June...