Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity

...Toward the end of World War II, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote that the scent of a blossoming tree (which in the poem also represents his writing pen) is "like an insult/ To suffering humanity...

...A Rwandan Hutu suspected of "Tutsi sympathies" (whatever those are) has had his face and head carefully carved with a machete into deep, symmetrical gashes, one of which extends in a perfect arc from his mouth almost to his ear...

...John Berger has written that every photograph snatches a moment out of time— which is to say out of context, out of history, out of lived experience—thereby creating a shocked, and shocking, discontinuity that is itself a form of violence...

...I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working...

...Marinovich does not try to stop the mob...

...Though the dryness of the stony earth and the pocked, misshapen graves tell us that this is a country where poverty and war have inextricably merged—over one million Afghans have died since 1979—a strange peacefulness pervades the photograph...

...The point to remember (though comprehension may be more difficult) is this: human beings—creatures of reason and free choice—did these things to each other, did them purposely and with passionate conviction...

...The bang-bang boys intuitively knew the difference between being neutral, which they weren't, and being accurate, which they were...

...Nachtwey was with Marinovich and Oosterbroek at the shootout in Thokoza...

...To see, or look away...

...In short, though everything we know about this scene bespeaks pain and devastation, their opposites are undeniably present, too...

...This suggests not that Nachtwey is a cold aesthete, but that horror and beauty cannot, perhaps, be as easily separated as some would like—and that those who believe they can untangle the two are probably already blind to both...

...Take, for instance, his 1996 photograph of an Afghan woman mourning her brother in a Kabul cemetery...

...The pictures of the dead and wounded were the ones that would show people the real aspect of war, and I was glad I had taken that one roll before I turned soppy...

...This is far more than can be said for many of the people Nachtwey has photographed over the past decade: stunned, ragcovered Somalis and Sudanese holding their heads as they writhe on the ground and slowly starve to death...

...The authors mourned their loss, but when they returned to the township a month later, their sadness was wrenched into sharp perspective...

...She was bleeding from her head and losing ground fast...

...In fact, the most talented and committed "conflict photographers" have always questioned both the morality of their craft and the toll it takes on them, though their answers bear little resemblance to the guiltridden, solipsistic hand-wringing that dominates so much contemporary criticism...

...James Nachtwey chooses what he wants to do," Time's director of photography has said...

...But then he thought some more: "Next morning, after sleeping it over, I felt better...

...THIS IS NOT simply a stylistic problem...

...You could say these photographers were drawn to the violence-drenched townships because something singular, epochal, world-historic was happening there, and that would be true...

...Marinovich was severely wounded, and Oosterbroek killed, as they covered a shootout in Thokoza township days before the 1994 elections...

...Don McCullin, one of Britain's leading photojournalists in the 1960s and 1970s who photographed wars in the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, and Lebanon, wrote of the price he paid for his immersion in catastrophe—and of the undeniable attraction that immersion held for him: "You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery and death...

...Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour I knew that of all the gory and heart-wrenching scenes I had already photographed that morning, this dead baby was the image that would show the insane cruelty of the attack...

...Marinovich and Silva—along with their "club" colleagues Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek—are white South Africans who cut their teeth and made their names covering the ferocious fighting in the black townships between supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and of the Inkatha Freedom Party in the turbulent transitional period of 1990-1994...

...Simultaneously complex and stark, Nachtwey's pictures are unburdened by extraneous detail: he shows us more than we can bear, but no more than we need to see...

...One day while driving in Thokoza, "Joao spotted a group of women chasing another, younger woman...

...A young Chechen bomb victim—he looks about eight—lies in a hospital bed, naked...

...thus, though they were staunch ANC supporters, they never hesitated to portray atrocities committed by their "own" side...

...Still, the cruelty of the combatants is often shocking—and proof once again of the unsurprising fact that dehumanizing political systems tend to dehumanize, not ennoble, their victims...

...it forces us, though, to engage certain paradoxes...

...Photojournalism works in the opposite way: meaning— moral, political, aesthetic—is deepened through specificity...

...in his Village Voice review, Woodward accused Nachtwey of "holding a gun to our heads" and demanded, "Should we be grateful...

...Nachtwey's picture of a starving, naked Sudanese man— his thighs barely wider than our wrists, his white teeth jutting out, his bony back covered either with flies or sores as he crawls on the ground toward a feeding station—is a study in stripped-down humanity that will inevitably evoke, for many viewers, the barely living skeletons at Dachau or Belsen...

...These are precisely the abilities that contemporary Americans have lost...

...Nachtwey's ask a lot, and therefore cause consternation...

...My ears picked out the slithering, whispery sound of steel entering flesh, the solid thud of the heavy fighting sticks crushing the bone of his skull...

...But the light sucked...

...one hand reaches out to rest on the grave...

...The subjects of these photographs may be bereaved, terrorized, exhausted—they may even be killers—but at least they stand upright, they look reasonably fed, they wear clothes, and they seem to exist within some kind of coherent community...

...at the ICP, visitors were given a confusing booklet containing a map of the photos, each numbered, to be matched with an accompanying list of captions...

...The Bang-Bang Club is a compelling, downtoearth adventure narrative—quasi-personal, quasi-historic—but it poses many of the theoretical and moral questions that photography critics debate...

...he is photographed in profile, his eyes wide with alarm, his hand clutched to his neck...

...I was horrified, screaming inside my head that this could not be happening...

...Yet the poem Milosz wrote about this brazen insult—about the blossoms, and the art, that dared survive the massacres—is itself a thing of beauty...

...A good example of both attitudes can be found in critic Henry Allen, who, reviewing Nachtwey's work in the New Yorker, wrote oh-so-wearily of the "chaos and impossibility" of the countries Nachtwey has photographed and of the "gruesome hopelessness" he portrays...

...At the beginning of the book, and of his career, Marinovich witnesses the lynching of a suspected ANC supporter (a member of the Pondo tribe) by pro-Inkatha Zulus...

...When Mark Rothko called a red-and-black painting "Red and Black," or when Cindy Sherman calls a self-portrait "Untitled," they invite the viewer to discover richer, more capacious meanings in their work by refusing to limit our imaginations...

...106 • DISSENT / Winter 2001...

...But even—or especially—on plantations, the fortunes and the futures of rich and poor are often closely intertwined...

...Indeed, Nachtwey is known for the perfection of his compositions— something that, oddly, he has been criticized for, as if craft were a moral shortcoming...

...This was not the kind of war photography he had imagined himself doing—this was too weird, but he shot off frame after frame...

...The authors make clear that a dizzying confluence of factors motivated them, including a desire to record history in the making, the need to escape unhappy love affairs, competitive rivalry, a hatred of apartheid, and a craving for action...

...Nachtwey's pictures inspire a similar but entirely fitting revulsion, which may be why, in discussions of his work, a fantasy of distance repeatedly emerges...

...But what we find in Nachtwey's photos isn't hell— it's the earth, our earth, the only one we have, the one we share with (not rent to) Rwandans and Bosnians and Chechens and Sudanese and all sorts of despised and terrifying "mutants...

...In the end, they come to a hardwon but sensible conclusion: "We had not personally suffered like some of the people we photographed, but neither were we responsible for their suffering—we had just witnessed it...

...There we met Distance, a hardened ANC fighter...

...Indeed, Marshall McLuhan's communitarian vision of the global village has proved to be a cozy fake...

...The picture," he said, "clarifies everything immediately"— by which he meant, of course, simplifies...

...all photographs—and images of atrocity and war, regardless of how piercing, are no exception—are therefore liable to an infinite number of (mis)interpretations...

...We are accustomed to images that demand nothing of us...

...Perhaps Nachtwey thought his pictures would be more powerful—or closer to the abstract values of "real" art—if readers were not distracted by text...

...0 NLY CONNECT...

...he makes bewildered despair—or its partner, cheap cynicism— too easy...

...The Zulus and I took off after him, a pack hunting its terrified prey," Marinovich writes...

...In early 1994, a colleague, photographer Abdul Shariff, was killed while on assignment in the township of Kathlehong...

...Though the burka is a cruel (some would say grotesque) garment that imprisons its wearer behind a face-grill, the loveliness of its billowing pleats cannot be denied...

...But Nachtwey, through presenting his photographs so "purely," abets the confusion he seeks to banish...

...Like the camps at Dachau and Belsen, the famines in the Sudan and Somalia are man-made creations—the result of conscious policies and not, say, too much or too little rain...

...Nevertheless, a type of aestheticization, a parsing of meaning, does emerge in Nachtwey's work, though it is not to be found in the photos themselves...

...In seconds they had caught her, hacking at her with whatever weapons they had...

...Milosz could only make his point by undermining it...

...1 02 DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS The beauty that seeps into some of Nachtwey's photographs is troubling, but it is not unethical...

...But I steadily checked light readings . . . I was as aware of what I was doing as a photographer as I was of the rich scent of fresh blood...

...Writing in the Village Voice, for instance, critic Richard B. Woodward castigated Nachtwey for "the troubling fact that the photographer took his time in framing and lighting the victims," and compared his work unfavorably with the "scrappy, often blurry pictures" Robert Capa took of the Spanish Civil War...

...After just a few dozen steps he went down...

...To participate in history, or hope that it's ended...

...Her face and body are entirely hidden by her burka, which flows onto the parched, cracked ground as she kneels at the primitive tombstone...

...Rwandans hacked to pieces by their compatriots or expiring of cholera in refugee camps...

...the New Yorker's arch assessment was called "Seasons in Hell," while the Voice's resentful tirade was headlined "To Hell and Back...

...But they also knew that they were feeding off the violence—the bang-bang—of their countrymen, and they sometimes feared there might be a payback...

...The low cries of pain from the woman on the dirt pavement were almost drowned out by the attackers' triumphant ululating...

...For whatever reason, he has made exactly the wrong choice...

...This absence of narrative makes photographs malleable, the perfect repository for projections of all kinds...

...While shaving I had a conversation with myself about the incompatibility of being a reIO4 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS porter and hanging onto a tender soul at the same time...

...He is a lightning rod for the current disputes over photojournalism— and therefore, too, over the nature of modern war and the humanitarian response to it...

...And photographs cannot, of course, tell us stories, for images are by their very nature non-narrative...

...a more apt metaphor for today's world might be the global plantation...

...Welcome to the end of the twentieth century, to the post—cold war decade of the "peace dividend...

...This may be why Adolf Hitler particularly liked the photograph as a propaganda tool...

...If we don't send a check to Oxfam after a visit with these ghosts, are we complicit in their terrible lives...

...Indeed, our reliance on images— so good at showing, so useless at explaining— is a major impediment to the emergence of a less fragmented, less sentimental, more thoughtful worldview...

...Most people probably dispensed with this cumbersome method and therefore had little idea of what, specifically, they were looking at...

...yET THOUGH Nachtwey's images are often intolerable, the charges of "war pornography" that have dogged him are specious...

...her head is bent forward...

...Later, Marinovich will win a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph called "Human Torch"—this time it is ANC supporters who set a suspected enemy on fire, then plunge a machete into his blazing skull...

...A more accurate title would have been The Family of Man, Continued...

...But unlike most others, he concentrates almost exclusively on wars and their aftermaths—he has said that he wanted to become a war photographer, not a photographer per se—and his work is perhaps the most widely distributed...

...His gaze is unflinching—he has said there is no picture he would not take, or has ever regretted taking—and it requires, I think, a person as tough as he (or, alternately, entirely obtuse) to scrutinize, or even glance DISSENT / Winter 2001 JOT BOOKS furtively, at many of his photos...

...His work is fascinating and important not just in itself, but for what it reveals about the ways in which critics and journalists view both photojournalists and the events they witness...

...Nachtwey—whose massive, imposing book Inferno has recently been published, and whose work was on view at the International Center of Photography (IC P) this past summer—is, along with Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, Eugene Richards, and Sebastiäo Salgado, among the preeminent photojournalists working today...

...even worse, there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason for their predicament and therefore, surely, no solutions to it...

...The BangBang Club is both politically informative and emotionally forthright—as, I suspect, are its authors, who look at themselves and their work unsparingly...

...Or perhaps he wanted to—in the words of that old, erroneous expression—" let the pictures tell the story...

...Perhaps Nachtwey should intentionally muddy his photographs so that, like carefully ''distressed" furniture, they can achieve the kind of shabby chic that critics (and home decorators) now seek out...

...grotesquely deformed, sore-encrusted Romanian orphans (Ceausescu's children, really) driven mad through abandonment or dying of AIDS...

...The Columbia Journalism Review titled its gushing profile "Pictures from Hell...

...In this photo, meaning and appearance fight each other at every turn...

...SUSIE LINFIELD is a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and teaches in the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University...

...Admire his eye...

...His photographs are extraordinarily sober, even disciplined...

...Joao was scared, conDISSENT / Winter 2001 n 105 BOOKS fused...

...This doesn't mean that we are all brothers under the skin, nor can it truthfully be said (except by Bill Clinton) that we feel each other's pain...

...James Nachtwey's photographs do not provide answers, though they certainly pose these questions to any quasi-sentient viewer...

...The photojournalist as sniper—and as vulture, exploiter, leech, manipulator, and liar— has become a staple of postmodern photography criticism...

...Even worse, this information is strictly compartmentalized from the photographs: in the huge book the captions appear, in tiny type, at the very back...

...And there was...

...It requires the ability to connect seemingly disparate events—events that occur in different places and even different time frames—in sometimes counterintuitive ways...

...Capa thought about the situation: "On the train to London, . . . I hated myself and my profession...

...THE AUTHORS of The Bang-Bang Club, South African photojournalists Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, reside squarely in the tradition of Capa and McCullin...

...the murder proceeds, and so does his work: "I was one of the circle of killers, shooting with a wide-angle lens just an arm's length away, much too close...

...You have to wade through to record them...

...you could say they were drawn to the townships because that's where the excitement, the juice, and the "powerhouse pictures" were to be found, and that would be true too...

...As the events of the 1990s show, the rich, peaceful countries are mightily confused when it comes to the poor, war-torn ones...

...the documentary photograph, we are informed, is at best a "fictive construct" and at worst a "discourse of control...

...Joao instinctively . . . pressed the shutter...

...The unofficial war these young photographers documented was chaotic, sadistic, devoid of glory...

...But the questions themselves are not necessarily welcome...

...At both his ICP show and in Inferno—which contains almost four hundred pictures—Nachtwey supplies us with little information beyond short captions that tell us the location, the date, and a very few facts...

...Instead, he makes it far too possible for the informationdeprived viewer to fall into an anguished yet impotent hopelessness: in the absence of knowledge, all starving people, all massacred people, all degraded, defeated, abject people begin to look sort of the same...

...It requires, on the part of the viewer, the ability to think politically—to think, that is, about power, freedom, justice, equality, exploitation— rather than wallow in pity and guilt...

...The camera, we are told, equals the gun...

...Carter committed suicide in July of that year, three months after winning the Pulitzer Prize...

...These were sounds I had never heard before, but they made sickening sense...

...Though the South Africans generally scorned foreign photographers as naïve dilettantes, they considered James Nachtwey an honorary "club" member, and he appears intermittently throughout the book...

...Nothing personal, but now you feel what is happening to us every day.'" There is much in this book that is highly disturbing, from the grisliness of the struggle to the professional thrill" Marinovich feels when he comes upon a grotesquely mutilated man who 'looked as if he had been crucified...

...One can reject the irritating narcissism of this approach while recognizing that the recording of suffering is a thorny business—and not a particularly democratic one...

...Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, The Bang-Bang Club IN JAMES NACHTWEY'S photographs, it's a relief to come upon a squinting sniper in Bosnia or Chechnya, or Croatian mourners at a funeral, or even India's "untouchables" performing their grueling, backbreaking work...

...But...

...This knowledge did not paralyze them, but they were forced to grow increasingly aware of it...

...To their credit, the authors never retreated into nihilism...

...Much of Nachtwey's work is almost impossible to look at...

...To remake the world, or keep amassing profits...

...Allen charged that Nachtwey views his "wretched" subjects as "civilization's mutants" and suggested that the war photographer "perhaps . is a sniper of sorts, too...

...It is good that one of you dies...

...To stop evil, or accept it...

...This sort of photography was only for undertakers and I didn't like being one...

...we see his bare chest with its delicate, child's skin, his plump belly-button, his small penis, and then . . . the amputated stumps of his legs, each cut off at the upper thigh...

...there is no exultation or cleverness here...

...this may be true of Nachtwey, too...

...Each geographic section is also preceded by a brief historical introduction...

...It requires the ability to recognize that there are some problems that, for better or worse, cannot be solved by a Live Aid concert...

...As members of the press and as whites, the photographers were in a privileged position visa -vis their subjects...

...Robert Capa told of how, in England during World War II, he once put down his camera when challenged by an indignant, slightly wounded pilot who felt he was being exploited...

...We trust his instincts...

...The title of the book—the four were dubbed "bang-bang paparazzi" by a South African magazine—is both brash and ironic...

...Or only disconnect...

...Alas, the viewer is no better than the photographer, for the former's gaze precisely, indeed rather remarkably, reproduces the oppressive power relations that the latter seeks to expose_ Naturally, then, moral purity resides in refusing to either take, or look at, such nasty pictures...

...Distance looked at us and then said: 'I am not sorry your friend Abdul was killed...

...Marinovich and Silva loved their work and believed, rightly, that it was important and necessary...

...Journalist Martha Gellhorn, who was in Dachau on the day the Germans surrendered, wrote that the discovery of the death camp made her ashamed to be human...

...The photograph contains no beginning, middle, and end—only a single moDISSENT / Winter 2001 n 103 BOOKS meet that once was "now," and now is "then...

...It was a quiet day and one of us mentioned Abdul...

...By segregating text and photos, Nachtwey undermines his self-proclaimed intention to promote understanding and inspire action— to help viewers of his work, as he writes in Inferno's "Afterword," "translate their feelings into an articulate stance...

...Just then a man walked into the right-hand side of his frame, patronizing the female killers with a broad smile...

...I cannot answer Woodward's first two queries, but the answer to the third is self-evident: we are complicit in "their" terrible lives whether we send a check, or not...

...Inferno is a terrible name for Nachtwey's book—it mystifies by suggesting that we are, or even could be, anywhere but here...

...And there it is, the picture we see: the handsome man with the dazzling, even joyous, smile in the foreground, the female killers continuing their hard work behind him...

...To reconnect the photograph to human experience—the opposite of deconstruction—is, of course, a far larger project than simply supplying, or reading, captions...

...his own phenomenal luck held, though a bullet whizzed through his hair...

...A bombed-out Dresden and a bombed-out Hanoi might look the same, but their histories of destruction are radically different...

...I felt I had seen so much horror that it was likely to destroy me...

...And surely it is not James Nachtwey's job—nor that of any photographer—to nurture this altered consciousness...

...Though grief is a harsh master, the woman's pose suggests a gentle humility that is very close to grace...

...He is a prominent member of the Magnum collective and has a highly prized contract with Time magazine, which allows him an unusual amount of freedom...

...We stopped at a shack .. . to see what was going on...

...It requires, most of all, a moral imagination: the ability to conceive of a world fundamentally different from the one we know...

...To intervene, or stay away...