The Quality of Mercy

It is, of course, a tragedy in itself that ours is a world in which war photographers are so busy. But given the realities of contemporary life, where war is as endemic in the poorer parts of the globe as it is endemic in its richer precincts, it should come as no surprise that war photographers are in such great demand. The bitter ironies go deeper still. It is at least arguable that the most interesting photographers working today are these anatomists of tragedy. What used to be called photojournalism is back, and with a vengeance. Obviously, there are great photographers working in other registers: Two, Annie Leibovitz, our great cartographer of celebrity, and Lynn Davis, whose landscapes have a 19th century purity and a 21st century kick, come to mind. But when we think of photographers whose insights are literally impossible to imagine in any other art form or method of storytelling can substitute for, the names that come to mind are Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Peress and James Nachtwey.

Of the three, Nachtwey is probably the least known, at least outside the photographic guild itself. In part, this is because his work is the least intellectual. Peress’ photographs are exercises of mind as much as of sensibility. Looking at his pictures, one often has the sense that, if the occasion seemed to call for it, he would put down his camera and write or make a film. In Salgado’s case, the viewer has the impression of watching a Diderot or a Condorcet at work. All of his photographs, however gripping, seem subaltern to his overarching project of completing his great pictorial encyclopedia. Nachtwey is different. This is a photographer who seems to have lost sight of neither the audience for whom his photographs were destined nor his own didactic and moral purposes in taking them.

In the afterword to “Inferno,” his magnificent, searing collection of pictures that are the distillation of the work he has done over the last decade in the most terrible places in the world, from the orphanages of post-Ceausescu Romania to the killing fields of Rwanda, Nachtwey is both modest and categorical. “The primary function of my photographs,” he writes, “has been to appear in mass-circulation magazines to record events as they are happening so that the pictures contribute to people’s awareness and help them form opinions.”

In his introduction, Luc Sante argues persuasively that Nachtwey is not so much a war photographer as an anti-war photographer, which means, as Sante rightly insists, that he is engaged in acts of witness on behalf of victims. It is interesting in this regard that Nachtwey included almost no photographs of the warlords, militia fighters and paramilitaries who are largely responsible for the scenes of horror he depicts. Clearly, it is not that they don’t interest him; to the contrary, their deeds haunt him and their absence from the pages of “Inferno” is almost more resonant than including them would have been. But Nachtwey never loses sight of the underlying purpose of his project, which is, to use an old-fashioned and under-appreciated term, quite simply that of solidarity with people who are suffering, in danger and in need.

His moving and thoughtfully argued afterword seems to confirm this. Doubtless, his editors at magazines like Newsweek have valued his photographs for very different reasons. But even at his most “journalistic,” it is clear that Nachtwey’s overarching goal was rarely that of simply imparting information. To the contrary, every image seems suffused with the essentially political and ethical ambitions of, as Nachtwey puts it, creating “images that evoke compassion” to “appeal to the readers’ best instincts.” These are, in the best sense of the word, incendiary images.

And no one paging through “Inferno” should be under any illusion about the toll that these photographs must have taken on Nachtwey. He writes that when he began documenting the orphanages of Romania in 1990, “every minute I was there, I wanted to flee.” It could hardly have been otherwise. What Peress once said about photographing funerals--that one had the choice of doing it on one’s feet, with the living, or on one’s knees, with the dead--holds true for every morally licit approach to pointing a camera at scenes Nachtwey has traveled to over the last decade. It is not only a question of physical courage, although that is required of war photographers. Moral courage is required as well; and, if demonstration were needed, “Inferno” shows just how morally brave Nachtwey has been.

The book is not just a moral triumph but an aesthetic one. Most photographers, whatever their preferred genre or subject matter, would be proud to have done half the first-rate work contained in the book. The images are models of composition; the layouts form an object lesson in skillful picture editing. At their best, Nachtwey’s war pictures are as memorable as the best work of the great photographers of a previous generation--Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullum and George Rodger. Even when he is photographing subjects so beaten down by suffering that they seem almost catatonic, as he did in a series of images shot in the south Somali city of Baidoa during the famine, or when he is portraying inanimate objects like a pile of machetes used by the murderers during the Rwandan genocide, to look at a Nachtwey photograph is not just to see an image of human suffering but practically to hear the screaming.

The photographs are almost unbearable to look at, and anyone with young children would think long and hard before leaving Nachtwey’s book where it could be paged through idly by young hands. And yet there is nothing even remotely prurient about the photographs; the moralist in Nachtwey, even as he frames his images, is too commanding a presence for that. Indeed, the work in “Inferno” demonstrates that, in the hands of a master at least, it is possible to portray what aid workers and United Nations bureaucrats euphemistically refer to as “man-made emergencies” without falling into either bathos or the pornography of violence. Obviously, carrying out such a feat of artistry and good judgment requires an almost unbelievably sure touch and, even more crucial, tremendous maturity. But these Nachtwey clearly possesses in abundance. When he writes that “the people whose photographs appear in this book are worthy of one’s recognition and the patience that may require,” he seems to be describing his own practice as a photographer as much as he is gently insisting that the reader look at his photographs and properly understand their intent.

Although it would be hard to over-praise Nachtwey’s work or to fail to sympathize with his ambitions for its use, hard questions remain that may seem inappropriate or discomfiting, especially to readers and viewers who share his hopes that the public in the rich world will be aroused to care more about the sufferings of people in the poor world. These questions revolve not just around the issue of whether Nachtwey really has been as successful as he seems to believe in transforming his picture taking into a species of moral activism, but whether this ambition is one to which photojournalism can realistically aspire. To say this is not to quarrel with Nachtwey’s resolve to bear witness; in this, he succeeds brilliantly. Rather, it is to ask whether the level at which photographs touch their viewers, which, as Nachtwey points out, is “more visceral, more elemental, closer to raw experience,” is one that really gives them the information they need to make the political judgment in order to mitigate the horrors Nachtwey’s pictures chronicle.

However understandable, given his experiences, Nachtwey’s stance may be, there is something dangerously simplistic about simply demanding a response to the sufferings of victims without specifying what that response should be. Nachtwey admonishes us that we must not continue to “accept the unacceptable.” He is right. But as humanitarian relief workers have learned to their cost, the kind of human empathy and instinctual solidarity with victims has not only proved to be insufficient, at times it has proved to be counterproductive, even destructive. That is because victims, except when they are children, are not just victims. The Rwandan Hutu refugees, whose appalling suffering in the camps in what was then eastern Zaire Nachtwey portrays in his book, are a case in point. They were victims all right; but many of them were also guilty of genocide. So when the viewer sees Nachtwey’s extraordinary photograph of a French soldier watching as a bulldozer deposits the bodies of some of these refugees who have just died of cholera into a common grave, is he or she being informed or misinformed?

*

I do not claim to know the answer, though I suspect that it is both. But what the example illustrates is that the moral line in the sand that Nachtwey draws with such consummate artistry and that is based on suffering alone is by no means as unassailable as he seems to believe. Nor is the underlying political message of his book, which is, in part at least, a plea for humanitarian intervention, as his approving comments about the NATO war in Kosovo make clear. Inflamed by what is often a superficial understanding of what is going on, calls for humanitarian military intervention (as opposed to intervention on political grounds) can be right, but they can also be deeply dangerous. It is a romantic delusion to suppose that if one can only feel compassion or solidarity, one will necessarily know what to do. Nachtwey is right to see his work as an antidote and a reproof to realpolitik and the cynical self-absorption of this bull market moment in the West. But to feel, however deeply, is not and will never be the same thing as to understand.