Word: nachtwey
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...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...
...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...