This is War: A Decade of Conflict: Photographs

As Susan Sontag once said, "There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture." Yet there is a poetic sense of justice in the increasing number of women who choose to cast a woman''s shadow as witness to war through this predatory act. Conflict photographers are visual historians, bearing witness to stories that must be told. The images they produce seize our attention and, moved by what we see, troubling questions come to mind. What has become of these victims of war whose plight has been so memorably captured on camera? How did human behavior turn so dark? Shooting War builds on this narrative by asking a different set of questions that to date has received little, if any, attention. What of the person taking the photograph? What might they have experienced? This book is a very personal visual answer to those questions. Having evolved out of Corinne Dufka''s work as a war photographer from 1988 to 1999 during which time she covered some of the bloodiest conflicts of the latter 20th century, mostly for the "wires," as the leading news agencies are known. The book is comprised of 300 photographs in nine chapters, each chapter being dedicated to a particular country and its arc of upheaval and pain. The imagery is not pretty, nor could it be, for it largely depicts the communal nightmare spawned by political leaders and warlords who ignited conflict using thinly veiled promises of doing good for their people. What they delivered, instead, was misery for millions. What is amazing about the work and what in the end is the success of the book is that the reader comes to realize the incredible bravery and access of the author. Yes, the photographs are devastating in the main; suffering worldwide and this cannot be ignored. But this photographer seems to have become invisible to her subjects. Pictured here are events that are inconceivable to understand how they could have been reported if the reader steps behind the camera the author is using to record the horrors of war. And the horrors seem to be universal, no matter where in the world they take place. Corinne''s job at the start was to produce a near-daily stream of photographs charting revolutions and coups, separatist movements and mass atrocities. The images were largely intended for a Western audience and for use in printed newspapers. It was a time before mobile phones, citizen journalism, and ubiquitous internet connectivity. The conflicts were unpredictable, chaotic and dangerous. Local photojournalists were often subject to the same patterns of violence and collective punishment as the rest of the population, making it extremely perilous for them to work. As outsiders, foreign journalists usually enjoyed a modicum of protection. People whose lives were being torn apart by violence wanted their stories to be told and, seeing us as a channel to communicate their desperation, opened up their homes and hearts to the small tribe of journalists covering these conflicts. By the early 1990''s, the Cold War and its more ideologically-driven proxy wars, including those in Central America, were winding down, and the author was posted to the former Yugoslavia and later Africa. Countries had started to go to war with themselves. Unscrupulous leaders, many inspired by a toxic mix of ego, profit, and ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas, waged war on civilians and turned villages into killing fields. To be a war photographer is to have an intimate relationship with the dead and dying. We navigate disparate worlds: both empathizing with those reeling from profound loss and interacting with those who blight and take human life, all while getting a job done. Inherent in it all, is the psychic damage done to any witness to brutality. What the eye sees, the brain records. There is no erase button. For the war photographer, the job twists things even further. Dufka explains how her life as a war photographer was punctuated by contradictory moments. The images in this book were taken at a frenzied pace: airport, war, photograph, airport, war, repeat. It was a dizzying time, when my colleagues and I lumbered across chaotic and militarized borders lugging portable darkrooms, small generators, petrol, water, and satellite phones the size of suitcases, often not knowing where we''d spend the night; not caring what peril was on the other side. In 1999, she put my cameras into storage and started a new career, documenting war crimes in West Africa for a human rights organization via witness testimony To be the last person on earth a dying woman or condemned man sees brings with it terrible moral uncertainty, but also, more importantly, clarity and a certain responsibility. War photographers are historians, artists, trespassers, and emotional bandits with complicated and contradictory motives, some virtuous, some not. But whether conscious or not, their images, including those which capture profound violence and lacerating grief, bear witness to our shared humanity, our universality. Their work seeks to extract the very essence of conflict, distilling it for deeper reflection by both the heart and intellect. These images beseech us to work harder to honor those who have perished and protect the rest of us from humanity''s worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.

• | Author: Corinne Dufka
• | Publisher: G Editions Llc
• | Publication Date: Sep 26, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 256 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0986250031
• | ISBN-13: 9780986250033