There are two very different kinds of photographs.
The easy kind is the kind we know best - the kind where we pluck the apple from the tree and coat it with fast flowing caramel. Celebrity photographs shine in a calculated attempt not to associate, but dissociate, with the people on the page. The shadows in those hollowed cheekbones, the glistening unlined foreheads, the floating strands of hair that never fall - we’ve convinced ourselves that celebrity photographs are about “getting to know” the soul behind an actor, but really they perform the opposite function. They make the celebrity unknowable by making them unreal. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the taste of all that inconsequential beauty doesn’t feel good. It is still something sweet.
The second type is the kind of photograph you don’t see as often. That’s the type where the world’s beauty appears unadorned, which, just as frequently, can be something ugly. It’s the type that encourages association instead of an otherworldly distance, where reality impinges on the world of the image despite the fact that it might have a bad taste. It’s association with things you are glad you aren’t a part of. It’s a bitter thing that shows a bitter place. “I want people to feel, I suppose, what I feel, which is anger and compassion, a sense that what’s happening is not acceptable.” That quote comes from an interview with James Nachtwey.
He takes the second kind of photographs.
The distinction doesn’t come, however, just from Nacthwey’s subject matter. James Nachtwey photographs war and desolation, two things that are frequently connected, but that alone doesn’t qualify his pictures as edifying. His peers, in fact, often create the same saccharine poses that celebrity journalists might use. Sebastiao Salgado, another renowned photographer of poverty and war, takes pictures that make poverty seem like a gleaming third world Vanity Fair. His supporters would argue that the beauty in his photographs provide a type of “tension,” that they show art in an artless world. Nachtwey wouldn’t argue - he’d be taking photographs.
The subject of the 2001 documentary “War Photographer,” Nachtwey only theorizes about his work between shots. Generally quiet and reserved, when Nachtwey does speak, he makes it clear that his job is activism, not aesthetics. “In a way, if an individual assumes the risk of placing himself in the middle of a war to communicate to the rest of the world what’s happening, he’s trying to negotiate for peace,” he says in “War Photographer.” “Perhaps that’s the reason for those in charge of perpetuating the war do not like to have photographers around.”
Despite the fact that Nachtwey doesn’t blink (and in a lot of places, those with shut eyes are preferred), he’s been at the scene of some of the most horrific events of the past 25 years. He’s been in Darfur, the Congo, and by a journalistic turn of fate, was in New York to record some of the most harrowing pictures of September 11th. He’s been a witness to history and has exposed millions to the realities of open secrets that no one wanted to see.
The difficulty in describing the pictures attests to their value - they don’t lead to pleasant rhapsodies about the nature of light or use of contrast. Instead, their value is in the unflinching presentation of a narrative and a scene. A woman chews a cord. A man stands covered in ash. Looking at Nachtwey’s photographs is not a pleasant experience like gazing at a carmelized celebrity. But that’s because they aren’t sugar - there’s something more nourishing provided by a photographer who doesn’t allow himself to blink.
“I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.”
- James Nachtwey- 
(Current Standing ~ 3 out of 5)
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October 27th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Checkout his photo essays on time.com