Image Makers
The photojournalist is a witness, an adventurer, an interpreter of history. And for the past half century, Magnum photographers have defined the craft
For many Magnum photographers, empathy comes naturally: They themselves have inhabited the world of the poor and the displaced. At 17, Capa was forced into exile in Berlin by a Budapest government unhappy with his revolutionary activities, then two years later he fled to Paris to escape the Nazis; Eli Reed once was homeless, and so, he says, "never ignores anybody."
Others willingly move into the world of the poor and displaced, determined to bear witness, to gather evidence of human suffering and inhuman crimes. Gilles Peress spent decades in Northern Ireland, Iran, and Bosnia, living the chaos and the exhaustion. After a while, he says, the distance between observer and observed diminishes. It is as if "it's you who's on the road, your kid who's with you, . . . his toys" being trampled in the dirt. Susan Meiselas spent years in Nicaragua and El Salvador, stepping among the bones. Coming upon a pair of legs lying on a lush green hillside, the torso eaten by vultures but the bare spine still jutting from muddy jeans, almost anyone would have run in horror; Meiselas stayed close enough to take the picture (Page 71).
The price of that closeness is often great danger: The sight of a stranger with a camera is rarely welcomed by those committing secret cruelties. Magnum photographers have died on assignment. Capa was killed by a land mine in Indochina; David "Chim" Seymour was gunned down in the Suez. Luc Delahaye barely survived being tortured in Krajina by Serbian separatists. James Nachtwey's pictures are terrifying in the proof they give us of where he has been--in the midst of gunfire, next to the grenade. For the time he is working, he experiences the same perilous life his subjects live. "I joined the demonstration to photograph," he says about a picture from South Africa, "and fortunately I wasn't hit, and unfortunately this boy was."
The nature of their relationship with the people whose pictures they take is a question that haunts these photojournalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson believedphotography to be "the true republican style of painting. The artist stands aside and lets you paint yourself." But these artists know better. They know that their sympathies and their venom shape what we see, whom we believe to be evil or good; they know to what extent they determine whether we, the viewers, respond in our gut or merely admire the photographer's genius for making a thing of great drama and beauty.
Beauty is, paradoxically, one of their knottier problems. In the Magnum archives are great works of art: Bruno Barbey's 1972 photo of a protest against the building of Tokyo's Narita airport has the magnificence of a Renaissance painting; Barbey portrays the forces of light (students in white) and darkness (police in black helmets) set against each other like massed medieval armies. Nachtwey's picture of Sandinistas carrying a wounded comrade out of the jungle is also painterly. The hurt man resembles a 16th-century Christ being taken down from the cross, his arms held aloft, splatters of mud and blood like stigmata. Nachtwey makes him a martyr, a symbol of the everlasting brutality and suffering in the world. But in doing so he also allows the universal to overshadow the particular: the fact that an act of violence was committed against this man in San Juan del Norte in 1984. For Rodger, this tension was untenable. After photographing piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen, he decided it was obscene to frame the atrocities in his viewfinder, "getting the dead into nice compositions." He abandoned war photography forever.
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