Fighting with Fire: James Nachtwey's Inferno and contemporary war

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 I saw appear; Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears... - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno1

A large (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 (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 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 . 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: since the sixties (2010), Brett

Abbott, calls “The New Journalists.” This group of contemporary war 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 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 of contemporary photojournalism since the

1980s.3 Born in Syracuse in 1948, Nachtwey graduated from 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 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, , 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 from

1986-2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency VII.8 He has won the Gold Medal five times, The 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, , 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.

In 1981, two essays were published that would build on Sontag’s commentary and change the art world’s evaluation of socially engaged photography as it moved into the postmodern era: the first was Allan Sekula’s “The Traffic in Photographs,” and the second was

Martha Rosler’s “In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)”. Sekula echoed

Sontag in looking at the split in thought about photographs as scientific truth versus the photograph as art, though he distinguishes these with a Marxist terminology as “two chattering ghosts: that of bourgeois and that of bourgeois art.”15 Sekula fundamentally asks in this article if photography can transcend its own commodification and place in mass culture. He ends his essay by questioning whether photography can be anything other than a “primitive, infantile, aggressive... imaginary discourse.”16

In a similar vein, Martha Rosler argued that photojournalists inherently make victims of their subjects and are not revolutionary enough to promote any actual change in the world. This theory is in part a product of her time, contrasting the more conservative and consumer-based eighties with the nostalgically remembered radicalism of the sixties. She stressed that glorifying the photographer is a key problem with the new “documentary.”17 Rosler says that documentary photographers promote this idea for financial gains, and when they move their work to the art gallery, it loses its dialectical understanding between its formal elements and its context within the living world.18 This can certainly be true. When photographs are presented in a gallery with little-to-no context in the form of didactics, viewers take away less of the global significance of 7 the works and may even walk out with only an understanding of the artist’s aesthetic style. Her

Hegelian views are certainly warranted in the discussion of art, but a one-size-fits-all theory for an entire artistic practice without looking at any contemporary photojournalists, loses theoretical footing for lack of foundation in concrete image analysis. Sontag’s, Sekula’s, and Rosler’s theories were incredibly influential and still persist in certain circles. They have led to a reevaluation of the media and of war photography in the art world.

The same year Rosler’s and Sekula’s essays were published (1981) and the discourse around photography changed, Nachtwey was encouraged by Howard Chapnick at the New York based Black Star photo agency to take his first war photography assignment in .

He has worked as a socially engaged war photographer ever since.19 Nachtwey and his contemporaries belong to a generation of war photographers that challenged notions of photojournalism outlined by the above mentioned postmodern photography critics. As seen in interviews and publications, this cohort of photographers including Meiselas, Towell, Salgado, and Nachtwey is comprised of humble individuals who risk their lives because they genuinely care about their subjects’ stories. Directly confronting theorists and critics of war photography,

Nachtwey said in the introduction he wrote for the book Humanity in war: frontline photography since 1860 (2009), “It's easy to relinquish hope, especially if you’re only an observer. But it’s too easy, even fashionable among some circles. Giving up never helped anyone. Irony never saved a life.”20 There is nothing ironic about Inferno: it confronts those who dismiss war photography and acts as a wake-up call for those willing to look on.

The first photo-essay in Inferno is contextualized by the plight of orphans and the mentally ill in post-Nicolae Ceausescu Romania. After Ceausescu banned birth control and 8 abortions in 1966, women facing poverty and hardship sought illegal abortions and many died, leaving other children as orphans. These children, like the elderly and mentally handicapped, were considered burdens of the state and often lived in government institutions. With the spread of HIV in the late 80s and early 90s because of unsterilized needles to administer drugs and blood transfusions, rates of infant mortality increased and many of these acquired fatal diseases.

This photo-essay begins with twenty-two photographs of the child victims of Ceausescu policies in Romania and then moves to fourteen photographs of adult psychiatric patients. Although the two sets of images may seem unrelated without proper contextualization, Nachtwey’s journalistic four-paragraph explanation of these issues in Romania shows their clear connection. After a brief historical context, Nachtwey lets the photographs speak for themselves. Rather than title his photographs, he provides concise, one to two sentence explanations of each image in a guide at the back of Inferno. Here, his direct tone communicates his rage at the conditions he witnessed.

Nachtwey is well studied in the tradition of war photojournalism and socially engaged art, like his contemporaries, who all go to great lengths to contextualize their pictures with political and historical descriptions and analysis says critic, David Levi Strauss.21 In this way, the New

Journalists acknowledge Sontag’s criticism of decontextualized work.

Nachtwey reaches out to international audiences and gives a voice to those who lack one

- in this case, children and the mentally ill. Figure 3, depicting a child with AIDS, is both terrifying and heartbreaking. Nachtwey frames the image of the child in a hospital by her in a crib that cages her as she screams. The photograph is silent but the position of the subject is definitely tragic, and for the moment or prolonged time spent looking at her photograph, the viewer is sucked into her reality and connected to her story. She is not a shy, passive mill worker 9 in a Lewis Hine photograph from the early 1900s (Fig. 4) whom we can disregard as a tragedy of a past epoch; she is a child of our contemporary era whom we must confront as she screams at us.

One of Rosler’s main problems with contemporary documentary photography is her belief that the camera creates victims for the gains of trophy photographs and careerism for the photographer, like Dorothea Lange has been accused of doing with her famous Depression era photograph of a migrant mother.22 Rosler characterizes “liberal documentary” or humanist photojournalism as a practice that does not assign blame but rather fosters an undertone of fate, offering a best-case outcome of a viewer sending a bit of money to a far off country.23 Rosler explains that documentary photographers present their subjects as “the Other” and therefore set up a system in which the viewer takes pity on the victim.24 Nachtwey always makes sure to protect and express his subjects’ dignity in his photographs, avoiding a visual creation of an

“other” that has long been the tradition in war photography. Scholar and documentary photographer, Michelle Bogre argues against Rosler’s idea, instead saying that an outsider like

Nachtwey can show truth without “Othering:” Nachtwey’s images dispute Rosler’s notion visually. 25 Bogre argues that a fresh set of eyes (like a photojournalist’s) can produce a more objective image because there is no emotional desire on the part of the photographer to show only the positive aspects of a culture or the “politically-correct” side of a conflict.26 This is clear in Nachtwey’s ability to question the state of orphanages and mental institutions in Romania.

Close-up photographs of individuals like the child in Figure 5 reflect one of Nachtwey’s key techniques to give the subject more agency in an uneven media landscape. This child has big, adorable eyes like the children in every viewer’s life and his honest, tear-stained face asks for a 10 moment's notice. Nachtwey does not present the boy as “Other” but rather shows a child that could be any child suffering an illness, calling on a long tradition of artists trying to expose the problems of a broken society. This story of post-Ceausescu Romania shows (and makes a strong statement as the opening photo-essay of Inferno) that wars are not merely battle: they are the problems effecting society before, during, and long after combat, usually problems most impacting those who have the least heard voices.

No conflict of the 1990’s can stress the permeability of war into other societal issues more than the famine in Somalia that was prompted by internal warfare following the overthrow of President Siad Barre. Here hunger was used as a weapon and in one year claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people. The first image of this two-part essay (the first in Baidoa and the second in Bardera) pictures a feeding center, where a child has collapsed from weakness. He is watched over by his mother, and a militiaman walks behind them (Fig. 6). Situating the militiaman in the background emphasizes that present-day wars are not merely about the military: there are few photographs of soldiers in Inferno and only a handful of actual combat scenes. It is war victims who dominate Nachtwey’s images, his goal being to make international viewers focus on civilians affected by wars.

Unlike war photojournalists of past eras who focused on the war heroes and the arena of combat (as can be seen in Capa’s D-Day photographs from World War II), Nachtwey has his lens focused on war’s victims.27 Nachtwey’s concern is that “along with the combatants, there are the non-combatants who find themselves caught up in forces beyond their control. What happens to them as individuals?”28 Only by seeing a Somali mother lifting her starved child’s body to take it to a grave (Fig. 7) can we imagine a world where no mother would ever have to watch her child 11 starve to death. Some might cry “utopian,” but Nachtwey seems to be responding to Sontag’s revised thoughts on war photography in her discussion of the in Regarding the Pain of

Others (2003). In the ’ contemporary war in Iraq, the Pentagon’s policy bans the media from taking pictures of U.S. military coffins and the media has largely agreed to self- censor, leading to forgotten victims and a general lack of violent imagery.29 Nachtwey’s philosophy and work seek to counter collective forgetfulness and apathy by bringing ground level images of human suffering to a mainstream audience. He reiterates their importance by republishing them in Inferno and showing them in exhibitions.

The third “rung of hell” in Nachtwey’s Inferno covers India’s two hundred million

“untouchables” or Dalits, the group of people at the bottom of the Hindu caste system. This story may not seem like a war at all, but for Nachtwey it is a social war against a group of people.

Nachtwey employs a micro-narrative approach to show not universal truth, but honesty in the particular history of this population of Dalits. Not unlike the weapon of hunger in Somalia, caste discrimination in certain parts of India is a weapon against the Dalits who face employment disadvantages, harassment, and even murder by those mired in societal hate. While Allan Sekula refuted the ability of photography to be a universal language, Nachtwey and other New

Journalists responded to this postmodern critique of war photography by focusing on local narratives in their photo-essays (Nachtwey compiled nine such narratives in Inferno) and drawing subjective truths from them. 30 Figure 8 represents a man picking through garbage alongside scavenging birds in New Delhi. This is one particular day for one particular man; his experiences are not likely viewers’ daily experiences. Nachtwey wishes to show snapshots of people’s lives to put us on what he calls “the ground level.” This can also be seen in the work of 12

Larry Towell (Fig. 9) or Susan Meiselas (Fig. 10). As postmodern philosopher Jean-François

Lyotard theorized, meta-narratives or grand narratives are products of Enlightenment, modernist thinking that seek to find universal truths, but lack the ability to take into account a multiplicity of experiences or those who might be on the margins of society.31 Therefore, micro-narratives offer a valuable alternative in their look at subjective truths. Repeating after Lyotard and other postmodernist thinkers, famous photographer W. Eugene Smith commented, “There is, of course, no objective truth in a photograph, but you can be subjective and honest.”32 Even though this cannot be applied everywhere equally, photojournalists still want to create an honest story, to inform audiences accurately. The man in Figure 8 would likely tell viewing audiences something similar–the fact that the caste system does not apply everywhere does not mean that the hardship of his life is any less real. That a photographer, an artist, an activist (Nachtwey is all of these) has a specific viewpoint about contentious, deadly, present-day issues should not necessarily be seen as detrimental to the truth of his or her images.

This fusion of subjectivity and honesty in Nachtwey’s photographic micro-narratives is a vehicle for content indicative of the rejection of the modern notion of the artist as self- expressionist and genius. This view persisted with earlier figures like photographer (creating many portraits of well-known individuals and landscapes of famous battles) or Robert Capa (active during the first half of the twentieth century), but today’s war photographers are now in favor of the idea of the photographer as the storyteller of others. This is obvious in Nachtwey’s quiet and shy demeanor, which lights up when he is given the opportunity to share the stories of others in the hopes of helping them. It is also visible in

Inferno, where he creates long photo-essays, linking individuals to tell the story of a specific 13 place. The revelation of injustice that is a characteristic drive of war photographers manifests in the contemporary generation as a desire to tell stories by glimpsing into conflicts rather than trying to explain the hyper-narrative of an entire war. “The images I create are a confluence of what is in front of me and what is inside me. They are objective and subjective at the same time, and they must be seen that way by the viewer in order to be convincing,” says Nachtwey.33

Abbott argues that documentary projects should not be considered comprehensive wholes of the subjects they address, but rather discussion starters, reflections, and subjective truths.34 This tenant of New Journalism has been a long time coming.

Early photojournalists tried to make iconic images of war. (British), arguably the first professional war photographer, took photographs with wet collodion plates in the of 1853-56, where he posed scenes or shot deserted fields.35 In his most famous photograph, The Valley in the Shadow of Death of 1855 (Fig. 11), he brought in cannon balls to scatter across the battlefield he was photographing.36 Bogre points out that such manipulation of war photographs today would end a journalist’s career, but in war photography’s beginnings this practice was commonplace.37 As war photography progressed, the photographers moved closer to the action and to civilians. Mathew Brady was the first to cross the “death threshold” by publishing war photographs of dead bodies during the U.S. Civil War.38 William Hooper took the first “famine” photographs in Madras, India, in 1876.39 But photographers’ proximity to war really shifted one hundred years later, in .

As a teenager in the 1960s, Nachtwey watched as war photographers in Vietnam put the viewer in the center of the action, focusing on the civilian context of war and human suffering.40

Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning image of a naked nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, Phan Thj Kim 14

Phúc, sprayed with napalm (Fig. 12) or Eddie Adam’s photograph of a Vietcong prisoner,

Nguyễn Văn Lém, being executed by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan on a street in Saigon (Fig. 13) still haunt our collective memory because of the camera’s intense proximity to its subjects. Larry

Burrows photographed the entire in , shocking audiences with even more realistic photographs of violence than ever seen before.41 One of Nachtwey’s idols, Don

McCullin, said of the emerging practice of the photographer getting closer to war: “I don’t believe you can see what's beyond the edge unless you put your head over it; I’ve many times been right up to the precipice, not even a foot or an inch away. That’s the only place to be if you’re going to see and show what suffering really means.”42 One can certainly see the resemblance between Nachtwey’s ground-level photographs like San Miguel Province El

Salvador of 1984, showing a father holding his injured daughter (Fig. 14) and those of war photographers from the 60s like McCullin’s Vietnamese man and his child wounded by hand grenades in Hué of 1968 (Fig. 15). These similarities emphasize visual tropes of war and how photographers beginning in Vietnam and evolving in the 1980s began to focus on the victims of war; ultimately their objective and hope being to fill the viewer with empathy and motivation to stop warfare from occurring in the future.

As part of the generation that grew up during Vietnam and saw the media influence public opinion, Nachtwey watched photographers break away from the protection of a censoring national military and choose to photograph at their own risk. He says of these Vietnam War photographers:

Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing, and photographers were

telling us another... They not only recorded history, they helped change the course of 15

history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and as consciousness

evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but

inevitable.43

Between his influences as a young photographer and his close-up style, Nachtwey clearly aims his intentions at the viewer in the hope that his photographs will prompt positive societal change in the world. Such a philosophy is further exemplified in the fourth photo-essay of Inferno, which covers the Sudanese conflict between the Muslim North and the Christian South in 1993, when many people became dependent on warlords or international relief due to the destruction of crops within the country. Referring to an image of a skeletal man summoning the strength to move in an NGO feeding center (Fig. 16), Nachtwey said, “if he didn’t give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope?”44 In this black-and-white photograph, the monochrome scheme further highlights the dire situation that this man faces. Nachtwey does not use his subjects to glorify his own skill; he is motivated by them to change the world. In another image from Sudan, Figure 17, Nachtwey photographed a man waiting for rehydration fluid in a feeding shelter. Although the man can barely move, he still has agency in this photograph as he gazes at the viewer, his one eye peering out beneath a blanket. Change comes through action, and while the Red Cross is helping in this famine and war, individuals are still dying, as is seen in the rest of Nachtwey’s chapter on Sudan. He photographs stories like this because he feels that what he is witnessing is morally wrong, and if the rest of the world could just see it, people would be moved to end current conflict and prevent future wars. New

Journalists are no longer willing to be the emotionless witnesses. They are invested in the lives 16 of those they are covering and do not hide their rage in relation to the atrocities that humans inflict on each other.

By offering “ground-level” views of human suffering (contrasting early eras of coverage solely focused on the “big events” of war), Nachtwey channels his anger about the world’s injustices and moves forward to influence public opinion, a sentiment echoed by many of his colleagues.45 The fifth photo-essay of Inferno, Nachtwey’s coverage of the Bosnian War, shows combat (Fig. 18), surgery of a wounded soldier (Fig. 19), the dead (Fig. 20), and mourning (Fig.

21) all at the ground-level, inserting the viewer into the space of the photograph. This is one of

Nachtwey’s strengths and a constant throughout Inferno. The viewer’s inclusion in the frame is a clear choice made to create a personal connection between the viewer and the subject’s narrative story experience.

One of the most fundamental elements of Nachtwey’s work and that of his contemporaries is the grounding of war photography in an ethical code very much tied to empathy. In an introduction to Nachtwey’s earlier book of photographs, Deeds of War (1989),

Robert Stone explains “we [as viewers] like to experience our own compassion because of the way it increases our self-regard. The photographs in this book do not let us off so easily.”46 Stone goes on to say that human suffering has never lost its moral dimension, even if we may no longer look to religious images for ethical examples.47 Photographer Larry Towell says that war photographers and audiences alike are responsible for looking at and comprehending such images because they share the world with the subjects depicted.48 Bogre explains that a common characteristic of those who become war photographers is a deep-rooted empathy for others who are suffering, which makes it more difficult for them to look away.49 17

Postmodern theorists have often framed photojournalists’ intentions differently, though and these characteristics have stuck. Martha Rosler argues that early documentary photography had social reform as its goal through moral uplift, but she says the moral uplift of reform is not enough to prompt change and that instead revolutionary politics are needed in artwork.50 New

Journalists like Nachtwey are revolutionary social activists in the intensity of their images and in their willingness to shock audiences out of complacency. As Susan Sontag points out in On

Photography, the photojournalist “stays behind his or her camera,” and this act is physical nonintervention, while still participation.51 She goes beyond Rosler, then, to say not only that the photographer is not doing enough but also that he is a participant in the violence. Sontag suggests that photographers like Nachtwey are arguably accepting of the violence taking place in their images if only for the moment they are taken.52 Yet Nachtwey described an incident in

Jakarta, Indonesia (among others) where people were attacking a guard and he tried to intervene:

“They allowed me to photograph it. But they wouldn’t allow me to stop it.”53 Nachtwey’s friend,

John Kifner recalls times the photojournalist has put down his to carry starving children to receive aid or help evacuate injured soldiers.54 Further, the photojournalist as a socially engaged artist believes his or her photographs will inspire viewers, and this will lead to change.

Nachtwey’s rage is most palpable when he speaks of the genocide he witnessed in

Rwanda. He says his experience “was like taking the express elevator to hell.”55 I am reluctant to state that any of the photo-essays in this book are worse than any others, but the coverage of

Rwanda is perhaps most disturbing in the sheer number of photographs that show disintegrating bodies, as in Figure 22. The subject matter of the photographs in this chapter is bleak, but their ability to inform viewers is important. The New Journalists have chosen the medium of 18 photography because of the informative power on the viewer. As Nachtwey says, the press is a service agency, meant to provide the service of awareness.56 War photographers often have a desire to subvert the cold, numerical facts of print journalism through the visual power of their photographs. Nachtwey’s photographs in Inferno clearly do not play into the watered-down idea of magazine photo-essays. In this book format, Nachtwey does not have to censor his most shocking photographs, such as those from his coverage of body counts in Rwanda. Photographs like Figure 22 do not document a numerical death toll but have the stronger impact of showing the abject death, evoking from the viewer a more visceral reaction. “It’s precisely when words fail that pictures like his are most needed,” says Richard Lacayo of Inferno.57

Postmodern theorists, however, argue that these sorts of photographs have the same numbing effect of daily death reports. Jean Baudrillard asserted that today there are more images than ever, and this influx has dulled our senses; the New Journalists are showing that thoughtful, informative photo-essays can instead broaden our consciousness about global issues.58

Reproducibility is also a quality of prints (posters, etchings, etc.) that have a tradition of being disseminated in order to inform the masses about the horrors of war. If there is anything to be upset about regarding photographs, it should not be the democratic fact that anyone can produce them, but instead the realization on the part of the viewer that photographs have “robbed us of the alibi of ignorance.”59 We can no longer live a life void of photographic images, and this is precisely where the New Journalists, conflict photographers like Nachtwey, ruin our days, asking viewers the difficult questions that no one else is willing to. War photographers are responsible for showing what is happening in the world. The viewer’s responsibility is to look at the atrocities war photojournalists are trying to raise awareness about: this might be the most 19 difficult realization on the part of audiences.60 As Nachtwey says, “The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place the demand on photography?”61

The kind of photography the New Journalists are producing can be recognized as an activist tool to expose social injustice globally. Photographers like Nachtwey are advancing an art form that directly challenges the established art world, because there is a certain egalitarianism to how easily photography can be disseminated.62 Susie Linfield, a contemporary media critic who confronts postmodern theorists in a similar vein as Michelle Bogre and Brett

Abbott, sees philosophers who strongly disdain war photography as problematic. The fear of a medium that can be mastered by anyone dates back to Baudelaire who said, “art should be left to the artists... not the camera wielding masses.”63 If what we see in newspapers, magazines, and books can be considered art and the average person can afford a book by a photojournalist

(Inferno costs $125), an easily reproduced item (perhaps more democratic than any other medium), then critics and curators no longer control access to this art. Questioning photojournalists’ validity and denouncing their work is an easy way to deal with this fear, but one that will ultimately fall apart as society moves toward a foundation based in visual culture rather than on artistic institutions. War photography offers much that an art critic might object to including its reproducibility, its use by amateurs, its democratic accessibility to viewers, its disturbing imagery, and most of all its ambiguity and the multiple meanings this implies relating to humanitarian issues.64 Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of many critiques of war photography is the lack of visual analysis on the part of critics, given that these theorists denigrate the artistic intentions of an entire field of war photographers. Rosler, for example, 20 admits after talking about the disservice done to a group of people in a photograph of the aftermath of the Chilean putsch in 1973 in Santiago de Chile that she has never even seen the photograph.65 In our world where visual culture and art are inextricably linked, it is necessary for art historians to consider what photojournalism says about contemporary society and the art world. Linfield says, “It’s hard to resist the thought that a very large number of photography critics–including the most influential ones–don’t really like photographs, or the act of looking at them, at all.”66

In 1994, after the story of the Rwandan genocide, Nachtwey followed Hutu refugees to

Zaire (now the Democratic People’s Republic of the Congo), where he witnessed a

“humanitarian catastrophe”. This complicated event was connected closely to the preceding

Rwandan genocide as Rwandan refugees flowed into Zaire but was also its own spectacle in the cholera epidemic and consequent deaths that occurred, as well as in the immense amount of media coverage the conflict received.67 This photo-essay contains some of Nachtwey’s most disturbing images, but it is amazing to note that he does not lose his ability to produce a beautifully composed photograph, like Figure 23 that shows bodies being moved with tractors and trucks or Figure 24 framing a chilling gaze of a man sick with cholera on his wife’s lap. In her essay, Rosler expresses a fear of the conflation of art and journalism or of a journalism more concerned with aesthetics than with politics.68 Contemporary scholar and critic, David Levi

Strauss finds this view problematic asking why beauty can’t be a call to action.69 It is an outdated concept that a disengaged, dispassionate, and indiscernible style of photography is somehow the most honest, and this idea must be reevaluated if we are ever to genuinely accept photography into art history as a legitimate medium.70 Beauty and horror can coexist, for what 21 else is the idea of the sublime in art history? Criticism of photography is harsh given its relatively short existence in the long history of artistic production, but its connections to the images like Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s “Disasters of War” are stronger than we might initially recognize. Levi Strauss connects Nachtwey with the art historical tradition of Francisco de

Goya’s because of their socially engaged themes focusing on war and its victims.71 Figure 23 bears an uncanny resemblance to Goya’s Cartloads for the cemetery from the “Disasters of War” series (Fig. 25). Another print from Nachtwey’s Romania photo-essay (Fig. 26) resembles

Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Fig. 27) from “Los Caprichos” series. Having studied art history at Dartmouth College as an undergraduate, Nachtwey is no stranger to Goya’s prints and undoubtedly drew on such tropes to make his visual form of storytelling more legible.72 These art historical connections signal to the educated art viewer that wars have not lost the need to transport the dead, or that institutions such as orphanages or insane asylums can in fact cause further psychological anguish for those trapped in their systems. Nachtwey has even admitted, “I tried to do with a camera what he was doing with a brush.”73 Aside from visual markers, Nachtwey mimics Goya in his desire to make easily disseminated prints (in the form of photographs) in a book format that can be bought by average citizens.

Socially engaged artists have portrayed the images of war for a long time, often with a certain horrifically beautiful quality. Faulting a photojournalist for creating well-composed pictures is problematic for many reasons. First and foremost, it reinforces the dichotomy of photography as art and photography as scientific evidence (discussed by Sontag), not allowing for a photography that is concerned with both aesthetics and social realities. Second, it denies the 22 artist’s ability to move into the space of artistic institutions where anti-war could be further publicized and disseminated.

Indeed, Nachtwey’s approach is an aesthetic one. John Kifner writes in his article

“Pictures from Hell,” “What is most striking about Nachtwey’s work – other than the sheer power of its subject matter – is the sense of composition, its almost painterly quality... Indeed, there was sometimes a feeling when Nachtwey was shooting in color that the pictures were almost too pretty, that the overall effect of his mastery of technique might detract from the horror of the subject.”74 When looking at Nachtwey’s pictures, one sees a certain beauty–but then the viewer notices dried blood on the ground and is very much brought back to reality, remembering that his photographs are of actual people and very painful events. This constant negotiation of differing emotions can be troubling to viewers as they appreciate the aesthetic qualities and react to the violence pictured. Linfield says that it is difficult for anyone to get their feelings “right” when it comes to gruesome images, especially when they reflect what awful things humans do to one another.75 While it might be easiest to avert one’s eyes, viewers should address the larger question posed by their feelings of distress: why do we think our reaction to images of suffering would ever be easy?76 As humans, we all share a vulnerability in viewing photographs of the violated body, “the original site of reality,” as Elaine Scarry has shown in her scholarship.77

When a viewer sees an image like Nachtwey’s photographs of bodies in Zaire, they are forced to think about their own mortality.

Though the New Journalists want to shock audiences into acting for social change, they recognize the value of a well-made photograph as vehicles for comprehensible information. Art historian and photography critic, Vicki Goldberg points out, that while we might shudder at some 23 of James Nachtwey’s images, we still admire them.78 Artists have always devised ways to make violence understandable, acceptable, and even enjoyable, Goldberg states referencing

Michelangelo’s last Pietà (Pietàs being the subject of Nachtwey’s next book).79 After looking at many of Nachtwey’s war photographs, a viewer sees that they take on similar compositional qualities and even sacred tropes, like the resemblance between the cross-like figures in the images of a Croatian woman at a funeral (Fig. 28) and a Serbian victim (Fig. 29) in the chapter about the Bosnian War in Inferno, and also to a photograph in his book Deeds of War (1989) from a conflict in San Juan del Norte Nicaragua (Fig. 30). Comparing Nachtwey’s images to religious painting of the Renaissance seems brutal, somehow inhumane, but it is relevant to discussing depictions of human suffering. As Goldberg says of Nachtwey in her essay “Inside

Bitter Places”:

He is extremely well versed in the history of art... Nonetheless, he firmly believes that

aesthetics should be a means of giving viewers information in the clearest possible form

and must remain at the service of the subject rather than the other way ‘round. If an

occasional photograph seems to repeat traditional high-art compositions associated with

the Passion of Christ, Nachtwey says that since he was reacting to events rather than

referring back to art, any similarities must mean that the old masters themselves were

looking directly at life.80

Uniting his desire to move people with photographs and present comprehensible information,

Nachtwey and other New Journalists reject the idea that a poorly composed photograph is a more honest snapshot of the moment pictured. 24

Linfield points out that Nachtwey works hard to not objectify his subjects, but he is among a successful group of photographers most often derided as pornographers.81 Such cold criticism from theorists is not only unwarranted, it also does a disservice to the viewer. This assessment is possible only from those who do not actually look at and think about images of violence or hardship. While the media has been debating the ethics of publishing graphic photographs since the beginning of war photography, viewing gruesome images has become in the art world a “test of hardness.”82 This tone was set largely by Susan Sontag and repeated especially by female postmodernists like Rosler who wanted to avoid being labeled as emotional critics for fear of appearing to be “girly” and, therefore, lose credibility.83 An institutional discourse in the art world has developed in which those who have emotional responses to photographs are lambasted as not thinking critically enough, and viewers are made to feel self- conscious and helpless in a denial of emotion about what a photograph actually means.84 By approaching photographs with suspicion, Linfield argues, it is easy for the viewer to deconstruct them but nearly impossible to actually see them.85 Goldberg warns that art historians have a habit of focusing on formal qualities as a means to avoid dealing with difficult subject matter.86 Yet it is possible to have an emotional response to a piece of art and use it as inspiration for analysis.87

Further, art historians must acknowledge the artists’ intent to inspire an emotional response in the viewer. The New Journalists believe an audience is more likely to actually read a well-composed photograph. Goldberg agrees, pointing out that Nachtwey’s compelling compositions unite captivating images in a package that is easier for editors to stomach, therefore allowing more disturbing images to be published.88 25

The New Journalists present an important point in their photography: war is no longer as simple as it once was, and brutal, modern day conflicts simply should not exist. Since World War

II, war has changed and so have its photographers. Some argue that there are now two types of war, and Nachtwey has covered both. Wars of independence were largely tied to postcolonial struggles and include Vietnam, Latin American conflicts (El Salvador, Nicaragua), the Falklands,

South Africa, and most recently the Arab Spring, which has affected nations such as Tunisia,

Egypt, and currently Syria.89 The second war of the later half of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first with a vengeance is “conflicts of faith,” as occurred in Lebanon,

Chechnya, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Intifada, and the current war in Iraq.90 Neither of these different types of war is the simple two-sided conflict of previous centuries, but instead these are complex conflicts with unclear lines between victims and perpetrators. Today’s wars have often been inconclusive, and some, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, span multiple generations of war photographers (linking Nachtwey to famous war journalists Don McCullin and Robert

Fisk).91 A war’s importance to the media is more and more based on its meaning to the international community, which creates “memorable sites of suffering” while simultaneously forgetting other conflicts.92

Nachtwey’s philosophy and work seek to counter this collective forgetfulness by bringing individual images of human suffering to a mainstream audience. His awareness of the complexity of modern warfare is clear in all of the essays in Inferno, especially his photo-essay on Chechnya: a war of both independence and faith largely forgotten by those in the international community. Often images of modern warfare are not impressive with their modernity but rather make us question what progress humans have made in the world. If we did not know the context, 26

Figure 31 of a soldier shooting out of a dark room could be from many places, but because it is from Inferno we know it is an image from the 1990s, and the viewer is confronted with the fact that war like this is still happening in places like Syria. The use of black-and-white distinguishes a feeling of history in each photograph, even though we know that the subject of the image is a recent conflict. Black-and-white is Nachtwey’s statement that the history visible in his images is unfolding right now in our laps, that it is our contemporary doing, or that our ambivalence enabled such wars. His older, color photographs jolted the viewer into the scene and into a sense of action, but the power of black-and-white makes the viewer feel both responsible for and ashamed of what has taken place. This is certainly Nachtwey’s intention as he produced Inferno as a retrospective of the wars of the 1990’s.

One eerie quality of Inferno is the seemingly cyclical references that connect the modern wars and conflicts even when they have little to nothing to do with one another. This is made possible because of photography’s ability to visually reference itself. Nachtwey’s self-referential quality can feel like a blurred simulacrum that is the continuation across time and space of human suffering. Baudrillard said that the more we see photographs of violence, the less they affect us, but this massive book of 382 photographs of nine modern wars is presented as a cohesive whole that allows audiences to grapple with difficult issues by examining similarities across Nachtwey’s chapters.93 For example, Figure 32 of a wounded older man whose face seems maimed by a mine is visually similar to the Romanian toddler with AIDS in Figure 5.

Their stories, situation, and ages are completely different, but the visual similarities of their tragedies encourage the viewer to make connections among the various problems suffered in

Post-Soviet states in the 1990s. 27

Robert Stone wrote that the “tragic ambiguity” in Nachtwey’s images rebels against the typical media reduction of conflicts to simplistic clichés.94 Nachtwey thus transcends any divide between journalist and artist to occupy the activist’s role to question commonly held ideas and move the public.95 Some have interpreted ambiguity or a lack of specific context in these images as surely negative, but in Nachtwey’s work the image can at times speak truths to humankind that are not definitive knowledge, but offer insight into the human condition. There is a great deal of ambiguous art that still has an activist intent and may not be an end or an answer to questions about a conflict, but rather a means to a solution.96 Although it is problematic to assume that images resonate with audiences of different times and cultures in the same way,

Nachtwey’s photographs hold enough ambiguity to reach out to different viewers while being firmly rooted in the framed scene’s historical moment. Sekula says that photography cannot be a universal solvent for global problems and that it can not be a way of “knowing” the world, but

Nachtwey’s images in Inferno and his other books intend a slightly different aim.97 “I don’t expect people to know what the solutions are. There are elected officials charged with dealing with these things,” said Nachtwey of the conflicts he covers in Inferno. As Sarah Boxer points out, his photographs do not need to have the answer. As news or as art: they need to pose the question.98

This is where Nachtwey leaves us in Inferno. In the ninth and final photo-essay covering the 1999 war in Kosovo, he presents a number of ambiguous images. Particularly, the last two photographs of Inferno present walls as questions to make viewers think about the future. Figure

33 shows graffiti and bloody handprints on the walls of a Kosovar family’s living room. One writer explains James Nachtwey’s very job is to be a witness.99 This bloody scene reminds the 28 viewer to reflect on the gruesome violence witnessed in Nachtwey’s preceding chapters and pages. Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others: “To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell.”100 Nachtwey does not offer any concrete solutions at the end of Inferno. In fact, he has admitted before that his own photographs bother him; he finds them painful to look at.101

James Nachtwey possesses an unending belief that his work will invoke compassion and social action in viewers regardless of their exhaustion or frustration with media images.102 In his last photograph of the last chapter on Kosovo (Fig. 34), he shows a political poster with the image of Slobodan Milosevic smeared with mud, being torn down by children’s hands. This hopeful image of children’s hands, representing the future, pulling down a tyrant’s propaganda leaves us with the message of a truly socially engaged artist. Goldberg has called Nachtwey’s subject matter “the spirit of our age”.103 If a man who has witnessed all this horror can still hope for the future, his optimism is surely uplifting.

Of course, there will always be cynics. Goldberg reminds us:

Every so often someone writes an angry letter protesting the fact that a picture of

atrocity was taken, or that it was published; perhaps this mirrors not just outrage but also

the viewer’s inchoate guilts at finding him or herself so riveted. Nachtwey says he would

expect people to be angry that such things happened, not that they were shown.104

Goldberg’s statement points out that the persistence of war and violence is not the fault of the photographer or the newspaper editor but that it is a global problem, bearing all of our guilt to varying degrees and requiring all of our attention to be addressed, attention that can sometimes only be grasped by the most riveting photograph. 29

Recent exhibitions and publications like WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed

Conflict and Its Aftermath (exhibition November 11, 2012- February 3, 2013, book published in

2012) demonstrate rising interest in war photography after over a decade of indifference towards the genre beginning in the 1980s. This particular project was meant to expand the discourse surrounding war photography. "For too long, discussions about this genre have... been claimed as the exclusive domain of theorists. Too many assumptions have been accepted that were often not based on real research," says Anne Wilkes Tucker, a contributor to the exhibition and book.

"More interdisciplinary inquiry is needed to weigh the complexities from which conflict photographs arise."105 This is where the field of war photography is headed, partially thanks to the work of socially engaged photography like Nachtwey and his peers. Aside from traditional museum settings and art books, annual exhibits like the World Press Photo Contest reach international audiences by traveling to various cities and displaying the most contemporary photojournalism online. Exhibitions and contests like these present a wide array of photographs, many of them related to war and conflict.

Photographers like Nachtwey belong to a movement that has listened to the critiques of the postmodern 1980s and adjusted their practice to change those things they found validly criticized, while disregarding the elements that were merely unfounded theory. The result is photojournalists who are more engaged in the art world and interested in using photography to reach new global audiences. James Nachtwey’s Inferno is no doubt a chilling peak into the worst of human . In connecting subjects and viewers, he hopes war can be eradicated and the images in Inferno will one day be nothing more than art history. 30

List of Works

Fig. 1) “A Hutu man who did not support the genocide had been imprisoned in the concentration camp, starved and attacked with machetes. He managed to survive after he was feed and was placed in the care of the Red Cross.” James Nachtwey, (1994), from “Rwanda” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 256-257), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 2) “As the vanquished Hutus fled into Tanzania, they had to leave at the border the weapons with which they had committed the genocide.” James Nachtwey, (1994), from “Rwanda” photo- essay in Inferno (p. 266-267), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 3) “Orphans with AIDS were sent to Colentina Hospital,” James Nachtwey, (1990), from “Romania” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 19), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 4) Girl worker in Carolina cotton mill, Lewis W. Hine, (1908), photograph, 12.5 x 17.5 cm, image from artstor.org

Fig. 5) “A child who had contracted AIDS while in an orphanage was sent to the hospital for contagious diseases in Constanta.” James Nachtwey, (1990) from “Romania” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 20-21), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 6) “A child who collapsed in front of a feeding centre was watched over by his mother as a clan militiaman passed by.” James Nachtwey, (1992), from “Somalia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 68-69), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 7) "A mother lifter her child to carry him to his grave." James Nachtwey, (1992), from “Somalia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 124-125), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 8) “Scavenging is a task designated specifically for untouchables. This man had migrated to New Delhi from the countryside and worked along with the scavenger birds.” James Nachtwey, (1993), from “India” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 150-151), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 9) Masked Palestinian demonstrators hiding behind wall prepare to throw moltov cocktails toward Israeli soldiers. The wall was demolished by Israelis in late October, Larry Towell, (2000), Ramallah, West Bank, black-and-white photograph, image from artstor.org

Fig. 10) Returning Home, Masaya, September 1978, Nicaragua, Susan Meiselas, (1978), from Nicaragua (1978-79), dye destruction print, 33 x 49.5 cm, image from artstor.org

Fig. 11) Valley in the Shadow of Death, Roger Fenton, (1855), photograph printed on salted paper from a wet collodion glass negative, featured in War/photography: images of armed conflict and its aftermath (p. 212)

31

Fig. 12) Napalmed Children, Huynh Cong (Nick) Ut, (June 8, 1972), photograph, featured in War/photography: images of armed conflict and its aftermath (p. 472-473)

Fig. 13) General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes Viet Cong Captain Nguyen Van Lem on street in Saigon, Eddie Adams (1968), photograph, featured in War/photography: images of armed conflict and its aftermath (p. 254)

Fig. 14) San Miguel Province El Salvador, James Nachtwey, from book Deeds of War (1984), color photograph

Fig. 15) Vietnamese man and his child wounded by hand grenades in Hué, Don McCullin (1968), black-and-white photograph, featured in The eye of war: words and photographs from the front line

Fig. 16) "A starving man moved towards an emergency feeding compound." James Nachtwey, (1993), from “Sudan” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 176-177), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 17) "Inside one of the shelters a man waited to be given rehydration fluid." James Nachtwey, (1993), from “Sudan” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 178-179), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 18) “Street battles erupted in Mostar when Croatian militiamen began an offensive against the Bosnian Muslim population.” James Nachtwey, (1993), from “Bosnia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 194-195), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 19) “A Bosnian commando had penetrated the Serbian lines in Breko. He was detected and hit by a rifle-grenade. His foot was shredded ,but he made it back to his own lines. In a school that had been converted into a field hospital, surgical preparations began before he was anaesthetized.” James Nachtwey, (1993), from “Bosnia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 200-201), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 20) “A Serbian infantry attack near the village of Rahic, outside Breko, was successfully repulsed by Bosnian forces. The Serbs who were killed in action were collected from the battlefield and taken by truck behind Bosnian lines. They were dumped in a farmyard, identified, and returned to their comrades the following day.” James Nachtwey, (1993) from “Bosnia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 242-243), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 21) "Mourning a soldier killed by Serbs and buried in what was once a football field." James Nachtwey, (1993), from “Bosnia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 238-239), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 22) “The massacre at Nyarabuye took place in the grounds of a Catholic church and school. Hundreds of Tutsis, including many children, were slaughtered at close range.” James Nachtwey, (1994), from “Rwanda” photo-essay in Inferno (271), black-and-white photograph

32

Fig. 23) "Hutu refugees were struck by cholera and buried in mass graves." James Nachtwey, (1994), from “Zaire” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 334-335), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 24) “A man weakened by cholera was supported by his wife as he waited outside a clinic.” James Nachtwey, (1994), from “Zaire” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 331), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 25) Carretadas al cementario/Cartloads for the cemetery, Francisco de Goya, (1810-20), from “Desastres de la Guerra/Disasters of War” series, etching, burnished aquatint, drypoint, burin, and burnisher

Fig. 26) “Children in Sacsa were confined to their beds or, if they were difficult to control, languished in hard, barren rooms.” James Nachtwey, (1990), from “Romania” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 44-45), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 27) The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco de Goya (1796-98), from series “Los Caprichos (The Caprices),” etching/aquatint, 21.5 x 15 cm, image from artstor.org

Fig. 28) “The funeral of a Croat militia man killed in the fighting in Mostar.” James Nachtwey, (1993-94), from “Bosnia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 212-213), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 29) “A Serbian infantry attack near the village of Rahic, outside Breko, was successfully repulsed by Bosnian forces. The Serbs who were killed in action were collected from the battlefield and taken by truck behind Bosnian lines. They were dumped in a farmyard, identified, and returned to their comrades the following day.” James Nachtwey, (1993-94), from “Bosnia” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 247), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 30) San Juan del Norte Nicaragua, James Nachtwey, from book Deeds of War (1989), color photograph

Fig. 31) “A Chechen rebel fought from a destroyed building on the front line.” James Nachtwey, (1995-96), from “Chechnya” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 348-349) black-and-white photograph

Fig. 32) “The hospitals were stretched beyond their limits by the number of civilian casualties and wounded resistance fighters. The wounds were severe and the medical supplies drastically depleted.” James Nachtwey, (1995-96), from “Chechnya” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 383), black- and-white photograph

Fig. 33) “Handprints and graffiti in blood covered the walls of a family’s living room in Pec.” James Nachtwey, (1999), from “Kosovo” photo-essay in Inferno (p. 464-465), black-and-white photograph

Fig. 34) “A political poster bearing the face of Slobodan Milosevic was smeared with mud and torn off the wall by the children of Prizren.” James Nachtwey, (1999), from “Kosovo” photo- 33 essay in Inferno (p. 466-467), black-and-white photograph

1. Dante Alighieri, and Robert Pinsky, The Inferno of Dante: a new verse translation, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). 2. Brett Abbott, Engaged observers: documentary photography since the sixties, (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 25. 3. John Kifner, "pictures from hell," Columbia Journalism Review 39. no. 2, (2000): 44."[Nachtwey] is a war photographer, arguably the best of his time." 4. James Nachtwey, James Nachtwey, photojournalist: 7 November 1992-10 January 1993, (Göteborg: Hasselblad Center, 1992), 1. 5. Ibid., 2. 6. Ibid., 1. 7. , and João Silva, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 122. 8. “Witness: photography by James Nachtwey,” last modified n.d., http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/ 9. Ibid. 10. James Nachtwey, "James Nachtwey: My photographs bear witness," TED Talks, Youtube video, http://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_s_searing_pictures_of_war.html 11 . James Nachtwey, "Documenting the Plague of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: by photographing this disease's devastation, James Nachtwey appeals `to stop the madness, lend a hand, restore humanity," Nieman Reports, (Reporting on Health) 57, (1): 39. 12. Kifner, "pictures from hell," 44. 13 . Richard Lacayo, "Prints Of Darkness: In a volume of profound, unflinching pictures, James Nachtwey surveys the grave new world of the 1990s, (The Arts/Photography), (Review)," Time, 2000, 155, (13): 82. 14. James Nachtwey, Inferno, (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), 470. 15. Allan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs". Art Journal, 41, (1981): 15. 16. Ibid., 23. 17 . Martha Rosler, 3 works: critical essays on photography and photographs, (Halifax, N.S.: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981), Part 3 "In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)," 308. 18. Ibid. 19. Nachtwey, James Nachtwey, photojournalist, 1. 20. Caroline Moorehead, and James Nachtwey, Humanity in war: frontline photography since 1860, (Geneva: ICRC, 2009), 3. 21 . David Levi Strauss, "James Nachtwey," Artforum International 39, no. 1, (2000): 180. 22. Rosler, “In, around and afterthoughts,” 306. 23. Ibid., 307. 24. Ibid., 325. 25. Michelle Bogre. Photography as activism: images for social change, (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2012), 4. 26. Ibid. 27 . Susie Linfield, The cruel radiance: photography and political violence, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 215. 28. Nachtwey, James Nachtwey, photojournalist, 2. 29. Antigoni Memou, "'When It Bleeds, It Leads' Death and Press Photography in the Anti-Capitalist Protests in Genoa 2001," Third Text, 24, no. 3, (2010): 343. 30. Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," 16-17. 31. Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii-xxv, 31-37. 32. Quoted in: Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," 16-17; Nachtwey, James Nachtwey, photojournalist, 2. 33. Quoted in: Abbott Engaged observers, 25. 34. Ibid., 31. 34

35. Sri-Kartini Leet, and Alison Hill, Reading photography: a sourcebook of critical texts, 1921-2000, (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2011), 320. 36. Bogre. Photography as activism, 20. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 22. 39. Ibid., 17. 40. Leet and Hill, Reading photography, 321. 47. Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, (New York: Picador, 2003), 38. 42. Quoted in: Vicki Goldberg, "Inside Bitter Places," in Ground level: photographs by James Nachtwey, ed. James Nachtwey (: College of Art, 1997), n.p. 43. Nachtwey, Inferno, 470; Christian Frei, "War Photographer," 2001, DVD; Nachtwey, "James Nachtwey: My photographs bear witness." 44. Nachtwey, "James Nachtwey: My photographs bear witness." 45. Nachtwey, "James Nachtwey: My photographs bear witness."; Abbott Engaged observers, 25. Photographer Marcus Bleasdale has said: "What I see has made me angry, and I want to maintain that in a process to enforce change. If I channel my anger, I remain passionate.” 46. James Nachtwey, Deeds of War, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 10. 47. Ibid., 8. 48. Bogre. Photography as activism, xiv. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Rosler, “In, around and afterthoughts,” 304. 51. Susan Sontag, On photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 11-12. 52. Ibid., 12. 53. Quoted in: Cal Fussman. "James Nachtwey: war photographer, 56, (WHAT I'VE LEARNED)." Esquire, 144, 4 (2005): 208-210. 54. Kifner, "pictures from hell," 45. 55. Frei, Christian, "War Photographer.” 56. Nachtwey, "James Nachtwey: My photographs bear witness." 57. Lacayo, "Prints Of Darkness,” 82. 58. Linfield, The cruel radiance, 46. 59. Ibid., 8, 46. 60. Ibid., 60. Linfield says, “Photojournalists are responsible for the ethics of showing, but we are responsible for the ethics of showing.” 61. Quoted in: Ibid. 62. Ibid., 13-14. 63. Quoted in: Ibid. 64. Ibid., Chapters 1-2. 65. Rosler, “In, around and afterthoughts,” 315. 66. Linfield, The cruel radiance, 5. 67. Nachtwey, Inferno, 285, 331. 68. Rosler, “In, around and afterthoughts,” 328. 69. Abbott Engaged observers, 27. 70. Ibid., 26-27. Martha Rosler called Susan Meiselas’ overly romantic and sensationalist, thus diminishing its meaning. David Levi Strauss points out to the depreciation of Rosler's argument, "that all representation is inevitably aesthetic." 71 . Levi Strauss, "James Nachtwey," 180. 72. Abbott, Engaged observers, 212. 73. Quoted in: Sarah Boxer, “The chillingly fine line between ecstasy and grief.(exhibit, ‘James Nachtwey: Testimony,’ International Center of Photography, New York City),” , (2000), 27. 74. Kifner, "pictures from hell," 44. 75. Linfield, The cruel radiance, 25. 76. Ibid., 27-28. 35

77. Quoted in: Ibid., 39. 78. Vicki Goldberg, "Encountering beauty and brutality," The Chronicle of Higher Education 44, no. 15 (1997): B8. 79, Ibid. 80. Goldberg, "Inside Bitter Places," in Ground level, n.p. 81. Linfield, The cruel radiance, 41. 82. Bogre. Photography as activism, 18; Sontag, On photography, 40. 83. Linfield, The cruel radiance, 5, 10. 84. Ibid., 6, 11. 85. Ibid., 30. 86. Goldberg, "Encountering beauty and brutality," B8. 87. Linfield, The cruel radiance, 30. 88. Goldberg, "Inside Bitter Places," in Ground level, n.p. 89. Phillip Knightley, Sarah Jackson, and Annabel Merullo, The eye of war: words and photographs from the front line, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 174. 90. Ibid., 224. 91. Ibid. 92. Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, 36-37. 93 . Jean Baudrillard, "Jean Baudrillard - The violence of the image," last modified 2012, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-violence-of-the-image/. 94. Nachtwey, Deeds of War, 10. 95. Chris Hondros, War in Shadows and Light: Photographs by Chris Hondros, (Raleigh, NC: Gallery of Art & Design, North Carolina State University, 2006). In this catalogue, Greg Campbell wrote, "There are times when a photojournalist takes this calling further than others in his field and not only creates documentation of events, but presents them in a way that makes the viewer question the fundamentals of what they're seeing. And that, of course, is the definition of good art." 96. Bogre. Photography as activism, xv. 97. Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," 21. 98. Boxer, "The chillingly fine line between ecstasy and grief,” 27. 99. Ibid. 100. Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, 114. 101. Alex Garcia, "Nachtwey meets with news photographers," News Photographer, 52, no. 9 (1997), 25. 102. Nachtwey, Inferno, 470. 103. Goldberg, "Encountering beauty and brutality," B8. 104. Ibid. 105 . Anne Tucker, Will Michels, and Natalie Zelt, War/photography: images of armed conflict and its aftermath, (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2012), 5.

36

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