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
In the photo, taken in 1943, Robert Capa and George Rodger stand smoking and talking on a Naples terrace. They are dashing in their khakis and boots and combed-back hair, scarves knotted at their necks; it's easy to imagine them in pith helmets shouldering rifles, galloping through desert sands, consorting with spies. The two men, however, are romantic figures of a different sort: photojournalists. Four years after the picture was taken, they became founding members of the Magnum photo agency, a group of exceptional photographers whose images have helped define a half century of history. Through their work, they have taken us to Algeria's anticolonial war, to Iran during revolution, to an Africa besieged by famine. They led us through a crack den in Harlem. They placed us at Martin Luther King Jr.'s side.
The men and women behind the cameras are adventurers, and their exploits have become legend: Capa's love of high-stakes poker and beautiful women, his vagabond youth and violent death. Susan Meiselas's narrow escape on a small dirt road outside San Salvador--the car she was riding in hit a claymore mine, the explosion wounding her and killing the driver. Michael Nichols's encounter in Africa with an enraged gorilla and his quick-witted response: a submissive pose that stavedoff the attack.
Yet the photojournalist is different from the spy or the explorer or the big-game hunter, rifle at the ready. He cannot bag his prey from afar but has to step in close, where he can look into his subjects' eyes. Nor does he have quite the imperial arrogance and moral certitude of those other audacious men. There are few admiring portraits of the powerful in the Magnum archives, few good and noble wars. At the coronation of King George VI, Henri Cartier-Bresson ignored the staged event entirely, shooting the edges of the crowd, making the center of his portrait a man sleeping in the trash.
Capa once said that if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough. These photographers are close enough to see the cracked skin and oozing lesions on a group of starving men's shins, close enough to see the fangs of a snarling U.S. Army attack dog, close enough that when Harry Gruyaert took a picture of a young woman in Morocco, she covered her face to avoid violating the laws of her faith.
That photographers can be aggressive, even destructive intruders in other people's lives has been brought home powerfully in recent weeks, forcing photojournalists to ask to what degree they share the sins of their tabloid relatives, the paparazzi. One group of photojournalists was alarmed enough by the vitriol aimed their way after Diana's death to make a public statement in their own defense: Their subject matter and motives, they said, distinguish them from those who stalk celebrities. Unlike the paparazzi, the photojournalist "feels a powerful social responsibility to document atrocities" and to give "a greater understanding of our world."
Yet the more important distinction, and the quality that makes Magnum photos like those on the following pages so powerful, is that these photojournalists, at their best, struggle with their responsibility to the particular human beings they capture on film. There are lapses: Gruyaert's attempt to capture the young girl's face may be far worse than shooting a celebrity--the girl never invited public attention, is without the means to secure her privacy, and believes that her very soul is at stake. As a rule, however, photojournalists aspire to empathy rather than predation. They strive to share their subjects' world, to live among them over time, to allow them some role in their own representation. Compare this with the paparazzi, whose slang for their work reveals its aggression: They were "doing Di" or "banging" her or "hosing" her, language that explicitly borrows the imagery of sexual assault.
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.
Other photojournalists, short of quitting outright, find ways to resist making people into symbolic expressions of what the photographer believes or into an element of his art. Meiselas describes trying to photograph the dead "as people who were loved by someone" and learning "when you don't belong there." Peress asks his subjects, often in a wordless exchange, whether they wish to be photographed, "to show or hide." Other photographers incorporate the subject's surprised or playful or mournful response to the camera as a central aspect of the picture. In Burt Glinn's 1985 photo of a cancer ward in a Seattle hospital, a mother encased protectively from head to toe in plastic holds her baby, who is dressed in pink satin and lace. The little girl looks dolefully into the camera, confronting Glinn as directly, and unsettlingly, as Glinn confronts her.
Mostly, the photographers whose words and photos fill these pages try in their pictures to confess how little they actually know, how little they can know, about the people and places they see. Few have captured the world's incomprehensibility as well as Peress. Many of his photos baffle: Why is that Irish priest's head tossed back in what seems a fit of ecstasy? (Page 67). What is the small girl with the blank face doing? Why do the women in the window remain so calm? The picture conveys what Peress himself sees: information too piecemeal to craft into a coherent whole. Elliott Erwitt uses quite opposite means to make a similar point. In a 1968 photo taken in Ballycotton, Ireland, he parodies one of Cartier-Bresson's most famous pictures--a man jumping a puddle caught in perfect midleap. The picture is often used to illustrate Bresson's belief that one could capture "the decisive moment" when the underlying order in the world reveals itself. Erwitt's decisive moment is also in midleap, but the photographer adds an absurd twist: His subject is a little dog.
The first 50 years of Magnum have produced one of the richest archives of photojournalism in the world, but it's hard to know what will happen in the next half century. The market for photojournalism is different--and many believe bleaker--from when Life magazine assigned Eve Arnold to spend several years photographing Malcolm X, or Ladies' Home Journal sent Capa and John Steinbeck to the Soviet Union. The emergence of digital imaging, which makes it possible to alter pictures without a trace, and the massive consolidation of ownership of agencies and images also make the future of photojournalism uncertain. What will survive of the Magnum legacy is the deeply idiosyncratic, subjective perspective these photographers bring to their work. In a world where every place seems more and more like every place else, there remains the hunger for a singular vision, to know what one photographer saw as he ventured out into history.
This story appears in the October 6, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.