Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Have you ever had any resistance from editors who say, "This photograph is too terrible to publish"?
None of the editors I've worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They've never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events. But it is an issue worth considering: What can people take? How much can they bear? And I think it's important to give people credit for being able to cope with the truth, cope with reality, deal with it and have some kind of genuine, worthwhile response to it.
I believe it's a disservice to a readership to condescend, be patronizing and feel that the whole world can't really take knowing what's going on. I think people can. I think they want to know. And to go into a situation that is deeply tragic, that's incredibly painful, and publish an image that is generic and easy to look at sends the wrong signal. It becomes a mere illustration.
If there is something occurring that is so bad that it could be considered a crime against humanity, it has to be transmitted with anguish, with pain, and create an impact in people -- upset them, shake them up, wake them out of their everyday routine. People should be aware that something highly unacceptable is taking place, and think about it and talk about it with each other.
You see yourself primarily as a photojournalist, rather than as an artist. You don't necessarily want people to think, Oh that's a beautiful composition, when they see your work.
That's right.
Yet in going through the book, every now and then I'd be startled to find an image beautiful. And then I'd quickly realize I was looking at a nightmare. For example, there's a photo you took in Rwanda. The first thing I noticed were the big heart-shaped, veined leaves. It's a nature photo; it could be by Wynn Bullock or Edward Weston or Eliot Porter -- that was my first impression. But then I saw a corpse lying face down in the grass under those beautiful big leaves.
I don't think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty. That's one of the paradoxes of life, and one of the themes of art and literature. And it's perhaps a way in which images become accessible to people. I try to record moments of beauty between people. I think that you'll see, running throughout this book, images where people are reaching out to each other, where they're caressing each other, or making contact in a tender way -- expressing human beauty in the midst of suffering. This is what I think gives "Inferno" its underlying hope. I find it uplifting to see people transcending their own agony to reach out to others, and I see it continuously in these situations.
That reminds me of one picture, which I believe you took in Romania at an orphanage, of a young boy feeding a slightly older boy from a bowl.
Yes, I was in an orphanage in Romania in which the children were being kept in inhuman conditions. Many of them didn't have clothes; many were confined to the same bed and surrounded by their own filth. There were very few of what I would call "keepers" -- I wouldn't even call them attendants, they were just keepers. Anyway, there were very, very few of them. So the children had to take care of each other. And this particular boy, the younger one, had a terrible physical handicap: His knees locked the reverse way and he had to move with just his arms; he couldn't use his legs. But he had tremendous energy and charisma, and actually took care of a lot of the children who were in worse condition than he was. He'd feed them and look after them.
I understand you paid your own way to go and do the Romanian project.
That's right.
How did you hear about it?
There were early press reports after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Some journalists had gotten in there and begun to report on an AIDS epidemic in orphanages in Romania, caused by injecting children with adult blood. It sounded horrific. And there was an opportunity, shortly after Ceausescu's fall, to actually go into Romania. There was no government anymore, so therefore there was no accountability for the authorities; the secret police were in hiding. And there was what you might call a moment of openness when, as a journalist, you could go in and explore the legacy of this dictatorship. I was very curious about it -- and especially curious about the AIDS epidemic.
I went there, began to travel around and found a kind of gulag of these horrible orphanages throughout the country. These weren't orphanages for normal children, but for children who had some kind of perceived mental or physical handicap and who were kept in ghastly conditions. I was able to find these places and gain access to them quite easily -- much more easily than I would have thought. I think I was discovering something that even most Romanians didn't know existed.
Later in the book, there's a picture taken in Somalia of one person using a pot of water to clean another very emaciated individual who's lying on a tile floor. Tell me about that photograph.
That's an image of washing the dead. Somalia is an Islamic country. And even in the face of the worst chaos, the total breakdown of society and tremendous hardship and suffering, the ritual of respect for the dead continued to be carried out. The famine victims would be brought to a collection point where a group of volunteers, local people, would wash the dead and then sew them into shrouds and take them to a mass grave.
Was there any resistance or reaction to your photographing this activity?
No. Virtually every picture in "Inferno" was made at close range. I like to work in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit. I want to give viewers the sense that they're sharing the same space with a photo's subject. These pictures would have been impossible to make unless I was accepted by the people I was photographing.
How do you achieve that acceptance?
When I approach people, I do it with respect, with deference; I do it slowly and gently and I think about the way I move, the way I speak and the way I use the camera. I let them know that I respect them and what they're going through. Also, almost everywhere I go, people understand that I'm going to show the outside world what's happening to them and give them a voice that they wouldn't otherwise have. They become a participant in the picture. I could not make these pictures without their acceptance and participation.
