“Conflict Zone,” an exhibition of conflict photography opening Friday at the New York City Fire Museum, has gone through several versions. The project was originally conceived in fall 2010 as a fundraiser for Joao Silva, who had just been injured in Afghanistan while on assignment for The New York Times.
In my mind’s eye, there is a perpetually revolving carousel of images that define the Iraq war. Many of them I saw in person. But many I did not.
A pool of red, bloody water reflects passers-by with the precision of a mirror. Crushed plastic bottles float on the unruffled surface. That photograph was taken by Ahmad al-Rubaye, a former carpenter and wedding photographer, at the scene of a bombing.
When the war started, photojournalism did show its power to sway public opinion. But it was in those early years as well — in some of the same images — that we saw photojournalism’s failures.
The photographer Benjamin Lowy was recently awarded the Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for his book “Iraq | Perspectives.” The book documents Lowy’s time covering the war in Iraq and reveals the U.S. soldiers’ experiences as seen through their night-vision scopes and their armored Humvee windows. Recently Lowy sat down with me to talk about both his book and his life as a conflict photographer. Here’s a selection of his photographs and what he had to say.
“In between conflicts, I go and photograph surfing,” he said. “I’ve always been scared by colleagues who are obsessed with war. I did not want to be like that. So I go make photos of something beautiful.”
It is a kind of therapy, though not without danger.
Though there are no hard numbers, the Libyan war appeared to draw a large number of unprepared and inexperienced photographers to the war zone. Anecdotal evidence suggests hundreds of photographers from around the world flocked to the cities of Ajdabiya, Benghazi and Misurata in the spring of 2011. Many of them were under 30 and under fire for the first time. Many paid their own way.
The personal conflict I felt during this time brought me to a point where my relation to breaking news played less an immediate role in my work than trying to restore my connection during a period when so much was unclear and surreal. Memories near and far rushed forward and I felt I needed to step back before the whole thing engulfed me.
Uniquely, the Eritrean revolutionaries fighting for independence from Ethiopia made a decision in the ’Sixties to assign fighters – both male and female – to record the war. They wanted to be in a position to write their own history, and not have their epic struggle distorted by the outside world. They also had to use propaganda to unite the diverse peoples of Eritrea against Ethiopia. The warrior-photographers brief was to be both soldier and reporter, and to decide when to shoot with the camera or with the gun.
The archive chronicles the full tapestry of the Eritrean struggle: the early rebellion; the famine of the ’Eighties that Emperor Haile Selassie exacerbated in an attempt to starve the revolution into submission and the ten long years when the Eritrean guerillas were living in underground bunkers, besieged by the massive Ethiopian army.
He has, as he puts it, taken “terrible liberties” with his life — dashing through rice paddies in Vietnam to escape snipers’ bullets; jumping up to snap a shot during gun battles — to bring home images that are, at times, excruciating to look at but often unforgettable.
On the tenth anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, TIME asks 40 renowned photographers to reflect on their harrowing experiences covering the conflict—and to describe which of their own photographs moved them most.
Photo by James Nachtwey
