WAR PHOTOGRAPHER

WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
Bradley Davis
 
 War Photographer/ 2001


Christian Frei/Switzerland/1959


Synopsis: Documentary about war photographer James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever.

Narrative and Visual Keywords: Photographer, Voice over Narration,Train,Mine,Graveyard.

Characterization/ Dialogue: This documentary is about war photographer James Nachtwey. This is the credo of James Nachtwey, this generations most renowned
war photographer. He says some poignant things about why and how he
does what he does. I think for the most part the word "war" here could
be replaced with the word "poverty".

 War Photographer is a documentary about Photojournalist James Nachtwey who is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades.
Nachtwey’s career as a war photographer began in 1981 when he covered civil unrest in Northern Ireland. Since then he has photographed more than 25 armed conflicts as well as dozens of critical social issues. He has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal, World Press Award, Magazine Photographer of the Year, and I.C.P. Infinity Award multiple times. He has been named recipient of the TED Prize, the Heinz Foundation Award for Art and Humanities, the Common Wealth Award and the Dan David Prize.  His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, among others. Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with TIME Magazine since 1984 and Nachtwey has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries. For the past three decades, he has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues, working in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza,Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines,
South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia,
Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.






 The director of this film shows video clips from those places, and many of  Nachtwey's memorable pictures, some of which are all the more haunting for suggesting, rather than showing, the extent of the cruelty and suffering he has seen. The most terrible image from Rwanda may be one in which neither killers nor victims appear, but one whose frame is filled by a pile of machetes.

 The film is less a retrospective than a profile of the photographer in action. It begins in the eerie silence of Kosovo in 1999 with  Natchtwey turning his camera on burning
farmhouses, grieving families and grave sites and follows him into the poorest sections of Jakarta, where homeless families live beside railroad tracks, and to the West Bank city of Ramallah in the early months of the current intifada.   It matters not a little that  Nachtwey is such an artful composer of images, that his work, although almost too painful to look at, is so graphic and eloquent.
The paradox of being immersed in the horrors of war and deprivation while at the same time remaining outside them, is central to the work he does. This documentary begins with a well-known quote from Robert Capa:
"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."  Nachtwey, choking on tear gas in Ramallah and on sulfur fumes at an Indonesian mine, helping a fatally wounded colleague in South Africa or following Rwandan Hutus into the refugee camps of what was then Zaire, could hardly be closer to the action. And yet as he himself observes, he must also remain an outsider, a sympathetic observer of what is happening to other people.
This sympathy may be what distinguishes  Nachtwey from many of his colleagues. He acknowledges that recording grief, injury, death and distress is potentially a form of exploitation, but he makes it clear that the alternative — allowing man-made misery to remain invisible beyond the reach of those whose consciences should be shocked by it — is worse. The point that Nachtwey pushes through out the movie is that people of the world must see the horrible things that happen every day. In Nachtwey View this is the only way to change the world.


 sources:What i've learned by Cal Fussman. Esquire.com Oct.1 2005
My photographs bear witness ted.com may 27 2009
James Nachtwey by Michael Kimmelman New York time March 27 2009