The Perils of Photojournalism

On October 23, New York Times photographer Joao Silva stepped on a landmine while embedded with U.S. soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  Earlier this week, photographer Greg Marinovich set up a fund to support Silva, who lost both of his legs in the explosion. Both of them are members of the Bang-Bang Club; perhaps not incidentally, news came on Wednesday that Tribeca Film has acquired the rights to the movie, Bang Bang Club, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Silva’s injuries are a reminder that the photographs which illustrate the Grey Lady and countless other newspapers and magazines come at a great price to both photographer and subject.  As photographer Moises Saman told the Columbia Journalism Review, “It’s part of war.”  If the members of the Bang-Bang Club are at all representative of photographers in conflict zones, then it’s a relatively common part of war, too.

Two members of the club are already dead: Ken Oosterbroek died in South Africa and Kevin Carter committed suicide, in part, because of the criticisms of a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph he took in the Sudan. Surviving members Silva and Marinovich have now both sustained serious injuries while snapping what would become our fractured, mental, slideshow—what the mind sees when it summon a visual accompaniment for “war.”  

It’s a photojournalistic narrative that's perhaps all too familiar: young, intrepid believers searching for truth through a lens—hoping not just to capture, but to change as well.  In 2009, Silva told the New York Times’s Lens Blog that “If you’ve changed one single person’s mind, I think you’ve accomplished something.”  If there seems something romantically earnest about the Bang-Bang Club, it’s because the names Silva, Carter, Oosterbroek and Marinovich are often mentioned in the same breath as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour.  The latter three were pioneers of the kind of wartime journalism which embedded photographers in the center of the chaos, using then new rapid-fire camera technology to capture the minutiae of conflict - pioneers of the very type of photojournalism the Bang-Bang Club utilized to often disturbing ends. 

Capa, Taro and Seymour are the subject of “Mexican Suitcase,” an exhibition at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan.  The three met in Paris during the 1930s, each of them from somewhere else: Capa started life in Hungary as Endre Friedmann; Taro as Gerta Pohorylle in Germany; Seymour as Dawid Szymin in Poland.  Political leftists, they traveled to Spain and documented the civil war. No one had ever seen the kind of war photography they were producing, active rather than the passive photographs of, say, Matthew Brady some seventy years prior. Their images were eagerly consumed by readers of European magazines, many of which are included in the ICP’s exhibition.  Capa became a star and, with Henri Cartier-Bresson, eventually founded Magnum Photos, the cooperative which still represents many photojournalists (including Saman).  

While the story of Capa, Taro and Seymour is, like the Bang-Bang Club, heroic in its own way, it’s also tragic.  In July of 1937, Taro was killed near Madrid.  Capa travelled to China and then back to Spain to witness the Republican defeat.  In 1939, he and Seymour travelled separately to photograph refugees pouring into France.  That’s when Capa and Seymour, both Jews with left-wing histories, saw the writing on the wall. They knew they had to leave Europe.  Seymour left for the U.S. before the outbreak of the war. Capa waited until the last minute.  He packed three boxes of film, rolled and cut, and gave them to a friend, asking him to send them to New York, where Capa was headed. 

They were never sent. The boxes ended up in Mexico with the Mexican ambassador to the Vichy government, and in 2007 the boxes, now appropriately called “The Mexican Suitcase”, eventually ended up at the International Center of Photography, which was founded by Capa’s brother, Cornell.  The Suitcase had over 4,500 negatives, many of them taken by Taro. In many regards they epitomize the work of each of the photographers. Taro and Seymour are somber and Capa is, well, Capa: fearless and epic.  But the Mexican Suitcase is also a reminder of the perils of photojournalism, when Capa forwarded it. Taro was already dead, killed in a jeep accident at the Battle of Brunete.  Capa was killed by a landmine in Indochina in 1954. Seymour would be severely wounded by a sniper in Egypt two years later. 

In 2009, Silva told the Lens Blog, “The camera is not a fortress.” The old cliché comes to mind: war is hell, but apparently so is photojournalism.  Maybe that’s why war and photography share so much linguistically: to shoot, rapid-fire, capture.  Silva’s injuries, the fate of the Bang-Bang club, and the ICP’s exhibition are certain reminders of that.