Fighting with Fire: James Nachtwey's Inferno and Contemporary War Photography
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Fighting with Fire: James Nachtwey's Inferno and contemporary war photography Samantha Baker Senior Capstone Art History Methodology Seminar 487 Professor Joanna Inglot May 2013 1 By sight, but by the sound a little runnel; Makes as it wends the hollow rock it flow; Has worn, descending through its winding channel: To get back up to the shining world from there... And following its path, we took no care; To rest, but climbed... Through a round aperture I saw appear; Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears... - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno1 A large black and white photograph (Fig. 1) shows the right side of a man’s face, our attention drawn to deep scars across his skin - scars hitting cartilage, maybe bone, taking off part of his ear, slicing into his mouth. The man grasps his neck as if to reveal his scars. Even though his wounds have now healed, they will never retreat completely. Viewers may have various responses when seeing this photograph from the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide: wonder at this man’s survival of such a horrific physical attack or vulnerability at the recognition of the human body’s fragility; embarrassment at a lack of knowledge regarding the genocide this man experienced or pain from what we do know of the Rwandan genocide; admiration for the beautiful composition, inquisition about whether this man is a victim or perhaps also a perpetrator–the thoughts go on. Our comprehension of this photograph likely mixes many differing responses and in doing so complicates our relationship to the image as viewers. Another photograph in the same photo essay on Rwanda (Fig. 2) shows what seems to be an ocean of machetes from the 1994 genocide – the very implements that cut the scars into the man’s face - and other images show partially covered mass graves from the period. James Nachtwey’s book 2 Inferno (1999) is a compendium of 382 photographs that both overwhelm and stun the viewer with images that are simultaneously disturbing and aesthetically appealing, leaving an imprint on the viewer’s thoughts. Rarely is art so literally breathtaking, bridging the viewer’s world with the subject’s through the lens of a camera. While viewing these photographs might be exhausting, the complexity of such images should not be dismissed as too difficult but rather embraced because Nachtwey’s Inferno is a work of art and piece of social activism meant to be seen. Nachtwey’s photography exemplifies the views of a generation that curator, scholar, and author of the book Engaged Observers: documentary photography since the sixties (2010), Brett Abbott, calls “The New Journalists.” This group of contemporary war photographers that have emerged from the 1980’s and rewrote the rules on the genre in the hopes of changing the world that allows war in the first place.2 Studying Nachtwey’s work highlights what makes the New Journalists different from their predecessors and what positions them as essential artists and producers of information. The New Journalists give a voice to those who lack one in global media, refuting concepts of objectivity and universality in favor of a type of storytelling that zooms in on local micro-narratives. They believe that photography is the best way to deliver the information they wish to convey, and they compose beautiful photographs to provide comprehensible visuals to better understand the serious conflicts they cover. Dismantling notions of war glory, the New Journalists believe that art must be socially engaged in order to be relevant and significant. By bridging the gap between photojournalism and the art world with exhibitions, books, and prints these photographers introduce an important new discussion that forces art critics to reconsider previous disdainful, reductive, and disconnected approaches to war photography. During a time when the art world is coming back around to socially engaged 3 artwork in a global context, James Nachtwey and his peers in essay-based, high-risk photojournalism are leading the world into a new era of understanding war photography. Many photographers, including Susan Meiselas, Larry Towell, and Sebastião Salgado, have made their marks in contemporary war photography, but James Nachtwey is perhaps the most renowned international war photographer of contemporary photojournalism since the 1980s.3 Born in Syracuse in 1948, Nachtwey graduated from Dartmouth College in 1970, served in the merchant marines, and then edited newsreels for NBC, learning photography in his free time beginning in 1972. He eventually landed a job at a New Mexico newspaper, The Albuquerque Journal.4 He said of his draw to war photography: “Personally, I wanted to know what war was, what happened during war, and most importantly, how history plays itself out on the ground level; that is, in the lives of ordinary people.”5 Nachtwey has covered nearly every violent conflict and war since 1981, publishing photographs from conflicts in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Lebanon, Romania, South African, Iraq and Russia, among many others.6 He is highly respected by his peers, after being Time Magazine’s top war photographer in the 1990s.7 Also, published in Life, Newsweek, National Geographic, Stern, and Time, his photographs have left an important mark on popular consciousness of the human trauma they depict. Nachtwey was a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos from 1986-2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency VII.8 He has won the Robert Capa Gold Medal five times, The World Press Photo Award twice, Magazine Photographer of the Year seven times, and the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award three times, to name only a few.9 Beyond his many awards and accomplishments, 4 Nachtwey holds a core belief that his photographs can change viewers’ minds and thus change the world. As he said during a TED talk in March 2007: Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what’s going on. Sometimes they put their lives on the line, because they believe your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts, generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.10 This sense of duty is likely why in 2001 he had a documentary film made about him called War Photographer and why many regard him as a model war photojournalist. Nachtwey refuses to accept the unacceptable, and this mentality has driven him to become one of the best war photographers of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first –or, as he would prefer to be called, an anti-war photographer. If he is an anti-war photographer, his book Inferno is the ultimate antiwar book. Upon opening this massive black-cover book, one reads a quotation announcing the gates of hell and quickly begins paging through nine photo-essays of conflicts that can each easily be labeled hell on earth. Yet, these images are not fictional like those of Dante’s famous poem. Nachtwey’s photographs come from actual events in real places including Romania, Somalia, India, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya, and Kosovo and show the cruelty inflicted by humans on one another in most disastrous conflicts of the last decade of the twentieth century. Nachtwey says: “During the past twenty years, my work has taken me to the darkest corners of the planet–man- made infernos that make Dante and Hieronymus Bosch look like straight, social documentarians.”11 Nachtwey’s friend and fellow journalist, John Kifner, told the artist that 5 Inferno was “awful” in terms of its subject matter, to which Nachtwey replied with a thank you: this jarring reaction is his intent.12 Intentionally large to maximize impact, the photographs of Inferno are mostly close-up shots, printed in stunning black-and-white to overwhelm the viewer who pages through the book. Looking at the photographs requires one’s full physical attention because of the book’s sheer size, which only enhances its emotional effect. As one reviewer said, “it has the heft of a gravestone.”13 Yet paging through, this large book gives the impression that Nachtwey’s collection is merely a snapshot of the atrocities that have taken place around the world in a ten year timeframe. After shooting in Romania in 1990 (the subject of the first chapter of Inferno), Nachtwey returned home to edit the photographs and realized he had documented individual victims in a way that subconsciously constructed a narrative reflecting the horrors of orphans and the mentally ill in a style that presented more information than a few well-selected photographs for a magazine.14 Nachtwey’s Inferno is evidence of his own artistic curation (as opposed to work selected by an editor), and his desire to insert his work in a trajectory with other socially engaged visual artists. More so than his earlier published Deeds of War (1989), Inferno is an art book. The photographs in this book are meant to reach beyond a media audience to the art world. While it may seem intuitive to exhibit photographs in an art context, Nachtwey’s book and accompanying exhibit were a bold move, because the art world has at times rejected war photography as a valid artistic product. Susan Sontag began the contemporary conversation on photography with her seminal work On Photography (1977) where she discusses the influx of photographs in the twentieth century, its effect especially on Americans (turning them into passive voyeurs), and her opinion that those who record events cannot, by definition, intervene in 6 them. Sontag’s writing encouraged our deconstruction of the medium of photography and fostered a new understanding of the medium’s many iterations that intersect in diverse and complicated ways.