By Grace Afsari-Mamagani
As the lights dimmed in Filene Auditorium on Wednesday afternoon, photojournalist James Nachtwey ’70 took community members in attendance on a visual and emotional journey. Influenced by images from Vietnam and the civil rights movement during the 1960s, Nachtwey said he began to consider the potential of photography and media to change the course of history and engrain pictures within a cultural collective consciousness.
“At its best, journalism is social intervention,” he said. Journalism, and powerful photography in particular, puts a human face to the abstract issues negotiated by world leaders; documentary photography interprets the stories of citizens on the ground, who feel the real and daily impact of the implications of policy. Photography, according to Nachtwey, is not the end in itself, but a means to the end, a tool for social awareness and tangible results.
Nachtwey — whose first book, Deeds of War, was published in 1989 — began his career as a war photographer in Ireland, documenting the everyday battlefield of Belfast. From there, he went on to photograph soldiers fighting the Central American proxy wars resulting from Cold War politics, car bombers destroying Lebanon in the heat of civil war, and the continued “conquest through… bible and sword” of European oligarchy in Guatemala. When the Berlin Wall fell, he traveled to Romania to document the AIDS epidemic in orphanages, bribing officials in the country with cigarettes, chocolate, and bottles of brandy, he said. “What I witnessed in Romania was nothing less than a crime against humanity,” he explained, his work motivated essentially by the hope that the world would respond.
His second book, Inferno, is a chronicle of crimes against humanity. In the case of his coverage of Somalia, the New York Times ran the story on the front page; the following day “the phones were ringing off the hook with people wanting to know how they could help… I believe that people will care if journalists will give them something to care about.” In the wake of Nachtwey’s photographs, the U.S. government, U.K. print media, and soon the entire world seemed to be paying attention: the UN came to the rescue, and the largest-ever International Red Cross mission saved approximately 1.5 million lives.
“That’s the power of the press,” he said.
Nachtwey photographed a range of other humanitarian crises, from southern Sudan to Chechnya to Rwanda (the last of which, in the immediate aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s election in South Africa, was akin to “taking the express elevator to hell”). He traveled to Kabul at the end of the Afghan war, was assigned to an American platoon in Baghdad following 9/11, explored the field of military medicine for National Geographic, photographed hundreds dying of tuberculosis, and documented crime and punishment in America.
“Photographers go to the extreme edges of experience to show a mass audience things they can’t see for themselves,” he said. His craft, despite the horrors he encounters regularly, is one of empowerment, of retaining the dignity of subjects who have nothing left to lose but continue to fight for life; his art, he said, is one contingent upon the sense of right and wrong, an ability to identify with others, and a refusal to accept the unacceptable. For the international community, the war photography produced by Nacthwey constitutes an invaluable service. It compels organizations to offer aid, attracts attention to the horrors we would otherwise forget, and, ultimately, seems to convey some basic humanity. It offers a voice to the marginalized and oppressed and can enact real political change. And it operates under the finally humble reminder to the journalist — and to the individual in the vast immensity of time — that “the stories we work on are far bigger than we are.”
