newyorker: “ Amy Davidson on Horst Faas, the A.P. combat photographer and editor who died last week, who both took pictures and handed out cameras in war zones ”

newyorker:

Amy Davidson on Horst Faas, the A.P. combat photographer and editor who died last week, who both took pictures and handed out cameras in war zones

11 years ago

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To some, the idea of war photography immediately invokes the image of soldiers on the battlefield, a visual story that has been documented again and again throughout conflicts dating back over the past century.

But after a decade in which thousands of people were killed and thousands more severely injured in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the concept of war has become something more human and more personal — in part because of the efforts of photojournalists.

Through photos, they’ve sought to more fully document how war isn’t confined to the battlefield — but that the daily reality of conflict has a lasting impact well beyond the battle zone, where the scars, both emotional and physical, are hard to heal.

I wrote about the amazing War/Photography exhibit opening at the Brooklyn Museum today (via Yahoo News)

10 years ago 4 notes

Some of the most moving photos in the War/Photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum were taken by Todd Heisler, who is an amazing photographer at the New York Times. In 2005, when he was still at the Rocky Mountain News, he spent a year documenting Marines who handle family notifications and funerals for soldiers who were killed in the Iraq war.

In an exhibition that is full of hundreds of incredibly powerful photos, my heart aches every single time I look at these images–and his entire photo essay is definitely worth a look if you haven’t seen them before (via Pulitzer.org)

10 years ago 26 notes

A 13th-century church is a fitting location for the exhibition of war photographs by Don McCullin, a man intent on paying public penance. Most photographers would be proud of the honors and accolades showered on Mr. McCullin at Perpignan’s Visa Pour l’Image festival this week.

Instead, he recoiled in shame, as if the words had wounded him.

“Photography was a beautiful thing to me,” Mr. McCullin, 78, said. “But once I started putting my hands in the blood and suffering of war I became really disillusioned. I would stand in front of men who were going to be executed in front of me, crying, looking at me and hoping I could stop their murder. There were dying children in Africa who were starving, and I would come to a feeding center. They would think here was a white man, he is going to bring some food aid. All I had was a Nikon camera around my neck.”

The ‘shame of memory’ haunts a war photographer (via Lens)

10 years ago 1 note

The rare exception where the captions really make the photos. How has that kid fake died 432 times?! He must have started Civil War re-enacting when he was in the womb.

Portraits Capture Civil War Re-Enactors Feigning Death (Photos by Eliot Dudik via Feature Shoot)

9 years ago 3 notes
“ Broadcast live to millions around the globe, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square seemed to be the defining visual moment of the Iraq war. To viewers and commentators, it was gripping proof that Iraqis were celebrating...

Broadcast live to millions around the globe, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square seemed to be the defining visual moment of the Iraq war. To viewers and commentators, it was gripping proof that Iraqis were celebrating the triumphal arrival of the Marines.

But it was not so apparent to some of the journalists who were actually there.

The photographer Gary Knight saw more journalists and Marines than actual civilians. And those Iraqis he saw, he said, seemed to be “doing it for the benefit of the cameras” at what amounted to little more than a media event. Just beyond the view of he cameras, the square was mostly empty. Lt. Tim McLaughlin, the Marine tank commander whose American flag ended up briefly atop the statue before it fell, drily observed that it was hardly a turning point, just “an event that for me occurred probably between 4:10 in the afternoon and 4:25 in the afternoon…

“I saw this for what it was — this wasn’t Iwo Jima,” he said. “It was probably the most trivial thing I had seen in five weeks. And I recognized what the press, the live TV cameras who had been starved of a story, were making of it. But I thought to myself, I’m not going to flatter this by making it into something that I know it isn’t.”

An Iconic Image from the Invasion of Iraq Wasn’t What it Seemed (via Lens)

11 years ago 0 notes

“

This is a war fought largely behind the scenes. Hamas fighters are not able to expose themselves. If they were to even step a foot on the street they would be spotted by an Israeli drone and immediately blown up. We don’t see those fighters. They are operating out of buildings and homes and at night. They are moving around very carefully. You don’t see any signs of authority on the streets. If you can imagine every police officer, every person of authority in America gone, this is what that would look like. If we had access to them, we would be photographing them. I never saw a single device for launching the rockets to Israel. It’s as if they don’t exist.

Sometimes people assume that you can have access to everything, that you can see everything. But the fighters are virtually invisible to us. What we do as photographers is document what we can to show that side of the war. There are funerals, there are people being rushed to the hospital, but you can’t differentiate the fighters from the civilians. They are not wearing uniforms. If there is someone coming into the hospital injured, you can’t tell if that’s just a shopkeeper or if this is someone who just fired a rocket towards Israel. It’s impossible to know who’s who. We tried to cover this as objectively as possible.

”

The NYT’s Tyler Hicks on covering the war in Gaza (via Lens)
9 years ago 2 notes
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