10 Images That Shaped The Career Of A Photojournalist Who Founded The Bronx Documentary Center

“If you’re committed, you went all the way.”

Mike Kamber has had many, many lives. The founder and executive director of the Bronx Documentary Center worked as a documentary photographer for over two decades, and his work has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He lived in the Bronx for a period in the 1980s and dreamed of making an educational space that would bring arts and education to the South Bronx. Founded in 2011, the Bronx Documentary Center is a nonprofit organization and mecca for photography lovers.

“Tim was my closest friend,” says Michael Kamber, founder and director of the Bronx Documentary Center. “He bled to death because he was surrounded by photographers who didn’t know how to stop the bleeding.”

Though you were in New York, thousands of miles away from where the two were killed, you immediately publicly criticized these photographers—both with decades of experience—for their own deaths. Your Facebook post reads, “Four guys hit with the same round were too close together.” In fact, they may have been climbing into a truck to retreat, they might have been helping wounded civilians, they might have been running for common shelter.

Four months after Neil Burgess famously called time of death on photojournalism, the debate is still raging. In fact, it’s been around for decades, as photographer Michael Kamber tells Phil Coomes of the BBC. “I remember arriving in New York in 1985 only to find that I’d arrived too late: photojournalism was dead. This was common knowledge – everybody said so.”