Word: nachtwey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
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...
...Inferno, which takes its name and epigraph from Dante, is Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya and Kosovo. It is gruesome stuff, some of the most grisly and horrifying photography I have ever seen, and certainly not right for you if your tastes fall on the squeamish side of Diane Arbus. Nachtwey surpasses in pure disgust value even Joel-Peter Witkin, who is known for raiding Mexican morgues in search of subjects. In one Nachtwey photograph taken in Rwanda in 1994, a carcass lies rotting in front of a church; the fact that it hasn't been removed hints that there are more...
...Nachtwey's photographs of the living are no less compelling, nor less vile. Images from the Sudan and from Somalia tell the story of the East African famine during the last decade. Photographs from Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya are striking for their portrayal of the agony of war-men on makeshift operating tables, blinded by shrapnel and bleeding from torn limbs; civilians dying in the snow; the living inconsolably mourning the dead; bloody handprints smeared on walls...
...would anyone risk his life to take these photographs? Why would anyone purchase a book of them? There is, first of all, the journalistic aspect of Nachtwey's work. He has seen what few others have seen and has brought back evidence of his journeys. His work is, as he writes in his afterword, an odyssey "through the dark reaches of the last decade,'' which is to say through some of the worst human experiences life has had to offer during the last few years. Few have demonstrated the awfulness of these situations better, and we should appreciate Nachtwey...
This week we turn to East Africa, with Karl Taro Greenfeld's story and James Nachtwey's photographs about mother and child mortality in Rwanda. (Nachtwey last week won an Eisie photography award for his image of a Kosovar refugee that ran in TIME last spring.) The continuing tragedy of that African nation is that it cannot even repopulate itself: 1 out of every 9 mothers dies in childbirth--compared with 1 in 4,000 in the U.S.--and 40% of children die before age five. When we developed this story idea, we wanted to ensure it would be supplemented...