![]() Mass media/ news media/ media criticism, American politics, American culture, current events, religion, pop culture Political/ news satire, observational comedy, insult comedy, black comedy The images themselves, at their best, extract the essence of conflict, beseeching the viewer to honor those who have perished and to protect the rest of humanity from its worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.Stand-up, television, film, books, podcast War photographers are historians, artists, trespassers, and emotional bandits with complicated motives, some virtuous, some not. To be the last person a dying woman, or a condemned man, sees on Earth is a morally uncomfortable thing, but also one that conveys a certain responsibility. These images are a reminder that the parts of the world that are broken still need a durable fix. In too many places, the factors that drove conflicts in decades past-predatory governance, corruption, and crushing poverty-continue unabated. In Bosnia, ethnic tensions are on the rise. El Salvador’s ideological war has been replaced by bloody gang violence. At the time of writing, war has returned to Sudan, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it never left. Way too many of the images I took decades ago could be taken today. My work is also a call for reflection on why conflicts relapse. May 1994, Benako, Tanzania: Hutu refugees, many of whom participated in the massacre of 500,000 Tutsi, reside in a camp just across the border with Tanzania. I had a daughter, I fostered a son, and I didn’t look back. Immersing myself in a world of policy, justice, and state building, I worked to stop the atrocities I had witnessed as a conflict photographer. The realization drove me from my profession and led me to another: documenting war crimes in West Africa for a human-rights organization by means of witness testimony. But as the years passed, I became aware that with each war, what I gained in stature as a photojournalist, I lost in human empathy. My images exposed atrocities, signaled the beginnings of epidemics, and set off alarms in world capitals. I produced this work at a frenzied pace: airport, war, photograph, airport, war, repeat. Photographing the wounded in frenetic hospitals, mothers rocking in grief, soldiers stepping on land mines, and militiamen taunting, torturing, and killing one another, I wrestled with the awareness that the most painful episodes of these people’s lives were also occasions on which a part of me thrived. My life as a war photographer was punctuated by such moments of cognitive dissonance. May 1996, Monrovia, Liberia: Thousands of Liberian civilians crowd onto a ship to escape heavy fighting in the Liberian capital that had killed hundreds and brought Monrovia to its knees. For the war photographer, the conjunction of horror and opportunity adds a further twist. To witness brutality is to sustain psychic damage: What the eye sees, the brain records and cannot erase. We occupy disparate worlds, empathizing with those reeling from profound loss, even while interacting with those who take human lives. To be a war photographer is to forge an intimate relationship with the dead and dying. Unscrupulous leaders, driven by ego, profit, and ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas, waged war on civilians and turned villages into killing fields. In the early ’90s, I was posted to the former Yugoslavia, and later, to Africa. I photographed the bodies that the notorious death squads left on street corners at night. ![]() I first picked up a camera in El Salvador in the mid-1980s. ![]() ![]() Many of the combatants naively viewed war as an opportunity, only to discover that their bodies were mere fodder for the powerful. The civilians were entering a labyrinth of grief that they would occupy for the rest of their lives. ![]() The book tells the story of war through the experiences of both civilians and combatants. More than that, refusing to see it, whether out of personal or political discomfort, is a form of misinformation. But seeing it-looking squarely at the misery delivered by leaders who promised to do good for their people-is important. The imagery is not pretty, nor could it be. This Is War evolved out of my work as a photographer covering some of the bloodiest conflicts of the late 20th century. ![]()
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