And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white moonshine.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look’st thou so?” – With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.

– from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

A vulture he had been called.

Kevin Carter in happier days during his tenure with the famed "Bang Bang Club."

“The police used to go around arresting black people for not carrying their passes,” she recalled. “They used to treat them very badly, and we felt unable to do anything about it. But Kevin got very angry about it. He used to have arguments with his father. ‘Why couldn’t we do something about it? Why didn’t we go shout at those police?’”

– Roma Carter on her son’s discontent with Apartheid

Apartheid, the nationwide governmental and institutional segregation of Native Africans from White South Afrikaners, had been law for more than a decade prior to Carter’s birth. The practice originated, unofficially, during the British and Dutch rule of the area as Baroness Blixen waxed poetic over the Ngong Hills, the glory of the East India Company became a receding memory, and “Laurence of Arabia” rose to iconic, post-mortem fame.

The Right Honourable Jan Christiaan Smuts.

Signed into enaction by The Right Honourable Jan Christiaan Smuts, Apartheid became the law of the South African land. By way of an electoral peculiarity reminiscent of the 2000 Bush v. Gore U.S. Presidential campaign, Smuts’ United Party had secured control of a majority in the South African House of Assembly despite a deficit in the popular vote.

Looking back to a policy proposed in 1948, Smuts and the United Party chose to officially divide the inhabitants of the nation of South Africa into four ethnic classifications: “Asian,” “Native,” “White,” and “Coloured” (i.e. individuals of mixed Black and White heritage). Non-White political representation was abolished. Asians, Coloureds, and Natives were removed from their homes in designated “White Neighborhoods” by military force. Black Africans, in 1970, saw their citizenships revoked. Education, beaches, medical care, as well as a number of other public services were segregated. Black South Africans as a whole found themselves restricted to substandard governmental services in eerie concert with the prejudices and deprivations – if not worse – gifted to African-Americans of a slightly earlier era.

Kevin Carter’s youth was colorful to say the least. Soon after completing high school he diverged from the traditional educational course in South Africa to study pharmacology. To his great displeasure, he found himself drafted into the South African Defence Forces as a result. In a move to avoid the front line, he enlisted with the SAAF (South African Air Force), unintentionally committing himself to four years of national service.

At 20 years of age, Carter came to the aid of a Black South African mess-hall waiter being harangued by his fellow White Afrikaner servicemen. Punishment was immediate. Moments after branding him a “kaffir-boetie” (nigger lover), troops set upon Kevin beating him unrepentantly as they shouted their ire over his altruistic actions. By 1980, Carter was AWOL.

Kevin Carter remolded as the Durban, South Africa disc jockey David in 1980.

He returned to military service, witnessed the Church Street bombing, and then was wounded while on guard duty by an explosive device which claimed 19 lives and was ultimately credited to the African National Congress.

Riots ensued in 1984 and Carter, upon his official dismissal from the military, took to shooting for the Johannesburg Star with a small group of young, male, perhaps overly-brave photographers who had dubbed themselves the Bang Bang Club – the first collection of Non-Black African photographers to focus on reporting the devastation and subjugation of South African natives.

The first photograph of a public execution by "necklacing" in South Africa in the mid-1980s. The victim was Maki Skosana.

I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.

– Kevin Carter commenting on the “necklacing” of Maki Skosana

Focused on a personal journey of revealing the injustice of Apartheid for the Johannesburg Star and the world, Carter ultimately uncovered travesties he could never before have conceived. In the mid-1980s he fashioned the first photograph of a woman, Maki Skosana, perishing by necklacing – the ritual of placing a tire filled and saturated with gasoline around the neck and torso of a presumed to be guilty person then setting it alight. The agony of the accused could be expected to last an average of twenty minutes before they finally passed into unconsciousness.

Not long after his suicide attempt, Kevin became dependent on alcohol and illicit drugs. At one point he was seen staggering while on assignment at a Mandela rally. A bit later, he ran his car into a residence and was taken into police custody under suspicion of driving while intoxicated. The Reuters editor assigned to Carter was nonplussed to say the least over a compulsory trip to the local lockup in order to recover Kevin’s film.

Kathy Davidson, Kevin’s girlfriend and a teacher, was at the end of her rope. She demanded that Kevin vacate her premises.

In 1993 Carter headed north of the border [with friend and fellow journalist] Jaoa Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a leave from the [South Africa] Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare. Immediately after their plane touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. “He was depressed afterward,” Silva recalls. “He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter.”

After another day in Sudan, Carter returned to Johannesburg. Coincidentally, the New York Times, which was looking for pictures of Sudan, bought his photograph and ran it on March 26, 1993. The picture immediately became an icon of Africa’s anguish. Hundreds of people wrote and called the Times asking what had happened to the child (the paper reported that it was not known whether she reached the feeding center); and papers around the world reproduced the photo. Friends and colleagues complimented Carter on his feat.

– Carter’s adventure as described in Time Magazine

Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library.

“I swear I got the most applause of anybody. I can’t wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment of my work I could receive.”

– Kevin writing to his parents back in Johannesburg

The Pulitzer Prize

Carter found himself awash in adoration upon his return to New York. He was formally invited to Haute Couture-littered and Glitterati-immersed parties of high acclaim where famous, complete strangers implored his signature. The events were in stark contrast to what he’d perhaps weeks ago survived.

“Photo editors at the major magazines wanted to meet the new hotshot, dressed in his black jeans and T shirts, with the tribal bracelets and diamond-stud earring, with the war-weary eyes and tales from the front lines of Nelson Mandela’s new South Africa. Carter signed with Sygma, a prestigious picture agency representing 200 of the world’s best photojournalists. ‘It can be a very glamorous business,’ says Sygma’s U.S. director, Eliane Laffont. ‘It’s very hard to make it, but Kevin is one of the few who really broke through. The pretty girls were falling for him, and everybody wanted to hear what he had to say.’”

– Scott MacLeod

An earlier rendition of the Sudanese girl featured in Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.

The underlying thrust of the story was on NDE (Near Death Experience), a phenomenon in many ways similar to PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but set apart by extremes in their affects on those afflicted.

Kevin was almost certainly victimized by the pair.

The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.

– The St. Petersburg Times in Florida commenting on Carter’s award-winning image

In short order, the praise heaped upon Carter had ripened, spoiled, and festered. When hundreds wrote The New York Times inquiring the health and safety of the starving Sudanese girl, the official answer was that her fate was unknown.

Carter received a seemingly endless stream of hate mail. The overwhelming consensus was that he’d taken advantage of a child in a mortally compromised situation for his own aggrandizement and financial benefit.

Having personally witnessed the utter depths to which humanity may sink more often than is conducive to sanity, having watched the wounding of “Bang Banger” Greg Marinovich and the death of his friend and club member Ken Oosterbroek, having debts he could never hope to pay, having children he could nary support, and having lost his love, Kevin could bear no more.

Kevin Carter goes to his knees during a confrontation between Inkatha and ANC fighters in Alexander township, Sandton, South Africa. An ANC supporter uses a dustbin for shelter behind him. Photo by Guy Adams.

Using silver gaffer tape, he attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his Nissan. He then ran the hose into his passenger’s side window, got into the cab, and lay down using his knapsack as a pillow.

Earlier, upon returning to Johannesburg after a trip to New York, Kevin wrote:

“I am depressed… without phone… money for rent… money for child support… money for debts… money!!!… I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain… of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners… I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.”

Underneath that knapsack is his Nissan was a note:

“I’m really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.”

Years later, Japanese journalist and writer Akio Fujiwara reported an account in his book “The Boy Who Became a Postcard,” of Kevin Carter’s Sudanese experience which sharply contrasted the New York Times’ standard reply to concerned readers.

Portuguese photographer João Silva, had accompanied Carter to Sudan hitching a ride with the United Nations’ Operation Lifeline Sudan. Given a deadline of 30 minutes to return to the plane upon landing (the time required to distribute foodstuffs), Silva ran out in search of guerillas while Carter remained relatively close to the aircraft as he documented children temporarily left alone by their mothers as they collected UN provisions.

The girl Kevin Carter photographed was one of the Sudanese children being rescued from absolute poverty by the United Nations but momentarily left unsupervised by their mothers desperate for provisions. The vulture which landed behind her was a fluke – a stray from the nearby manure waste dump.

José María Luis Arenzana and Luis Davilla, two Spanish photographers present at the time, support Akio Fujiwara’s depiction:

“We took him and Pepe Arenzana to Ayod, where most of the time were in a feeding center where locals go. At one end of the enclosure, was a dump where waste and was pulling people to defecate. As these children are so weak and malnourished they are going head giving the impression that they are dead. As part of the fauna there are vultures go for these remains. So if you grab a telephoto crush the child’s perspective in the foreground and background and it seems that the vultures will eat it, but that’s an absolute hoax, perhaps the animal is 20 meters.”

In other words, these seasoned photographers found it likely that Kevin Carter’s actual physical distance from the emaciated Sudanese girl was in fact more remote than appeared due to the telephoto effect and that the vulture’s proximity to the young one was as well exaggerated by the same well-documented photographic phenomenon. That fact is, however, irrelevant. Carter chased the vulture away once he’d made his photograph. He left the welfare of the girl to her mother, mere steps away, as she collected sustenance from the United Nations’ plane in the effort to keep her daughter breathing.

A starving Sudanese apparently salvaging moisture from the anus of an animal. Photographed by Kevin Carter.

Immanent, revered, and nearly deity-like in reputation, James Nachtwey spent time side by side with members of the Bang Bang Club unfortunately witnessing the death of Ken Oosterbroek in the process. While very much a loner, he identified with the club’s singular devotion.

“They put themselves in face of danger, were arrested numerous times, but never quit. They literally were willing to sacrifice themselves for what they believed in”

– James Nachtwey commenting on the Bang Bang Club

Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

– from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Helene Bertha Amalie (Leni) Riefenstahl at c. 33 years of age by photographer Karl Schenker.

Reminiscing on her youth as she approached death and prompted to comment on what she saw in 60-year-old images of herself, Riefenstahl answered, “Well, really as if the person in this picture is not me but just some actress.”

Interviewer: “This innocence, enthusiasm, then the fall from fame, the great disappointment… how do you see all that today?”

Riefenstahl: “It’s all so long ago now. I’ve long since got over it. I don’t think about it anymore. At my age – I’ll be 90 this year – many decades have now gone by. They were bad times. It’s like another world, but I no longer live in the past.”

In the beginning, the Austrian born German politician Adolf Hitler was a savior. Through a variety of economic policies, the dictator newly appointed via the Enabling Act brought a prosperity to Germany absent for years on end. The lands of the Germanics, long embattled and deprived, came to be nicknamed the “Caribbean of Europe.” There was not a German soul who doubted Hitler’s magnificent, ingenious leadership.

At the time it was politically difficult for any nation to criticize Hitler’s tactics. His plans had played out perfectly raising a struggling nation to international prominence and fame. But as his ambitions grew, so did the concerns of the world.

This is where Ms. Riefenstahl entered; full of ambition and latent talent. Adolph Hitler commissioned her and served as the informal Executive Producer during the filming of Riefenstahl’s first acknowledged masterpiece Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will).

Her preceding film, Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith) incorporated many, if not all, of the photographic and editing techniques that brought Triumph it’s glory, however it has all but completely disappeared under Hitler’s orders to erase Ernst Röhm, his one time Number One, from German history. If not for the NSDAP Archive of Third Reich and Nazi related material, history might have have lost an enlightening artifact.

Triumph des Willens won Riefenstahl a seemingly endless and proliferating cascade of accolades. In 1935 she was awarded the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Prize), a gold medal at Venice Biennale, and the Grand Prix at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. Leni Riefenstahl’s experimental yet expert employment of footage from multiple cameras, tracking cameras, and aerial photography seamlessly blended with a stirring soundtrack genuinely evolved the art of filmmaking – and no responsible critic or connoisseur could deny it.

Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the first documentary film made of the Olympic Games, made use of revolutionary, groundbreaking motion picture techniques later to become industry standards — including unusual camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups, placing tracking shot rails within the bleachers, and the like. It won the National Film Prize, the Venice International Film Festival, the Swedish Polar Prize, the Greek Sports Prize, the Olympic Gold Medal of the Comité International Olympique, and the Lausanne International Film Festival.

While the recipient of worldwide praise for her uncanny artistic ability, Leni could not ultimately escape the resulting derision to follow Hitler’s defeat and the exposure of his and his regime’s crimes against humanity. Her work was rebranded as propaganda of the worst sort and her visual inventions stolen wholesale by filmmakers globally with nary a whiff of an acknowledgement of their origins.

“I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.”

– Leni Riefenstahl describing her experience of witnessing one of Hitler’s speeches in 1932

Though she was embraced in her old age by such luminaries as Siegfried & Roy and Mick Jagger, Riefenstahl remained haunted by her association with and one-time affection for Adolph Hitler. The effectiveness – the affect of her consummate ability in service of the Third Reich, whether she found the politics palatable or not, tainted her brilliance.

Today, well after her death, she remains the single most famous female film director – and the most despised worldwide.

Leni Riefenstahl on Athuruga Island on March 13, 2003; 6 months before her passing.

No journalist ever wishes for the day they are forced to write a retraction. In fact, the post scheduled for this month was focused on an entirely different and neglected Miko Photo project: The Virginia Intertribal. Instead this space must be used to address the deception by one Mike Daisey.

I believe it best, due to the depth of my emotional reaction, to simply refer all of you to the articles written by others. Under these circumstances I cannot comment objectively.

Please click on the image above
to hear the entire National Public Radio broadcast.

Mike Daisey responded to the discovery of his duplicity on his blog. It goes, verbatim, as follows:

“This American Life” has raised questions about the adaptation of AGONY/ECSTASY we created for their program. Here is my response:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

Only one observation:

It grieves me to admit that journalism is today as vulnerable to chicanery as it was in the 1800s.

Lately I’ve been experiencing a touch of schadenfreude.

It springs pregnant from my choice to at last settle upon the old standard and the first of its kind, the BlackBerry, rather than dive into the swirling miasma that is everything about the iPhone.

I resisted the transition to a smartphone with the same fervor I fought against digital photography. “Why should I change,” I thought, “if I’m happy with what I have?”

“Why,” I pondered, “should I alter my habits if I’m perfectly satisfied with the capabilities already at my fingertips?”

While I’ll freely admit that I habitually tweak my BlackBerry for increased privacy, more security, and fewer records for my service provider by favoring my own modem and trusted proxies, I acknowledge that the inventor of my phone, Research In Motion, has gone to extraordinary lengths to create a platform and worldwide infrastructure appealing to such luminaries as U.S. President Barack Obama, former U.S. Vice President and one time bearded wonder Al Gore, Michael Dell, blog maven Arianna Huffington, Lady Gaga and Paris Hilton (though I hesitate to mention either), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the entire government of the United States of America along with most Fortune 500 companies.

My sense of technological savvy has however been recently cut off at the knees. BlackBerry, as it turns out, carries at least some portion of the guilt with which Apple, Inc. is now burdened.

The New York Times and The Washington Post, since at least the late 1970s, have been covering the developing story of how the electronics consumed by Americans are manufactured. Almost invariably such tales fell deep into Section A (if not C or mayhap Q) where they would receive passing recognition at best. Americans, even then, could seemingly not care less about how their primitive digital watches or playthings built around liquid crystal displays came into existence. It was simply enough to appreciate that the devices were available for purchase and not just another imaginary gadget portrayed on Steve Austin’s weekly fictional bio.

From this fascination, a mole hill in China grew into a mountain. Shenzhen was a tiny village virtually identical to the vision any American might have while recalling Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. Dating back to at least 5000 B.C. as a prolific source of salt before the Spice Wars raged, Shenzhen managed to retain its hushed, humble character. In 1979 that all changed.

Just north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen has grown exponentially under its designation as a SEZ (Special Economic Zone). Today at least 1.85 million of its citizens regularly work 12 hour days to make the iPhones and BlackBerrys and iPods and iPads we Americans crave… on a good day. When new versions of the mentioned products are released Shenzhen workers can expect to toil (silently, under penalty of severe reprimand) for as much as 16 hours a day before climbing into cots stacked four high along dorm walls.

Foxconn employee suicide.

Recently, high profile bloggers and columnists such as David Pogue have commented on the groundswell of criticism against Apple, Inc. and the working conditions within the walls of its largest manufacturer, Foxconn. He cited the New York Times article “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad” as the impetus for this popular uprising, but he was incorrect.

Mike Daisey performing "The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs."

Proper credit actually goes to a certain self-described “Apple fanboy” named Mike Daisey. Back in 2011 he decided to investigate exactly how his most beloved gadgets originated. He was and is not a journalist. He luckily had the finances available to travel to Shenzhen, China after experiencing a rather unexpected motivator.

His tale aired on National Public Radio not in February, when the New York Times article was published, but more than a month earlier: January 6, 2012.

“The shocking things that Mike said which brought me to tears were so because they came as a first-person story. Mike was living the pain of what he was describing as he told it.”

– Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, Inc.

Ira Glass in 2006.

Ira Glass of This American Life below introduces what they call Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory. Following, Daisey gives an abbreviated performance of his one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Just after, Ira Glass returns to establish the journalistic credibility of Daisey’s report while collecting knowledgeable, relevant comments.

It’s a long listen, a commitment in fact – a few seconds past one hour – but it’s worth it if you care at all about what your fellow human beings on the opposite side of the world are enduring to provide you, personally, with your playthings.

It’s as well a damned good story fashioned at the hands of a master.

Please click on the image above
to hear the entire National Public Radio broadcast.
The National Public Radio program “This American Life” has retracted this piece due to the discovery of inaccuracies in the story and duplicity on the part of Mike Daisey.
Please click here for a further explanation.

Further reading:

Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak Cried At Mike Daisey’s Play About Apple

Qiaobusi takes the Fuji Kang suicide case

Foxconn confirms guards beat up workers

Foxconn confirms beatings as yet another employee plunges to his death

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

“I really needed only a one horse-power. This was a two horse-power, but I thought perhaps business would grow up to it. It was worth a chance, so I took it.”

— George Eastman

I was 13 the first time I noticed the song “Kodachrome.” The lyrics remained a mystery for a good decade afterward. It was all Sanskrit to me. I simply liked the rhythm and emotion it evoked.

Two or so years later I became enraptured by photography and – as a rather underprivileged child – fashioned a facsimile of a 35mm camera from a found block of wood. While I knew what Kodachrome film was by then, I still made no connection between Paul Simon’s masterpiece and the photographic tool.

Forgotten for decades, it wasn’t until Kodachrome’s imminent demise in 2009 that I bothered to look up that 1973 piece of pop. “Steve McCurry to Shoot Kodachrome – One Last Time,” “Farewell Kodachrome: Steve McCurry Takes The Final 36 Exposures,” the headlines read. I was panicked – and heartbroken.

At the historic reunion concert in New York’s Central Park, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel perform
a medley of “Kodachrome” and “Maybellene” on 19 September 1981.

As a budding photographer I’d been told by mentors of the magical quality of Kodachrome film. When I finally dared invest in a few rolls, I’d made sure I would be headed toward an appropriately majestic subject: the Blue Ridge Mountains from which my ancestors hail. Once there among the clouds, I shot with perhaps more care than I ever had. The results (awaited for weeks as was to be expected due to the nature of processing the film) stunned me. I felt unworthy of credit for the images I’d made.

Kodachrome is/was unlike any sort of film that does or has existed and remains superior to any exotic permutation of digital photography yet devised. It possessed the ability to render… absolutely incredible detail in both shadows and highlights while retaining an uncanny believability. It was Technicolor kissed by heaven.

One thing universal to all photographers – complete amateurs, students, or seasoned pros – is the realization that somehow no photograph, no matter how carefully fashioned, ever captures the beauty so easily seen by the human eye. Pros often become so accustomed to the discrepancy that we cease noticing it. Kodachrome, while still not representative, managed to amazingly give the impression of reality… heightened. Staring at a Kodachrome, especially through a loupe, inspired sounds and smells and the very temperature of the day recorded.

1949 Kodachrome image of Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus, in the West End of London by Chalmers Butterfield.

1950 Kodachrome image by Willard R. Culver for the National Geographic Society - People stroll in the village of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland known for a waterfall that cascades off a 1000-foot cliff.

And still, 75 years after its creation and more than 60 years after the images above were made, the very same film stock allowed famed photographer Steve McCurry to fashion the stunning photographs at the beginning of this article and below this paragraph.

Frame 17 of the final roll of Kodachrome produced. A Rabari tribal elder, photographed by Steve McCurry in India, June 2010.

Certainly best known for his 1984 impromptu portrait of an Afghan girl named Sharbat Gula (shot too on Kodachrome), McCurry held sway when he asked Kodak to sell him the last roll of Kodachrome off the mill… whenever it happened. According to Vanity Fair magazine the agreement was reached quickly and enthusiastically. Long experienced with the film stock “made by God and Man” (Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes), McCurry had this to say of its passing:

Kodachrome had more poetry in it, a softness, an elegance. With digital photography, you gain many benefits [but] you have to put in post-production. [With Kodachrome,] you take it out of the box and the pictures are already brilliant.

— Steve McCurry

He was speaking of the little yellow and red box in which finished Kodachrome slides were returned to the photographer. In the early days photographers rushed to hold their slides up to a window or in front of a convenient bulb to excitedly view their results. With the advent of light tables, no matter how seasoned the photog, those tiny packages doused golden and crimson were opened only on the top of a freshly lit light table – each slide carefully laid out one by one, side by side, in a tight grid so as to savor the experience of how Eastman Kodak had magically elevated our best (if wanting) efforts to artistry.

Kodak did, and still does, produce a wide variety of films lauded by photographic purists, but we all know those days are numbered. Almost two centuries of recording images on one medium and transferring them to another are soon to be ended. Tri-X, a black & white stock heavily favored by such luminaries as Sebastião Salgado and used by very nearly every photography student for the last 50 years, will soon go away. It will die not for its unavailability. Its demise is already underway because only Kodak, as far as I’m aware, still possesses the chemistry to process the film and make prints.

I know this because, just over two years ago, I went to the old photo shop in which I was once employed – the only one in this area that can truly be considered a professional photo shop – and asked to have some old B&W negs printed. I was quickly informed that they had ceased printing B&W years ago and that the only way to have my images printed was to send them off to Rochester, NY.

Film and slide scanners, appearing soon after it was clear photography was evolving into a primarily digital medium, were sky high in price upon introduction. They then dropped to bargain basement as cell phones and smartphones with included imaging devices became ubiquitous. Today one can purchase a film scanner for as little as 18 bucks (intended for amateurs that haven’t yet converted such things as their old wedding and graduation pictures to digital form) or drop $5,449 on Nikon’s Super Coolscan 5000 ED (intended to allow folks like Sebastião Salgado and folks who wish they were Sebastião Salgado to make the best, most cutting edge copies available with present technology).

Kodak’s longtime companion Plus-X is gone. BW 400CN hangs around like a prostitute hopeful of coming romance. Flamboyant twins E100G and E100VS visit regularly despite the now cemented absence of their sisters E-200 and EPP 100, but the beau – The Great Yellow Father – seems confused over what precisely is happening around him. He publicly promoted his relationships with ELITE Chrome 100 and ELITE Chrome Extra Color 100 (brushing aside their uncanny resemblance to E100G and E100VS) yet, moments afterward, released a statement disavowing the implied Ménage à trois.

Much has been written in the past couple of weeks about how Eastman Kodak managed to permanently land itself in the Stop Bath. Some commentaries are trivial, others are petty and accusatory, while a handful are insightful, lucid observations. Those I’ve selected are listed at the end of this article.

It should be remembered, beyond all else, that Kodak was once Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Ma Bell, U.S. Steel, and La Cosa Nostra all wrapped up in one neat package for photographers for decades on end. Eastman Kodak produced the best cameras, the finest lenses, the most exquisite printing papers, and the most exacting chemistry of any in the world. Even the often obstinate, photophobic maverick Henri Cartier-Bresson submitted to Voja Mitrovic’s reliance on The Great Yellow Father. Ansel Adams’ dependance on Kodak products was near absolute.

Many challengers arose. Ilford put up quite a fight. Agfa did as well. It was perhaps Fuji with its Velvia/Fujichrome that dealt the final killing blow to Kodak’s premier product; Kodachrome 25 – renowned for its unsurpassed clarity and color rendition. Fuji’s Velvia managed to render results more amazingly crisp with color saturation that outstripped anything Kodak had to offer. Indeed, many pros accustomed to the exquisite images Kodachrome offered at ASA 25 found Fuji’s alternative overblown and garish… until the majority of viewers disagreed.

George Eastman was a visionary, but a practical one. In April 1880 he’d leased the third floor on a building in Rochester, NY and subsequently found he needed a one horsepower engine to produce his product. Coming across a deal on an engine twice as powerful, he risked the $125 US hoping that business would meet capacity. By the mid-1990s, Reuters estimated his company’s worth at $31 billion.

His story and the story of his company is stirring, inspiring, and provocative. Retracing the demise of Eastman’s company is as well disturbingly illustrative of what happens when the original visionary hands his enterprise over to others.

George Eastman

Institutions, even as pervasive as Eastman Kodak, cannot last. We’ve seen Geocities, Theglobe.com, Tripod.com, SixDegrees.com, and perhaps more familiar to recent memory, Friendster all fall. In time Facebook will seem quaint, Twitter akin to bell bottom jeans, and the almighty of all software firms, Google, little more than a clever marketing play on an obscure mathematical term.

It is not entirely their fault that they will die. They must. They may prolong their existence in some hobbled state as Kodak surely will, but in the end the cycle of life takes them all.

In the final summation, none of these companies will be remembered for their technological advances. In 50 years everything they’ve accomplished will seem elementary. What we’ll recall is how they conducted business. How they conducted themselves. We’ll remember how they made us feel.

To read more:

Kodak’s Last Snap: The End of The Great Yellow Father

An Elegy for “The Great Yellow Father”

Let us one final time pay homage to the great yellow god

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…

– “Jaques” in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”

While the last six posts here have been, in one way or another, contemplations on death and suffering, I feel duty bound to linger on the subject just a tiny bit longer. Movie Nights are normally vacations from the deadly seriousness creeping in every corner of this blog, however it seems to me that we lost far too many remarkable people this year for my last post of 2011 to be one entirely devoted to humor and frivolity.

I cannot possibly provide as thorough a tribute to the lost as The Washington Post’s Notable deaths of 2011. Instead I’ll make my best, if meager, effort to pay my regards to those whose passing affected me most strongly. Perhaps some of these giants too touched you.

↑ Apple Inc.’s inspiring 1997 ad so micromanaged by Steve Jobs that some say he practically created the entire piece.

↑ Steve Jobs delivering the 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University a mere six years before his departure.

While lengthy by internet standards, the speech is insightful from beginning to end and well worth the watching.

↑ A pitifully brief, if poignant observation of a spectacularly gifted vocalist’s evolution and decline.

↑ Christopher Hitchens, described by The New York Times as “a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq.” In March of this year, CBS aired Steve Kroft’s incisive interview of the “contrarian.”

He left the world on 15 December 2011 due to complications from esophageal cancer brought on and exacerbated by habitual smoking and excessive consumption of alcohol. “Hitch,” as he was often called, was 62.





↑ My deepest apologies for the commercial(s) that will likely preface this video.

This was Andrew Aitken “Andy” Rooney’s last Op/Ed for the iconic news program 60 Minutes on 2 October 2011. Less than five weeks later, due to “postoperative complications from an undisclosed surgery,” Andy passed away on 4 November 2011 at the age of 92.

His extended stint on the tail end of 60 Minutes began 33 years prior, alternating weekly with a now long discontinued spot called “Point/Counterpoint.” Once proving his humorous observations of the everyday more engaging than two politicos having at it, “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” became the most popular feature of the news program.

The day after his loss, 60 Minutes Overtime posted what they call a “selection of some of Andy Rooney’s best pieces.” The next day, on its 6 November 2011 broadcast, 60 Minutes, by way of correspondent Scott Pelley, announced that they would not attempt to fill Andy’s old slot. “He cannot be replaced,” Pelley commented with a warm smile.

↑ There’s little I can convey that is more enlightening than the Wikipedia segment on Erykah Badu’s highly controversial “Window Seat.”

Please read it.

While you may initially be of one opinion about this particular work, you will almost assuredly find your perception altered once you’ve discovered the backstory.







↑↓ The Story of Jonah Mowry

↑ Precisely why Adidas Inc. seeks to slyly promote itself as the reason for the young Sasha DiGiulian’s stunning achievements is beyond me. (Well, not entirely.)

Regardless, Sasha, barely an adult (or not, depending upon which nation might be evaluating) accomplished what no woman before had managed. At the baby’s-bottom-tender age of 18 Sasha became the first woman to conquer a “Class 9a” ascent. That makes her, yes, a historical figure before she’s seen the inside of her college level History 101 lecture room.

↑ Award-winning and internationally recognized rollerbladers Pierre Lelievre and Anthony Finocchiaro having their way with Shanghai on December 2nd of this year.


↓ Back in junior high school I ran up the side of a tree for the first time. It turned out to be the last as well. I’ve never had the guts to try it again. Other than noting that it seemed a natural outgrowth of the cartwheels, roundhouses, and somersaults I learned to do in elementary school, I really can’t tell you why I thought it was a grand idea to sprint up timber.

In the ensuing years breakdancing became all the rage. With the release of the film Breakin’, Boogaloo Shrimp and Shabba Doo achieved household name status. In the same year, 1984, a sequel called Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo hit theaters starring much of the same cast and promoting itself as portraying the next evolutionary step in breakdancing.

While Boogaloo Shrimp and Shabba Doo had both performed stunts on screen far superior than anything I ever managed, I never in person witnessed anyone else attempting such a thing as my tree trick until college. I was shooting in a nightclub for a class project when a friend (and accomplished breaker) noticed I’d turned my lens his way. In a blink he shot like a squirrel up a wall, performed a somersault at the top, and landed in perfect time to continue dancing un-airborne. It happened so quickly I was forced to ask him to reproduce the elaborate step… and I still missed the shot.

If breakdancing has in fact evolved rather than disappearing into the miasma, it exists today as parkour. A deft, eclectic combination of gymnastics, skating moves, biking moves, various martial arts, and philosophy, the performance art owes its birth to Sébastien Foucan. To learn why, view the program below.

A WARNING: this is a full length British television production running just over 49 minutes. If you’re presently at work, it might be best to postpone watching this until you’re at home with your spiked eggnog.

Should you have difficulty viewing this video, simply click here.

↑ Just plain fun.

↑ A moving piece by director, cinematographer, writer and producer Jeremy Snell.

For more information on his efforts, visit jeremysnell.com.



↓ Three men, Rick Mereki, Tim White, and Andrew Lees, over the course of a mere 44 days traveled 38,000 miles through 11 countries to make the 3 following shorts.

↓ To our Vietnam War veterans, alive and dead, who returned home to such an ignoble greeting, the more than 4800 soldiers, the nearly 114,000 Iraqi civilians, and an untold number of non-Iraqi civilians such as journalists, international aid personnel and foreign visitors who were shot to death, blown apart, beheaded, or partially beheaded during Operation Iraqi Freedom:

JoiningForces.gov.

Happy Holidays from the Obama Family

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.

– Robert Bolt

Eons ago, when I was a young man eager to call himself a photographer but really only an enthralled amateur with a few fortunate compositions, I worked at an outfit called Atlantis Photo. It was – and remains – the only truly professional photo lab in the area. Even in this era of digital everything, it and the Trahadias family persevere; preserving knowledge and traditions all too quickly being forgotten.

Please click on the image for the story behind it.

To say it served as my photography college would be an injustice. I took a couple of photography courses in college. They did not compare in any form or fashion with the lessons handed out, free of charge, at Atlantis. When my mouth went agape at fellow employees making statements like “this [print] is an eighth of a Stop off,” others noticed and quietly, slowly, patiently taught me to perceive even finer distinctions. They taught me about silly, insider names for various species of shoots such as the “Grip & Grin.” They instructed me in practical business aspects of photography that could be found published nowhere, dispensing apolitically correct caveats like “don’t shoot a band unless they pay you up front.” They introduced me to all the local photography celebrities which eventually lead to close friendships with a few – certainly the greatest gift I was afforded. A few of those even joined what I call my Quartet of Mentors. But most difficult of all the tutorials Atlantis placed in my lap was delivered unintentionally. It was a contemplation on impermanence and the abruptness of death.

When you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it.

– Marlene Dietrich

Although my family is sometimes seemingly populated with immortals, there has of course been death among us. In every case, there was foreshadowing and even a lead-in. When one of our clan was about to go, the rest were provided enough warning to get dressed, get gas, buy a card and some roses, and perhaps cook a tuna noodle casserole for all the mourners they would be joining bedside. Not a one of us, at least in my lifetime, has been blessed with even the tiniest bit of privacy on our way out of the world. And the single thing that excuses all the hubbub, and crying, and grandiosity we pour on our passing is that we know they love it and they love us more than they ever have before simply for being there to kiss them goodbye.

But when you’re not a member of a passing person’s family, you know nothing. Nothing. And if their death turns out to be only mildly sudden – say spread across a day or two or three – the announcement hits as if you watched them drop in front of you.

Frank died that way. He died that way for me. He was a delivery driver for Atlantis. Always a little apart from the rest of the employees yet never without a chuckle and a smile, he whisked through the lab every morning collecting packages for his run like some gnome suffering from gigantism who’d left Santa’s shop in search of (ahem) bigger things.

Please click on the image for an explanation of how it is related to the image above.

One morning – I think it may have been a Tuesday or Wednesday – I punched in and went about my normal duties. As usual the lab was already bustling. Phil, Jacqueline, Paul, Dave, Lee, D.J., Skip and all the others were either arriving or hurriedly tackling the new day’s mountains or putting out yesterday’s fires. Things had been going on this way for an hour or more before I noticed Frank hadn’t stepped through the front door at the usual instant. (He was a very punctual fellow as all delivery drivers should be.)

“Where’s Frank? He’s running late,” I remarked.

Dave and D.J. gave each other a glance just before Dave responded, “Frank passed.”

At that moment the news seemed inconceivable. I eyed my two coworkers to see if they were playing another of our often over-the-top jokes but there were no signs of deception; only regret and sublimated mourning.

“He just died?! He’s gone?! When?!”

Dave looked me in the eye and said “Last night,” then, in a vaguely premeditated manner, went straight back to filing negatives. I don’t think we met eyes again for the rest of the day.

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

– Ashley Montagu

“Days to weeks.” That’s what we were told. She would be gone from us before the next month passed.

With my original post about her and her prognosis, I promised I would give regular updates on my grandmother’s decline. That has not been possible for she has not declined. My beloved G-Ma has improved. She has improved beyond all medical reckoning.

Today she is a sprite, if slightly hobbled, octogenarian. Placed only a few months ago in hospice in expectation of her imminent demise, she is today an active participant in my own recuperation. Indeed, there are times when we’ve wished she’d be just a little less exuberant. While not “crazy” herself, a woman of her energy threatens the sanity of nearly any supposedly “normal” person.

A good part of her onetime bizarre behavior may be directly attributed to well-intentioned but ill-conceived prescriptions. It appears that as an anomalous episode ensued, the attending physicians assumed more than they should have thereby withdrawing a number of medications which would have returned my grandmother to a far more steady mental state.

Once her long-time psychiatrist regained control of the situation, re-prescribing all of the medicines he had previously specified, Mattie woke up. Annoyingly inquisitive, incessantly questioning, and down-right nosey, Mattie Geneva Munden has returned in full, fantastic force to drive us, each and every one, absolutely nuts. And we could not possibly love her more.

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.

– Albert Pike

I have strong reservations about discussing my Mom’s problems. While my G-Ma has for decades been my very closest friend, my Mother is now the dearest friend I’ve ever had.

We’ve had some very difficult times. We’ve both lied to each other. We’ve both betrayed one another. We’ve both gone well beyond the bounds of trust a mother and son should by all rights take for granted. And yet, today, we treasure a mutual love deeper than we ever might have hoped for.

My Mother suffers from multiple mental illnesses. For some years now she’s been under the care of a psychiatrist that we’ve only recently reasoned might be… unsuitable in her case. The situation ultimately resulted in a stay in a dedicated psychiatric facility ¾ of the way across the State of Virginia.

Within several hours of her admittance I talked to her by phone. She was a different person. She was calm, lucid, rational, and a voice I hadn’t heard for two decades. From the attention of a physician perhaps more attuned to her and the rearrangement of a few pills, the bright, loving woman who raised me had at last been returned.

Death is always around the corner, but often our society gives it inordinate help.

– Carter Burwell

If there is a moral to the last two stories, it is to simply get a second opinion – even a third. It really isn’t that hard a thing to do. As with both my grandmother and mother, second opinions did make all the difference.

Should you have loved ones in predicted mortal jeopardy (or anything close to it), do them, yourself, and your family a favor: get someone else’s word on it.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

– Mark Twain

Please click on the image for an explanation of how it continues this tradition.

I went two days, approaching my third day, without sleeping. The constant, intense, but dull pain in my chest and back made every position except standing impossibly uncomfortable.

Most of that time I invented ways to continue working while remaining on my feet. When exhaustion set in I’d spend 20 minutes or so reclining until it became once again obvious there was no relief to be found in relaxing. I’d then go back to work until my legs were jelly – compelled to make an umpteenth attempt at sitting and finding some semblance of ease.

Early on the morning of August 28th, I came to the conclusion that I was suffering a severe anxiety attack and went to Chesapeake General Hospital’s Emergency Room. Upon arrival a very observant security guard noticed how painfully I was walking and presented a wheelchair as soon as I crossed the doorsill. In short order I was evaluated by a nurse and shuffled off to Intensive Care.

Within what seemed mere minutes a familiar physician gave me a once over as we exchanged pleasantries. I explained to him that I suffered from anxiety attacks and that my symptoms were almost certainly an unusually severe expression of that illness. A little while later, and apparently after some careful consideration, he returned to say, “I don’t want to let this go as an anxiety attack just yet. I want to perform [a test of some kind].”

“Sure,” I replied, “whatever.”

A test was performed. I don’t recall the nature of it because a needle attached to an I.V. in turn attached to a clear plastic bag filled with morphine had become my fast friends. In a flash I was back in the IC; my mother now present with poorly veiled worry all over her. Medical personnel fell onto me performing tasks I can only imagine.

A new physician approached my bedside and asked me to again detail my symptoms. According to my recollection, I gave a rather poor, morphine-compromised description. The original doctor then returned to ask me to sit up and tell him precisely where I was feeling pain. Semi-drunken but more focused this time, I gave him the most precise explanation I was then capable of providing. With better information available, I can only surmise that Physician #1 left the room to pass it along to Physician #2 because Physician #2 returned in short order to say he’d like to do another test.

“Shoo. Wha’ever.” I was beginning to feel very content right about then.

Call no man happy till he is dead.

– Aeschylus

I have no recollection whatsoever of that test. As far as I know they yanked out my brain with a corkscrew, played football with it, and squeezed the grey mass back into my skull through my right ear. A heartbeat later I was again in my bed in the IC chatting with my now plainly distraught mother wearing the bravest face she could manage. We talked of trivialities, made frail jokes wherever we could, yet oddly avoided discussing plans for the future – my mother’s favorite pastime.

Things get fuzzier here (maybe because of that brainectomy). I seem to remember a total of four tests being performed, but the discussions accompanying the final two have almost completely vanished from my memory. All that I can recall is that they occurred. Afterward came the event that stands out most for me. What I think was yet a third doctor stepped into my room to ask if he could have a private word with me. Let’s call him Physician #3.

By then I no longer felt drunk. The deleterious effects were subsiding and I’d begun to feel quite lucid while also benefiting from the peculiar, surprisingly clear optimism large doses of morphine can afford. When the doctor entered, I was sitting up on the side of the bed, utterly assuaged of pain for the first time in roughly 60 hours, and cracking jokes with my mother and all the personnel in the room.

C’mon with the rain. I’ve a smile on my face.

– Gene Kelly

I hopped off the bed with the energy of a twenty-year-old athlete in answer to the doctor’s request. ‘Though tempered by my usual skepticism, there was plenty of room left to enjoy the unexpected burst of positivity coursing artificially through my veins. On our walk to a small conference room nearby, I briefly became aware of a spring in my step – I.V. in tow. I felt for a moment comically like Astaire with his coat rack or Kelly with his umbrella.

We sat and the physician, his expression now troubled, launched into a convoluted illustration of what he and his peers had discovered. I interrupted him almost immediately and perhaps a bit too forcefully as I was once wont to do. “I have an anxiety disorder. Only tell me what I need to know. Otherwise I’ll start experiencing all sorts of symptoms that don’t actually exist.”

A few medical professionals, when I’ve recounted this story, have winced at his response. They, by all indications, viewed it as harsh. I do not, I will not, and I will defend him to the last. He correctly assessed the overarching bravado of a patient deeply accustomed to believing, stupidly, in his invincibility and that life had nothing left with which to startle him.

That doctor twisted his guts, his genuine sense of compassion, and perhaps a license-endangering rule or two to present me a gift: when I most needed it, he handed me unvarnished truth.

Looking to one side and biting his lip as he pondered, his brow grew progressively furrowed until he at last dived in with, “You have seven days to live and we don’t know how many of those are already gone.”

Death will be a great relief. No more interviews.

– Katharine Hepburn

In seconds Physician #3 was back to delineating the whats and wherefores involved in possibly saving my life, but I was long gone. Time had stopped and not unpleasantly. A sense of peace rained down washing out of every mental crevice all the tedious little worries of day to day existence. And with all that grunge removed and massive new square yardage available like crevasses made naked in rivers of light, regrets over old flames, guilts, and grudges over wrongs dealt decades ago fell away as too silly to warrant a nanosecond of contemplation. There was simply no more leeway for assigning kudos or faults. My time on Earth had been cast in stone. Second guessing any of it was chasing a dragon.

The whirlpool cleared – hovering Technicolored in the mists above was the truly important: family. Despite beautiful clarity, I could not resist pondering the tremendous relief of leaving life. I would be no more. In the instant before I walked on, I knew I would revel in the ecstasy of my complete and utter absence. My secrets would vanish from time. All my lingering pains would flitter away. And my anguishes, my most traumatic experiences, would all disappear like tears in the rain.

Dying is easy, it’s living that scares me to death.

– Annie Lennox

Unlike Physician #3 given the terrible task of telling me odds were heavily against my continued existence, I knew how many days were left to me: 4 ½ – a compact series of symbols uncomfortably akin to the certitude of an equation. If my congenital disease killed in seven days, I’d already spent two and a half of them in a moronic effort to tough out the pain, continue working, and prevail by will alone.

Given the rather brief term I would have to endure and the truly wonderful, serenity-imparting, (ironically in this case) life-affirming side effects of massive morphine dosages, requesting that the docs just keep me doped up until I died was not at all an unattractive option. In fact, in that moment of suspended temporal experience, such a scenario was damned near irresistible. Embracing death, I had realized, is not necessarily a decision of sadness or of sacrifice. It may be wholly indulgent.

Please click on the image for an explanation of how it continues this tradition.

Mi familia, the memory of my family, brought me back and gave me pause. While I might for the duration of one picoscopic vivisection of a blink find a cherished escape in stepping out of the world, the Munden clan, my G-Ma, my Aunt Mildred, my cousin Marvette, and most importantly, most seriously my mother would be crushed at my early exit. My decision to part voluntarily would only render the event inflamed and infected with toxic emotional spores pouring out in clouds over my loved ones for years on end.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

– David Gerrold

Aortic Dissections, of which I have a pair, are inherited heart defects that, once they manifest, have a mortality rate of 80%. Half of the victims die before they can receive medical assistance. (And since I have two, one of them apparently inoperable, there is at least a 160% chance I will one day abruptly drop dead – which also probably makes me a splendid candidate for marriage.) According to what I’ve heard, survivability of the prescribed surgery hovers right around 7% – 10%. Normally, when a victim is faced with these statistics he or she is merely being presented with a less lengthy but more painful or less painful but lengthier means of leaving the company of the living.

Physician #3 made clear, confidently and encouragingly, that he thought I had a 90% chance of surviving the surgery due to my youth and physical condition. That gave little comfort as I’d already committed myself to the operation before knowing there was any possibility whatsoever that the cure could kill. Had I known of the whole 7% – 10% thing, I’m quite certain this article would never have been written. Not living to see my own hideous chest scar was a contingency I’d not considered as even a remote ramification.

In short order I was back on my bed in the IC, carefully breaking the news to my mother that I was going into surgery… on my heart… immediately. Somehow the issue of survivability never came up. Just when I thought I had her dealing with the facts in a relatively calm, rational manner, the first doctor rushed in, obviously anxious.

“How’s the pain?”

“It’s gone,” I said.

“Gone? No pain?”

“Completely gone,” I said motioning like an umpire declaring a baseball runner safe.

“OK. Nightingale will be here in a minute.”

“Nightingale!” Mom was not at all thrilled with this new piece of information.

“They have to fly me to Norfolk General. They don’t have all the equipment they need for the surgery here.”

If you’d like to get a better idea of my mother, imagine a stereotypical Jewish mother. She may, like I, have virtually every other nationality coursing through her veins, but it is that single caricature which best describes her combination of overprotection, unnecessary worry, superstition, and self-sacrificing love. That said, you will understand how intense the discussion became between the two of us over all this heart surgery and helicopter nonsense.

Soon the Nightingale pilot and her paramedic arrived with a particularly tall gurney apparently designed for in-flight transport. They asked my mother to wait outside the room, I’m sure because of the new premium on space. We all remained where we were for some interminable period, as if awaiting a cue, until someone finally flashed by the door with a flurry of directions.

Needles and tubes flew. Metal clanked. “One… two… three!” and I’d been lifted in a single swing from the bed to the gurney. A few more adjustments and then I was that guy on TV lying on a stretcher as medical personnel slammed him through one set of white, swinging doors after another.

Sentara Healthcare's lifesaving aerial ambulance named after "The Lady with the Lamp," pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale.

“I’m good,” I yelled in return with a hand placed on a nearby cupboard so that my gurney wouldn’t continue sliding side to side. As the chopper weaved its way between buildings, it swayed; everything inside the vehicle shifting under the break-neck pace the pilot had set for herself.

“Eleven minutes!” The paramedic slapped high-fives with the pilot as we landed at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

– Alice Walker

More white metal doors flew apart as my gurney slammed into them under the thrust of people dressed in scrubs gripping my bed and sprinting as if for dear life.

When I slid to a stop, probably in some room designed to prep me for surgery, my feet slipping a little off the end of the gurney at the moment of arrival, a flurry of administrators, legal aides, etc. – clipboards in hand – appeared from nowhere to ask me what I’m sure must have been very important legal questions. With a single exception, granting Medical Power of Attorney to my cousin Marvette trusted for her steely judgement, I have nary a recollection of anything else I might have said, done, or agreed to.

Among the last memories I have before going under are the classic movie scenes of a hospital ceiling and masked physicians and nurses viewed from beneath their chins. Regardless of the morphine and prior to the “milk of amnesia” to come, I was fully cognizant of the fact that what I was seeing and feeling and smelling might very well be the last experiences I would ever have.

“I have to pee.”

“Can you wait? We were going to take care of that in a second.”

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “Catheter.”

My memory again breaks here, fading out until returning to witness a nurse proclaiming, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,” as she shaved away my chest hair.

I raised a hand, feebly, saying, “It’s OK, sweetheart.”

Surgeon using an electric saw to open a patient's chest during heart surgery. He is cutting through the breastbone, or sternum.

There are unique, humorous moments still to be retold – such as the absolutely gorgeous brunette nurse whose interest was piqued at the proposition of a sponge bath – but somehow they seem tales more appropriately told to loved ones. As open as this recounting has been, there are facets of it I feel are best appreciated by the folks who actually know me and would therefore most sincerely treasure them.

I can tell you this: the week following my surgery was very much like watching snippets of a movie; incomplete scenes appearing then fading to black only to be followed by another scene in progress just before it too faded to black. My nurses on the 4th floor of Sentara’s Heart Hospital, who I adore, took fantastic care of me during the entire surrealistic period.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

– Katharine Hepburn

In turn I gave them hell. Often I refused their help or preemptively accomplished whatever chore with which they were supposed to assist me before they had the chance to return. Usually they pouted in response… then smiled.

When tasked with such stomach-turning jobs as removing electrical wires from my belly and torso, they affectionately laid themselves across me, taking all the time in the world to perform the procedures as tenderly as possible.

My great regret is that my memory is so compromised about my time with these wonderful women. I resorted to giving them nicknames. There was “The Taskmaster,” a tiny nurse of African-American descent who I thought might have once been a hazer in a sorority. Whatever her past, her talents were now well-directed toward leading the unhealthy and even dying to a more satisfying existence – whether they agreed to the endeavor or not. There was “Sunshine,” so named because every morning she greeted me with “Good Morning, Sunshine,” and a broad smile under her glowing blonde mane. Naturally and innocently flirtatious, Sunshine gave me reason to endure the train wreck continuously crashing in my molested chest. And there was “The Asian Lady,” a woman more mature, more experienced, and unfortunately subjected to my worst behavior as I went through what can only be called a mild paranoid event accompanied by severe chest pain. I rejected her help to the point that her arms dropped in frustration, and I continue to be unspeakably sad for bringing her to such a state.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

– W. Somerset Maugham

A few weeks later I was back in the hospital due to a few complications of my original chest-cracking. I can recall that stay much better – I certainly remember the doctors and nurses who attended me with far more clarity – but somehow I don’t care to recall.

Exhaustion has set in on the subject and it’s hard to tell if it will subside anywhere in the near future. All that is present now is a deep, penetrating thankfulness for all those who struggled to snatch me from Death’s maw.

Counter to Maugham and Walker, I did not find the road to death dull or boring. Perhaps for the genuinely objective those observations are reasonable, but for family and friends it is certainly incorrect and for the victim statements of monumental ignorance.

More than a year ago I received the joyous news that I had “a heart like a horse.” The attending physicians became so enthusiastic that they practically pumped their fists like gridiron players reaching the end zone. The slight enlargement of my heart was attributed to my former pastime as an avid runner. Eighteen months later, five months ago, my heart nearly tore itself apart… and this was all under the care of a cardiologist.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

– J. Robert Oppenheimer

I suppose it is useless to indulge in a discussion of my lack of faith in modern medicine. Most of the points I would make, anecdotal or not, are already listed above. But I do find it relevant to talk about the elephant in the article: death.

Speaking from personal experience for the very, very first time, accepting death is not necessarily a decision of solemn reservation. It can be exhaling, it can be sniffing a flower, it can be peace engulfing a mind and total relaxation spreading throughout every miniscule part of a body.

Coming to grips with death is gripping The Grim Reaper by his collar, his power to terrify resting entirely in his ability to surprise. If we accept the tired, old, staid, arthritic, poorly dispositioned Reaper as but another function of life — like a sneeze or expelled gas, he becomes toothless — as worrisome as a belch. The Reaper is left bereft of weapons with which to threaten.

Self-portrait, 5 October 2011

Apparently I am not yet ready to go. Even given the explicit opportunity, I opted back in. Even when everyone I love was as ready to deal with my passing as they could be, I elected to remain. Even while I am now most reticent about my worth on the planet and about deserving to be, I choose to persist.

For now it seems fit to celebrate that I continue breathing, that my heart – reduced in capacity as it is – continues beating, that I still ache to photograph, and that I still long to fashion but a single image more descriptive of the human condition than any before.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

– Leonardo da Vinci

“Yo lo vi.”
Translation: I saw this.

– Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

"The Third of May 1808" (completed 1814) by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

David Levi Strauss

No less than 126 years later, James Nachtwey’s ironically named, three and a half pound tome Deeds of War
was released. It chronicles his work between the years 1981-1989, the bulk of the book composed of 75 gorgeous color plates. While widely hailed as stunning upon publication, those same critics would now admit it was but a warm-up for Nachtwey’s eventual Inferno.

A child at play in 1984 on a relic of the Nicaraguan civil war. © James Nachtwey

After some time, the mild-mannered conflict photographer unexpectedly found himself under critical fire. “Too pretty” some said. “A glorification of violence” said others. Such reactions likely grew from the fact that we’d become accustomed to seeing well-composed, serious-minded photographic works in black & white.

Muhammad Ali by Gordon Parks © 1966

There is indeed truth in that belief, but it was arguably too tightly gripped. In 1966 Larry Burrows, on assignment for LIFE magazine, shot “Reaching Out,” most often referred to as “South of the DMZ, South Vietnam.” It depicts an American Marine Gunnery Sergeant, in the process of being evacuated from the arena after his third injury, struggling to rush to the aid of his already dead commanding officer. It is still an under-recognized masterwork bursting with the same intensity and tragedy and beauty da Vinci or Michelangelo might have gifted us had photography been discovered just a bit earlier.

Reaching Out, © 1966 by Larry Burrows

Likewise, Alex Webb has for decades now produced documentary photographs whose tales are illuminated by the inclusion of an ample palette. An obvious student of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s dizzyingly complex approach to composition, Webb, particularly in his renderings of Haiti, consistently demonstrates what his virtual mentor might have done had he an eye for color.

Street scene in Haiti, © 1986 by Alex Webb

Webb’s works, recently as visually stinging as LaChapelle’s reliably Gaudí-esque extravagances, once explored the staid rules of color theory as they might submit to a determined, impassioned artist. An under-appreciated master in his own right, Webb managed to thoroughly assume Henri’s convoluted monochromatic esthetic while imparting touches of color necessary to convey a sense of exotic place. He borrowed shamelessly from his assumed teacher ultimately perfecting a visual vocabulary so deft that it may one day be seen as an advancement over Cartier-Bresson’s best efforts. Despite Webb’s recent stroll into the cartoonish, Cartier-Bresson’s fractured yet conjoined assemblages may have found their most serene completion in Webb’s earlier pieces.

Shortly thereafter, it became a rarity for Nachtwey to release a photographic work in anything other than black & white. His focus became yet more myopic. His compositions became more stringently classical. The standards by which he judged his works became increasingly tyrannical even as he honed his facility for interpersonal communication.

Retiring to a fault, Nachtwey taught himself once again. He very deliberately drove himself to develop the devices necessary, as Robert Capa would have described, for getting “close enough.” Quite plainly, it was subsequent to Deeds of War that Nachtwey’s images began to put on display the very pores of the faces he recorded. His photographs were no longer slightly removed observations of the insane scenes of peoples in conflict. He became a kind of portraitist, burning into film the intimate agony of those suffering through the upheavals of their homelands.

Still, as today, he endured the barbs of critics who no longer vilified him for his use of color but instead condemned his works as a whole for their undeniably beautiful portrayals of horror. Nachtwey, in impoverished bodies, human heads stripped of all flesh, and entire communities reduced to little more than anarchy, uncannily and perhaps bizarrely found a means by which to elevate them all to operatic tragedy. While every other conflict photographer on the planet submitted haphazardly exposed images deep in grit and the blur of the fog of war, Nachtwey consistently came back with wonderfully lit compositions rivaling Renaissance painting at its height. It was and is, simply, for such audacity that he has been punished.

Hutu men and children fleeing the Rwandan civil war, © James Nachtwey

This is not to say Nachtwey has gone uncelebrated. Rather, he is likely the single most decorated photojournalist in modern history. Hardly a year has gone by since the early 80s in which Nachtwey was not the guest of honor at an awards ceremony. His coterie of fans has grown steadily into a minor cult and finding fault in Nachtwey’s images is today as verboten as nitpicking Mother Teresa’s humanitarianism.

As a result of so much adulation, Nachtwey’s most ardent aficionados have found themselves hailing the beauty in depictions of humanity at its worst. In discussing the intrinsic eloquence of Nachtwey’s works, they have found themselves primarily praising macabre scenes not for their honesty but for their wonderful, penetrating renderings.

During his self-imposed quest to rise from noted photographer to imminent purveyor of the iconic, Nachtwey borrowed from and sought to emulate masterworks by many including, perhaps most often, W. Eugene Smith. In his 1993 portrait of a grieving Bosnian family and less obviously in his later images of bereaved Serbians and Palestinians, Nachtwey paid homage to Smith’s 1950 work Spanish Women in Mourning.

Spanish Women in Mourning, © 1950 by W. Eugene Smith

Mourning a soldier killed in the civil war, Bosnia, © 1993 by James Nachtwey

Serbian funeral for a victim of the Kosovo War, © 1999 by James Nachtwey

Palestinian mother overcome with grief during the Ramallah conflict, © 2000 by James Nachtwey

In Rwanda in 1994 Nachtwey made an image of a tortured Hutu that has become emblematic of his entire oeuvre. When interviewed by National Public Radio’s Elizabeth Farnsworth he had the following to say on the piece:

This is a picture of a man who had just been liberated from a Hutu death camp where mainly members of the Tutsi tribe were being incarcerated, being starved, beaten, abused and systematically killed. This man happened to be a Hutu himself, but because he didn’t support the genocide, he was subjected to the same treatment. On the most basic level, I hope that people when they look at this work will engage themselves with it and not shut down, not turn away from it, but realize that their opinion counts for something, that they become part of a constituency, and people who have the power to make decisions that affect the lives of thousands of people know that there’s a constituency forming out there, and they have to do something about it.

– James Nachtwey, 16 May 2000

This photograph too borrows from Smith. As described by an observer present as Nachtwey fashioned the portrait, the subject was remarkably enthusiastic and “wild-eyed” as he displayed his scars. It is only reasonable to assume the fellow suffered from at least a mild form of mental illness as a result of the tribulations he endured. And it is here, not just in visual similarity but also emotional state, that we find stark likeness with W. Eugene Smith’s A Madwoman in a Haitian Clinic.

A Madwoman in a Haitian Clinic, 1958 © by W. Eugene Smith

Survivor of a Hutu death camp, © 1994 by James Nachtwey

The Miners of Serra Pelada, Brazil, © 1986 by Sebastião Salgado

Right: Hutu refugees of the Rwandan Civil War, © 1994 by James Nachtwey. / Left: Indonesian man overcome during a celebration of Suharto' s resignation, © 1998 by James Nachtwey

Recently, and luckily for we enthusiasts, Nachtwey has seen his way clear to once again document history in color. In 1992 during a trip through South Africa, he spotted young Xhosa tribesmen enduring a rite of male passage into adulthood. Smeared in white clay, the young men awaited a centuries-old circumcision ritual called “ulwaluko.”

Nearly ten years later he photographed “Women Pray in Front of Shrine Built at Site of Iman Hussein’s Murder on the Occasion of the 40th Day of Muharram.” Stark and minimalist, Nachtwey’s image provides a sense of foreboding, wonder, mystery and unexpectedly palpable dread.

“Women Pray in Front of Shrine Built at Site of Iman Hussein’s Murder on the Occasion of the 40th Day of Muharram” © 2003 by James Nachtwey

Indonesia - Women of the An-Nadzir commune begin Islam’s Feast of the Sacrifice, © 2007 by James Nachtwey

This video may take up to two minutes to load.
A commercial may also precede.

Nachtwey holds to his original mission. Very recently he created a moving body of work on the plight of Haitians subsequent to the 12 January 2010 earthquake. But there are signs that the gentleman is relaxing. The quirky, humorous images he fashioned for National Geographic stand as evidence of a softening soul.

A selection of images from Nachtwey's National Geographic editorial "Facing Down the Fanatics," all images © James Nachtwey.

While Nachtwey may have yet to produce his ultimate masterpiece, we can be certain he gifted us unlikely beauty as he wrenched our hearts. He has shown us unvarnished precisely what results from the unrestrained animosity of our species and silently cautioned us of what might occur should we continue to indulge.

At 63 years old and after roughly 30 years of shooting in the most vile conditions imaginable, he’s more than earned a decade or two in a rocking chair on the porch of some distant country home. But somehow I doubt that will ever happen.

We are more likely to one day learn that he, at 83, rushed into some burning, collapsing Bosnian home to photograph the rescue of the family within only to finally be taken down by a malaria-laden mosquito bite he suffered six months prior in some dark corner of Africa.

Those of us who have followed his career cannot help but love him. We can but hope that “our time’s Robert Capa” will not meet the same fate, camera in hand. Then again, perhaps he would be happiest passing on just that way.

“Fear is not what’s important; it’s how you deal with it. It would be like asking a marathon runner if they feel pain. It’s not a matter of whether you feel it – it’s how you manage it.

It could happen to any of us [photojournalists] anytime. And we all know that this is a distinct possibility every time we go out.

Everyday it’s what we face. It comes with the territory. It’s part of the job. You go in knowing that from the beginning. Nobody feels sorry for themselves. It’s just part of it.”

– James Nachtwey, War Photographer, 2001

James Nachtwey assisting the wounded photojournalist Greg Marinovich of the so-called "Bang Bang Club" during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s. Image © Juda Ngwenya

James Nachtwey, as any Baby Boomer will tell you, did not spring like Venus full grown into a singular fixation with fostering love. His expressed motivations are very much grounded in the American Liberal/Revolutionary sentiments of his then young peers in the late 1960s and early 70s.

As Nachtwey grew to maturity, American opposition to the Vietnam War intensified. The seemingly synchronized assassinations of one political leader after yet another religious luminary bred disillusionment and disappointment and discontentment until it all became unintentionally encapsulated and poetically summarized in the single greatest betrayal of the American electorate by a popularly elected President. From the troubled brow and sweaty upper lip of Richard Milhous Nixon – considered today by many presidential scholars as one of our most savvy and intelligent Executives – came the darkest period in America’s entire political history: Watergate.

President Nixon with his edited transcripts of the White House Tapes subpoenaed by the Special Prosecutor, during his speech to the Nation on Watergate. 29 April 1974

By the time Presidential successor Gerald R. Ford provided his predecessor a “full, free, and absolute pardon,” thereby removing any possibility whatsoever that Nixon could ever be prosecuted, the nation was so despondent that a mere murmur by today’s standards was raised in protest. Geriatric, adolescent, or infantile, we’d already become too “hip” to do otherwise. We’d ceased to believe the U.S. government was somehow more moral than any other given regime. We’d put aside the idea that our representatives were any less capable than foreign dignitaries of betraying their countries’ highest principles in the sub rosa pursuit of preserving power and bank balances.

To someone of his generation, Nachtwey’s motivations are easily familiar if still not readily comprehensible. Demonstrations by Boomers against the Vietnam War were almost commonplace in their day. Marches and sit-ins and boycotts happened with increasing regularity. In turn, “paddywagons” with their accompanying tear gas- and baton-armed police officers arrived to put down the rebellions (often violently) and haul the subdued accused off to (usually) temporary holding.

Some, such as Abbie Hoffman and his Youth International Party, chose a frontal assault on established American mores as a countercultural, even humorous escalation of the conflict. Approaches like this had seen prior success in U.S. politics but only when supported behind the scenes with serious dialogue between those already quietly wielding the power and influence to alter the state of the State. While boisterous picket lines, and impassioned civilian speeches, and pop songs such as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” made big splashes, it

Animated shot of defendants Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale (background) for the film Chicago 10 by Brett Morgen.

Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, James Taylor, and above all Joni Mitchell may have stirred the humanitarian souls of millions of Americans, but it was writers and journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, Wayne Karlin and Neil Sheehan and photojournalists like Eddie Adams, Larry Burrows, Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, John Paul Filo, Henri Huet, Don McCullin, Tim Page, Sebastião Salgado, W. Eugene Smith, Dana Stone, and Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut who turned the gazes of Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson’s, Richard Nixon’s, and Gerald Ford’s administrations. Indeed, it was those same chroniclers of modern history who ultimately established our consensus on that period.

The desire to pick up a guitar and sing against “The Man” was nearly universal among Nachtwey’s generation. The compulsion to pick up a camera, fly halfway around the world in a tiny, rickety, four-seater for 18 hours, land in a place of unspeakably suffocating heat and humidity, find oneself bereft of common decencies such as toothpaste and toilet paper, and then put all uncertainty, fear, and physical discomfort aside in order to compassionately, painstakingly photograph not only utterly foreign individuals but entire cultures completely alien by all practical measures was and is still a practice safely said to be nigh on incomprehensible to the vast majority of American civilians – the sort of folks President Johnson or any other U.S. President never would be inclined to grant an audience on the topic of war much less America’s scar – the Vietnam War.

While laymen may apprehend Nachtwey’s wish to wage war on war and fathom his saint-like, peculiarly humble yet spectacular willingness to sacrifice his well-being for the sake of his cause, there is still… a thing. Suppose Nachtwey had differed with Jacob Riis just that extra little bit necessary to convince himself the written word was not only more powerful than the sword but the printed picture as well? What if Nachtwey had sat all three – including prose – aside and instead sought to follow in the footsteps of designer Henry Pelham and artist/engraver Paul Revere (of “The British are coming!” fame) so that he might achieve a more thorough, artistic continuity between the historical accounts laid down before him and those infinite passages that would follow his brief additions?

"The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre," as designed by Henry Pelham, colored by Christian Remick,engraved by Paul Revere, and printed by Benjamin Edes. The event later came to be known as "The Boston Massacre."

Celebrated, researched and dissected as James might be, we have no answers to such obvious questions. The wide strokes, much less the details, of Nachtwey’s youth are today so difficult to isolate that greater success might be realized if Geraldo Rivera took another crack at Al Capone’s Vault.

Regardless of our lack of accounts of wee, little James’ schoolyard fights, nocturnal urinary accidents, and 6th grade romances, there is still enough unregulated information floating about which allows some rather surprising insight into the artist. Perhaps most striking is the fact that the aesthetic history and visual origins of Nachtwey’s chosen manner of expression have gone almost completely unrecognized despite their ready availability in shards across the internet.

In our good fortune, Nachtwey elected to practice a form of photojournalism once dubbed “Concerned Photography.” Its thumbprint is its single, distinct, straight, narrow, even stony aim to raise public awareness of an underprivileged group’s plight. The caveat, of course, is the fact that the cause trumpeted is one judged worthy by the photographer. Neither Jacob Riis nor James have been exceptions in assuming they possessed the intrinsic authority to render such verdicts.

According to TIME magazine writer Richard Lacayo, Jacob Riis “virtually invented what much later came to be called ‘concerned photography,’ a combination of finger pointing, hand wringing and fist shaking now accepted as one of the quintessential purposes of photojournalism.”

A "Five Cents Lodging" on Bayard Street in New York, as photographed by Jacob Riis or one of his three uncredited assistants. c. 1889

Jacob, a Dane, had relocated to the United States in the middle to late 19th Century as the country entered the so-called Panic of 1873. Just as today and during the Great Depression, markets fluctuated wildly and unemployment was rampant in Europe and the U.S. In short order Jacob found himself disabused of the vision of a United States of America webbed with streets paved in gold. For three years he relied on whatever shelter he could find or fabricate and dug his dinners from dumpsters out back of The Delmonico restaurant among others; an occupation he referred to as “dining at the Delmonico.”

“[I joined] the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or door-way.”

– Jacob Riis

Given their striking experiential similarities, it’s hard to accept that there was never a moment when an aged Riis stumbled upon some brilliant trinket from a youthful Nachtwey’s hand and found himself immediately speechless. Like the fearsome, ferocious New York art critic René Ricard rendered a giggling, gushing groupie in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s mere presence or Antonio Salieri left dumbstruck over a trifling nevertheless brilliant little ditty spun out of Mozart’s playful genius, Jacob Riis should have been able to recount at least a single tale of astonishment after once sucker-punched with his first glimpse of a Nachtwey.

James was doing everything Jacob strived for, only so very much better. Riis would have seen a brand of photojournalism not merely transcending his own in every aesthetic measure, but also a degree of raw emotion and technical proficiency utterly unattainable for the Dane. Both of them writers, Riis would have had to as well recognized that Nachtwey didn’t just report. He… expressed stories with such thoughtfulness and eloquence supported by a sort of philosophy so touching yet unyielding that Riis’ efforts appeared by comparison pedestrian at best and struggling at worst.

Sudan, 1993 – Famine victim in a feeding center © James Nachtwey

Then again, perhaps Riis, in his role as Anti-Clapton, never would have touted the coming of Hendricks for concern over his own career. In retrospect none of it really matters. Jacob Riis passed away more than three decades before James Nachtwey was born.

November 26, 1834 front page of Charles Anderson Dana's "The Sun." Jacob Riis first began publishing his photographs through this New York tabloid.

The newspapers of the era were given to hyperbole, highly opinionated coverage, and most of all exclamation points, but Jacob found that even with this extreme license his articles lacked the desperation he so much wished to portray. So he took up photography.

Riis was no artist. As cynical and hard-bitten as the timeless, stereotypical photojournalist, he had nary an observable concern for composition, form, or any other thing that might be construed as aesthetic. Jacob had but three goals: to portray as dramatically as possible the slums of New York, to shock New York’s middle class into action, and to simply get the images recorded to film in a way at least approximating proper exposure.

Baxter Street Court, in the Five Points slums of New York in 1895, as photographed by Jacob Riis or one of his three uncredited assistants.

The last of those criteria could not have been met without the late 1880s invention of “open flash” photography. The technique involves placing magnesium powder mixed with an oxidizing agent (known today as an accelerant… such as kerosene, butane, and gasoline) on a handheld platform (Riis used a frying pan) in which the chemical combination is then struck so as to produce a minor explosion; thereby lighting the area to be photographed.

Or perhaps not so minor. On two occasions Riis set himself and his subjects ablaze.

Jacob Riis c. 1906.

He succeeded. Riis triumphed not only in inspiring his contemporaries to combat the living conditions at Five Points, his drive and dedication and unique vision as well redirected the focus of photojournalism as an entire discipline.

Palestinian youth, at the turn of this century, found themselves in naked combat against the Israel Defense Forces. In a historically bizarre reversal of David versus Goliath, Israel’s foes faced overwhelming military might with nothing more than courage, outrage, and weapons scarcely altered since the biblical era.

Palestinian youth fighting the Israeli Army with slingshots in 2000.

For a Western war photographer, the safest place would have of course been behind the protection of Israeli tanks. Nachtwey chose to stand side by side with the untrained, ill-equipped, understandably frightened and impulsive Palestinians. And he suffered for it.

Palestinians fighting the Israeli army in 2000.

If there is a constant other than Nachtwey’s ability to return from a project with shocking, heart-wrenching, stomach-turning, impossibly beautiful images, it is the reliability that he will have in the process of capturing those images played a game or two of chess with Death.

Nachtwey’s conspicuously maintained coif was once quite literally parted by a bullet. A non-smoker, he is far more likely than any tobacco devotee to face demise from lung cancer due to his innumerable enthusiastic dives into environments thoroughly poisoned with teargas, toxic fumes, and sulfur clouds.

When Nachtwey’s harrowing second book, Inferno, was published in 1999, all commentary on his work took on a sense of disturbed wonderment. It became cliché for reviewers to remark on their inability to view the collection in a single sitting due, in final analysis, to their delicate sensibilities. As reliably as the next drumbeat in a John Philip Sousa march, they then followed up with an increasingly stale progression of rhetorical questions on how Nachtwey could possibly endure witnessing the scenes he had recorded without losing grasp of his sanity.

Nachtwey’s most ardent supporters answered the proliferating public queries while adhering to what turned out to be a regrettable strategy. More often than not, Nachtwey’s closest friends and associates painted him an otherworldly figure so completely dedicated to his cause that he could not allow himself the luxury of becoming too emotionally involved with individual incidents of tragedy. His quest and its resulting fruit, they urged us to believe, was simply too valuable to be evaluated by standards similar to those by which one might judge… physicians for example.

It’s fair to say Nachtwey has since spent a substantial portion of his time tweaking the impression of dispassion and callousness that resulted. His deepest, most genuine motivations have once again become sometimes confusing and at others baffling, but there are few today who would call into question his commitment or doubt his stated reasons for his behavior.

Rwandan Genocide, 1994 © by James Nachtwey

In the mid 80s Nachtwey found himself under new pressures. It was no longer enough that he regularly risked his life to return to the Western world images of entire cultures on the brink. Indeed many of us had ceased to care. Well-meaning organizations such as the now renamed Christian Children’s Fund had so inundated Western nations with photos and footage of destitute children in advanced stages of starvation, or lying prone as insects probed every part of their faces, or drinking from and bathing in fetid streams that desensitization was an inevitability among First World nations. The Christian Children’s Fund’s promotionals were eventually relegated to the wee hours of television alongside sex chat line commercials and testimonials for questionable weight loss drugs.

The situation was no different in the magazine industry. Nachtwey’s bread and butter – creating stunning photographs of the cruelties of conflict for national publications – began to burn away. Advertisers balked at having their glamorous, very expensively produced full-page ads situated opposite depictions of mortal combat, famine and anarchy. “Whose conscience,” the argument went, “would allow them to purchase a $3000 Omega while simultaneously contemplating how 20 Tutsis must have felt as they were hacked to bits alive?”

Starvation Victim During the Rwandan Genocide © James Nachtwey

Governments too were becoming fond of restricting the freedom of the press. Prior to its fall, the Soviet Union had always exercised strict control over what might and what might not be published. In surprisingly glacial fashion, monarchies and dictatorships worldwide as well as a groundswell of Arab nations eventually adopted the same stance while citing “national security” as the paramount concern.

Soon it was commonplace for journalists and photojournalists to be detained or arrested under suspicion of espionage. And what counter could seriously be presented? American, and British, and French journalists among many others were undeniably poking about Afghanistan and Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina in hopes of exposing government sponsored human rights abuses to the world. The leaders of the numerous non-Western nations in question were not only well within their rights to deal with foreign journalists as possible spies, they were also highly justified due to the simple fact that these same journalists indeed were focused on undermining undemocratic regimes – a function indistinguishable from the aims of a bonafied covert operative.

TIME magazine cover 12 February 2001. Image © James Nachtwey

Today, while still a gentleman of impeccable manners and fastidious to a fault, James Nachtwey is a tattered and battered 63-year-old. His body and mind have suffered violences which would have long ago killed most of us. He’s spent more time recuperating than many of us have working. And yet he persists.

On Wednesday, 10 December 2003 at the age of 55 he received his most recent life-threatening injury to date. Accompanied by TIME senior correspondent Michael Weisskopf, Nachtwey went out on patrol in Baghdad with the Army’s 1st Armored Division. In the course of the patrol an insurgent tossed a triggered hand grenade into the Humvee occupied by two soldiers, Weisskopf, and Nachtwey.

Reacting heroically, Weisskopf grabbed the grenade to throw it out of the vehicle. The ordinance exploded, taking Weisskopf’s right hand along, before he fully cleared the Humvee.

Nachtwey, seriously injured and in excruciating pain, managed to make a few photographs of medic Billie Grimes tending Weisskopf before himself falling unconscious. Just 15 days later he’d forced himself out of bed and into a plane in order to cover the catastrophic tsunami that hit Southeast Asia killing in excess of an estimated 230,000 people.

Nachtwey has remained unmarried by seemingly semi-conscious decision. He has remained childless, according to reports, to avoid the vicious dichotomy of getting to know and photograph tragically impoverished children only to eventually return home to attend the wishes of his own, over-privileged offspring.

As one contemplates the sheer depth of James Nachtwey’s commitment, another question begs: Why?

Why follow such a deprivation-laden course? Why risk one’s luckily First World life to document a vast array almost certainly en route to early death? Why record their mortal, frequently absurd disagreements so emotionally charged that neither party could imagine a positive future sans the extermination of their ideological rivals?

Why, ultimately, photograph war?

Next:

Depth of Field VIII: Nachtwey³

“In many ways, mankind is very advanced. But in other ways, we’re still at a very early stage of evolution where it’s necessary to use violence as a tool. I don’t know when we’ll evolve out of that – if ever.”

– James Nachtwey in Esquire magazine, 1 October 2005

Journalism professors like to tell their students that while they may be choosing a career of limited recognition and more limited paychecks, a vocation often popularly depicted as populated with human vultures, and an intrinsic lifestyle almost certainly haunted with fleeting affection and transience, they will as well earn bragging rights to an experience exclusive to those who seek the truth for their living. Journalists – whether writers or photographers or cameramen – all enjoy a “front seat to history.”

Nachtwey first moved to New York in pursuit of work as a freelance magazine photographer in 1980. He has said that he refrained from the relocation until he considered himself “ready” as a photographer to take on the subjects he was most eager to record.

Preparing himself as a young man, whether consciously or not, involved an eclectic journey both physical and mental. He entered Dartmouth College in 1966 choosing to study an unlikely pairing of subjects: Art History and Political Science. Forty-one years later he described his evolution.

“I was a student in the sixties; a time of social upheaval and questioning, and on a personal level, an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging, the civil rights movement was underway, and pictures had a powerful influence on me. Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another. I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans. Their images fueled resistance to the war and to racism. They not only recorded history, they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness, and as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible but inevitable.

“I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus both the benefits and the costs of political policies. It can give credit to sound decision making, adding momentum to success. In the face of poor political judgment or political inaction, it becomes a kind of intervention, assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior. It puts a human face on issues which from afar can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one.

“And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice, and as a reaction that stimulates public opinion and gives impetus to public debate thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda – much as they would like to. Coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly. The Press is certainly a business and in order to survive it must be a successful business, but the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibility.

“Society’s problems can’t be solved until they’re identified. On a higher plane the Press is a service industry and the service it provides is awareness. Every story does not have to sell something. There’s also a time to give. That was a tradition I wanted to follow. Seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved, and that visual journalism could actually become a factor in conflict resolution, I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer. But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph.”

– James Nachtwey at the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference on 8 March 2007

Nachtwey as photographed by celebrated photojournalist David Turnley during the post-election violence in South Africa in 1994.

Over roughly five and a half years subsequent to graduation, Nachtwey taught himself photography while simultaneously bouncing from a stint on a United States Merchant Marine vessel to an apprenticeship as a news film editor and finally to touring the contiguous U.S. as a trucker. By 1976 he had managed to secure a position as a newspaper photographer for the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico – far flung from his native Massachusetts. It was only after an additional four years working professionally that he felt adequately prepared to court the major publications based out of New York.

Reuters cameraman Desmond Wright editing news footage just as Nachtwey did in his early career. Wright here discusses the philosophical, practical, and commercial quandaries inextricable from the act of recording suffering.

Around the same time Nachtwey was seeing his first success in Albuquerque, an Irish one-time coach builder named Robert Gerard Sands was being released after three years of incarceration in HM (Her Majesty’s) Prison Maze for the possession of four firearms. Sands, a Catholic, had endured intimidation, manipulation, and multiple forced relocations at the hands of Protestant Ulster Loyalists for the entirety of his life. In perhaps understandable, inevitable protest, he joined the IRA in 1972. Mere months later, he found himself behind the walls of “The Maze.”

Almost immediately after his release in Spring 1976, Bobby Sands renewed his IRA involvement only to be shortly thereafter officially accused, if not convicted, of terrorist activities. In September of 1977 his luck ran out. He was successfully prosecuted as party to a 1976 live-fire exchange between the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Her Majesty’s Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sands was sentenced to 14 years inside the “H-Block” of The Maze. Hours following his internment, he learned that he would also be subject to what was then called a “No. 1” starvation diet every third day due to allegations of his participation in a scuffle while incarcerated.

As further indignity, Bobby Sands, along with every other inmate implicated in the dispute between Britain and Northern Ireland, was denied his request to wear his own clothing rather than prison fatigues as allowed by General Provisions Part II, Article 6 of the Geneva Conventions. Prime Minister Thatcher along with the British Parliament denied that IRA members were prosecuting a war but were instead terrorists and therefore not protected under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The prisoners were provided fresh civilian clothing rather than their own in an international public relations effort tinged with black humor.

Sands and his fellows responded with the Blanket Protest – an outright refusal to wear the clothing provided by the British. Rather than perpetuate the derision being visited upon them by donning what was almost certainly merely a shuffle of garments between owners, the IRA paramilitaries chose to cover themselves in towels and blankets.

This is an excerpt from the film “Hunger” by Director Steve McQueen. Please, click the Back Button on your browser to return to this article once you have viewed the above video in it’s automatically generated full screen mode.

In the last days of October 1980, Maze prisoners and IRA members Brendan Hughes, Tommy McKearney, Raymond McCartney, Tom McFeeley, Sean McKenna, Leo Green, and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) member John Nixon went on hunger strike to protest the denial of their status as political prisoners. Their self-sacrificing strategy was heavily supported. Between September 1976 and 1981 more than 1000 male H-Block inmates chose to participate in the Blanket Protest. They were initially joined by Mairéad Farrell and two other women of the Armagh Women’s Prison. Soon after, 27 more female inmates elected to maintain modesty with nothing else than towels, blankets, and self-respect.

Prime Minister Thatcher and the rest of the British government initially buckled under the weight of a Sean McKenna knocking semiconsciously on heaven’s door. In response to a thirty-two-page conciliation from London very publicly dispatched to Belfast, Brendan Hughes moved to save McKenna’s life after 53 days of mutual starvation.

A month later it was clear Margaret Thatcher had pulled a fast one. Via clever legal language, the British government had managed to maneuver itself into a position of technically satisfying the demands of the H-Block while at the same time establishing its utter disrespect for not only the hunger strikers but all those Irish who rejected British dominion as well.

Once it had become apparent just what the British had done, Bobby Sands led a new hunger strike beginning on 1 March 1981. By a twist of fate, Member of Parliament Frank McGuire for the Fermanagh and South Tyrone region of Northern Ireland expired quite unexpectedly four days later. In feverishly quick negotiations with several of the potential contenders for the open seat, the IRA managed to ensure a single candidate was put forth against the Ulster Unionist Harry West.

“If Frank Maguire hadn’t died, if he had died a few months earlier or a few months later, history would be different, I’m convinced of that.”

– Owen Carron, Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone from 1981 to 1983, speaking in 1998 about The Troubles

Officially the nominee of the freshly minted Anti H-Block political party, Bobby Sands defeated Harry West by the vanishingly slim margin of 1,447 votes to become the first Member of Parliament who also happened to be both a prisoner and a native son of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. His narrow election hinged largely on campaign-inspired Irish activism and a national desire to rescue Sands from death by starvation. Most of Sands’ countrymen considered it impossible that Prime Minister Thatcher would allow a fellow Member of Parliament to pass away under such easily preventable circumstances.

Twenty-six days after what has been called “one of the most significant elections in the history of Ireland,” Bobby Sands died at the age of 27 due to a total of 66 days of “self-imposed starvation” according to the original pathologist’s report.

“We thought we could save him. We thought if we could get Bobby elected, the British couldn’t just let him die.”

– Owen Carron, Bobby Sands’ Election Agent during his 1981 campaign, reflecting on The Troubles 17 years later

Actor Michael Fassbender portraying Bobby Sands’ last moments in the Steve McQueen Film “Hunger.”

After traveling to New York to seek his fortune and ultimately signing with Black Star, Nachtwey received his first overseas assignment. Relatively fresh faced with a dramatic, vaguely punk, sweep of hair shading his forehead, the wiry photographer ventured into Belfast to record the chaos surrounding the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikes.

As all hell rained down around him, Nachtwey captured an image resplendent in his manner of fashioning beauty from horror. It does not depict Bobby Sands. In its background are no posters or murals or graffiti in support of the IRA or Sinn Féin. Nowhere appears Margaret Thatcher’s face, Harry West’s countenance, or even an obscured representation of Frank McGuire. Instead the photograph is concerned entirely with the malice humans inflict on their fellows and the efforts we embark upon to quell those fires.

In comparison to Nachtwey’s later works, this one is tame. But it is as well an oracle of what would come from the reluctant witness.

A truck is hijacked by Catholic demonstrators in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the hunger strike of Bobby Sands. Photograph by James Nachtwey.

“The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I’m benefiting from someone else’s tragedy. This idea haunts me. It’s something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person’s predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself.”

– James Nachtwey, 1991

Next Month:

Depth of Field VII: Nachtwey²