We used to witness war in the rearview mirror. But journalists often now deliver what they see via Twitter, before consulting with headquarters, and it has made for more visceral reporting.
My social media feed has taken a bloody turn in the last few weeks and I’m hardly alone. Along with the usual Twitter wisecracking and comments on incremental news, I have seen bodies scattered across fields and hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza. I have read posts from reporters who felt threatened, horrified and revolted.
Italian photographer Alessio Romenzi harbors no illusions that his images of dead civilians—many of them children—caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip will have an impact on the conflict. But he can’t stay away from the story.
Journalists have become targets in that many places for that long now that their vulnerability, and ultimately their fungibility, has ceased to even be noteworthy.
As the conflict in Ukraine continues, another battle rages far from the front lines—a battle between Russian news sites and a group of Kiev-based journalists who say the sites are misusing, even fabricating, news photographs filed from Ukraine.
If you’re looking for bang-bang, this might not be your book. There are photographs of soldiers who later ended up KIA, and of Marines swimming in an Afghan canal while a member of the outfit next door is shredded by an IED. War, especially like those in Afghanistan and Iraq following the short initial “shock and awe” phase, is fleeting and random. It’s like relentlessly spinning a carnival wheel, and waiting for your number to turn up…and praying that it never does.
Unlike the Western photographers, the North Vietnamese photographers were combatants, ordered to stay on the battlefront until victory or death. They developed their film at night in streams using soup bowls, their darkroom a cardboard box. Luong Nghia Dung, the North Vietnamese Robert Capa; Pham Van Khuong, Vo Vanh Quy – their black-and-white war is so much like our war.
Pictures like these clearly amount to extremist propaganda, so should they have been published? For AFP, the answer is yes — but not without first taking careful precautions to ensure they were not faked. We also avoided publishing those photos depicting gratuitous violence for its own sake.
Since he was a child, Peter van Agtmael has been interested in going to war, though he admits he wasn’t sure exactly what he would be doing once he got…
Since he was a child, Peter van Agtmael has been interested in going to war, though he admits he wasn’t sure exactly what he would be doing once he got there.
As rebel forces capture Iraqi cities, veteran photojournalists look at the lessons learned and the obstacles that lie ahead for independent coverage in the region.
The growing instability in Iraq was on the minds of members of the NOOR collective, who were in New York last week for an agency meeting. Andrea Bruce, Stanley Greene, Yuri Kozyrev and Kadir Van Lohuizen — all veterans of covering the war — spoke with Michael Kamber, the author of “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories From Iraq,” an oral history of those who covered the conflict. Their conversation has been edited.
Two men quickly came and helped him reach cover, one of whom, Riley later recalled, had a camera around his neck. The photographer was Capa, and somewhere between the moment when Riley reached the surf and when he was being lifted, wounded, out of the water, Capa made the photo that for generations has defined the chaos and the courage witnessed on D-Day
It had taken years, and several attempts each, to get Syrian visas for photographer Yuri Kozyrev and myself. Despite all that waiting, nothing had quite prepared us for what we would encounter in Syria
CLICK to purchase tickets a note from Sebastian Junger I’m writing to let you know that my next film, KORENGAL, is about to come out on May 30th in New York. Tim and I had planned to make a follow-up to Restrepo, but a few weeks after going to the Oscars,
Restrepo was intended to give civilians an idea of what combat feels like; KORENGAL is completely different. It is meant to help soldiers – and civilians – understand the experience of war
Marine Cpl. Christopher G. Scherer, 21, was killed by a sniper on July 21, 2007, in Karmah, Iraq. He was from East Northport, New York. His bedroom was photographed in…
While they grew up on opposite sides of the world, Ashley Gilbertson [Australian] and Peter van Agtmael [American] found themselves trudging through the same Iraqi soil in the mid-2000s. Unlike soldiers in uniform, however, Gilbertson and van Agtmael holstered cameras instead of guns, training lenses instead of barrels on discrete moments of soon-to-be-history
I had strong beliefs. I believed that journalism, however flawed, was one of the key checks against corruption and power-mongering. I found photography when I was 19, and soon there was a feeling of completion that had never been there. It sensitized me. It crystallized a hatred of cruelty, while giving me a reverence that every moment was of potential beauty and consequence.
The trailer for Mike and Carlos Boettcher’s new movie “The Hornet’s Nest” that opens in theaters nationwide today says right up front the film is “Not based on a true story.” Then a second message appears on the screen, “This is the true story.”
Seventy years ago, the great war photographer joined the first slaughterhouse wave of D-day, recording W.W. II’s pivotal battle in 11 historic images of blur and grit. But that is only a fraction compared with what he shot—and lost.
Photojournalist Tyler Hicks spoke at the 2014 National Geographic Photography Seminar in January—an annual celebration of photography held at the society’s headquarters in Washington.
War’s Lingering Requiem in Vietnam
‘Hornet’s Nest’: Memorial Day war movie by father and son journalists opens