Last night at the Hood Museum, preeminent photojournalist James Nachtwey '70 presented a slide show and narration of his 13 years in a profession defined by danger, violence and the witnessing of the world's horrors.
Nachtwey described himself as a 'war photographer,' and chronicled how he became interested in photography at the College and, lacking the money to enter graduate programs, how he educated himself 'in the aisles of bookstores' and on various small assignments, beginning international photography in 1981.
While the photographs stand alone as testament to atrocities around the world, Nachtwey's narrative lent insight into his emotional engagement in his work. He showed a child in a Romanian institution crouching naked on the iron of a mattressless bed frame which he never left. Nachtwey said, "That one bed was his world."
In another picture, two Croatian soldiers are momentarily exposed as they retreat during building-to-building action in a dusty haze which Nachtwey explained was created by machine-gun fire. "This man in the foreground made it, but the man you see behind him was hit. After I made this image (a picture of the soldier lying, bleeding, in the arms of his comrades) I helped carry him out." Another photograph shows a skeletal child lying atop his father: "I helped them into my vehicle and took them to the food distribution center." In Somalia and southern Sudan especially, it was difficult to discern which bodies were alive and which were corpses without Natchwey's help.
After the presentation, an audience member asked Nachtwey how he could justify simply observing and recording these horrors. He related a humorously poignant story about his rescue of a Haitian from a mob. Pretending to be an American official, Nachtwey 'arrested' the man and pulled him into a waiting Jeep, which then refused to start. When asked to help him with a rolling start the mob eagerly assisted. He said, "At one point they were pushing on both the front and back of the car." Later he discovered the man was not an attache for the Haitian military regime, but was in fact a tenant whose landlord, upon discovering that he could not afford the rent, had turned the mob on him. Nachtwey concluded, "I help when there is something I can do, and when it's already being done, I do my work."
