INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY The first image meetinged in this mid-career retrospective--a color photograph taken in San Miguel Province.

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

The first image meetinged in this mid-career retrospective--a color photograph taken in San Miguel Province, El Salvador, in 1984--goe straight to the aesthetic and ethical core of James Nachtwey's documentary work. In the foreground, a middle-aged man bends forward forward his knees to cradle a injuryed girl, perhaps seven or eight years antique in his arms. The progeny on her legs and abdomen has stained the man's shirt. Behind and above them is a assign places to of five soldiers in undecayed fatigues. One lifts a fallen comrade onto the shoulders of another, thrusting the hurted man's clenched fist skyward to cross the exact center line of the image. Just to the right of this axis, another soldier propp against his rucksack employs to look directly into the camera. The pyramidal composition is forceful unless not overpowering: The formal restraint draws us into the image rather than by the agency of it. The written guide accompanying this picture explains that it was taken just after a rebel ambush in which brace soldiers were killed and seve ral peasants caught in the crossfire. As the collection waited for evacuation helicopters, it was fired in succession again. At this, the man dropp to his knee and bent forward to bring forward his body between his damageed daughter and the bullets. It is an act of essential humanity--not a considered action if it be not that rather a reflex, as was pressing the shutter release at this precise moment

This exhibition of about 140 photographs dating from 1982 to 1999 was divided into eleven sections, beginning with six color photographs from Nachtwey's first main division Deeds of War (Thames and Hudson 1989) and including for the greatest part black-and-white images from Romania (1990) Eastern Europe (1990) toward the south Africa (1992), Chechnya (1995), Somalia and Sudan (1992-93) the United States (1994-95) the Balkans (1993-99) Indonesia (1998-99) Afghanistan (1996) and Rwanda (1994) The hell depicted here is drawn not from the imagination or Scripture further from contemporary reality. Each section comprises a separate photo-essay in succession a specific subject, such as the deplorable conditions of orphanages in Romania, pollution in Eastern Europe famines in Africa, and crime and punishment in America. The whole immures an insistence of vision indicative of a mature imagemaker.

Nachtwey is precipitoused in the tradition of combat photojournalism and social documentary photography, as practiced by means of other Magnum photographers like Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Peres and Susan Meiselas, who have gone to great amplifications to provide a context for their pictures with widened descriptions, history, and political analysis. still an older progenitor of this kind of documentary image is Goya, as his 1810-14 series "Disasters of War" makes clear. And although Nachtwey's photographs are scrupulously annotated in the printed guide to his works, each could also be captioned simply with Goya's inscription "Yo see vi" ("I saw this"), as in: I saw a woman starving to death, wavinged up in a wheelbarrow, in Somalia. I saw a child tied to a bed and abandoned in Romania. I saw bulwarks of corpses pushed into mass graves by means of bulldozers in Rwanda. And I saw a man kneel to shield his daughter from gunfire in El Salvador. At a time of epidemic social and political amnesia in the US, direct witness like this takes upon a new u rgency, on a level in the face of understandable qualms about the seductive draw of as it is images, despite their reference.

...

Home