Some images will always have the power to make us confront horror.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/opinion/international-world/ukraine-war-bucha-photographs.html
This image of a man with both eyes open is one of the most compelling and disquieting photos to come out of Bucha. It’s an intimate and puzzling image of death, and I’ve never seen anything like it. What did this man see at the moment of his death? Whatever it was, his resolve remained.
“War is 95 percent boredom and 5 percent sheer terror, from a journalist’s point of view,” says David Hume Kennerly, who won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his feature photography of the Vietnam War. CJR sat down with Kennerly and three other esteemed photojournalists from that conflict, Art Greenspon, Robert Hodierne, and David Burnett, to ask what lessons we can take from Vietnam to cover today’s invisible killer and the absence of public suffering.
As a photographer, and one who truly loves other people’s pictures, I try not to be critical, but when I see so many photographs in one place, my mind immediately goes into contest judging mode. I can’t help but sort the vast display of work into winners and losers categories. And that’s how most people look at art, whether they admit it or not, especially if they want to buy something.
This book synthesizes 50 years of experience as a globe-trotting shooter into my most basic shooting essentials. It can’t teach you how to see, but I’m pretty sure it will show you where to look
Someone once asked David Hume Kennerly if he ever held back when he was President Gerald R. Ford’s White House photographer. Though it was sometimes difficult — as when the Fords cried after his 1976 election loss — Mr. Kennerly said he did not. “I think it comes from my background,” he said. “It comes from journalism.”
I felt really compelled to try to answer a few questions on the David Hume Kennerly piece (controversy?) today.
