More Responses to James Nachtwey
by Charlie Tims
James Nachtwey's XDRTB slideshow continues to make waves. It has nearly been blogged 500 times and has now spawned a new game here in London. Meanwhile we are beavering away in The Emergency Room, trying to make sense of it all (see video above). In the meantime, Brett Rodgers, Director of the Photographer's Gallery, passed us this response to photos.
Despite their claims to the contrary, Natchwey’s images fall neatly into the traditional world of photojournalism which was always considered to have a special relationship to the real. Due to its assumed immediacy to the palpable facts of the world, the world revealed through the lens of the traditional photojournalist - from legendary figures such as W Eugene Smith to Don MCCullin - was always trumpeted as being reliable and authentic. Capa’s legendary advice supports this conclusion ‘ if your pictures are not good enough, you are not close enough’ . There is no doubt that Natchwey fulfills the role of witness by getting us very close to his subject but does his approach really offer us anything very new pictorially on the issues of suffering?
With the emergence of new technologies such as TV video, camera phones , and the white cube as a space to show images of conflict which directly confront traditional notions of photojournalism, has contemporary photojournalism has lost much of its witnessing authority? Yes and no. In the right hands the camera can still raise awareness not just of their ostensible subjects but of the ethics of pictorially representing suffering, death and deprivation. Natchwey’s bold attempt to find a new way of disseminating his images does not get around the fact that it is the images themselves that must finally carry the message – rather than their marketing, promotion and packaging.