James Nachtwey's "Inferno"

There's a very striking picture you took in Bosnia of a massive column that has toppled, and in the foreground are two men in white working on a man whom I presume is dead. What was happening when you took that photograph?

The toppled column is actually a minaret of a mosque that had been broken by Serbian shelling; it was in a small village outside the town of Breko, which was one of the major points of conflict during the Bosnian war. The dead man is a young soldier from that village, who was brought to a makeshift morgue set up in front of the mosque where, again, because it is an Islamic society, the bodies of the dead are washed before burial.

I stayed in the village for a couple of weeks; I became part of the community to record what was happening to the people. And almost every day the dead would be brought to the mosque, and the townspeople would assemble there and try to identify them and discover their own sons and family members who had been killed in battle. Slowly the population of young men of the town was being wiped out.

Have you ever been injured in the course of your work?

I've been injured very slightly a few times. I was extremely lucky in every case. The injury itself could have been much more grave. A couple of times I could actually have been killed. I've been very lucky so far.

Have you ever been in a situation where you put down your camera and interceded in what was taking place in front of the lens?

That's happened several times. But most often, when there's a soldier wounded, they're tended to by their own comrades or a combat medic, in which case my getting into it would be superfluous. My job is to record it and communicate it. And I stick to that except in those cases where I'm the only one who can make a difference -- if there isn't someone there to help or there aren't enough people to carry the wounded to a safe place. Once in Haiti and once in South Africa, I rescued people from lynch mobs, from being beaten to death. I tried to do the same thing in Indonesia but wasn't able to save him. When it's clear to me that I'm the one person who can make a difference, I put down my camera.

Some of the most disturbing pictures in the book were taken in Rwanda, during the massacres in 1994. One image looks like it was taken at the church where villagers decided to leave the remains of the massacre victims where they fell, as a memorial. This particular photograph is of a skeleton -- or a near skeleton -- lying on the ground outside the church, and the white statue of Christ is above the door.

Yes, that's the church at Nyarabuye near the Tanzania border. At that time it wasn't yet decided that it would become a monument. The war, in fact, wasn't over yet. So things like monuments hadn't been decided upon yet. Since then, I believe, it has become a monument.

What goes on inside of you when you're dropped off somewhere like that Rwandan church, filled with corpses. You arrive at this place, this hellish scene, and you pull your camera out of your bag and you start photographing. How are you able to function in such circumstances? Most of us would just freeze up in shock or go to pieces.

My job is not to go someplace and fall apart. I would fall to pieces if I was an emergency room doctor, but thankfully there are people who are trained to handle that kind of trauma and handle it well. My training is to channel emotions -- my feelings of anger, of anguish, of disbelief, grief and frustration -- to overcome them and channel them into my work. If I let those emotions paralyze me, then I shouldn't go there in the first place because I'd be useless. I go there with a purpose and I have to take those emotions and, with a sense of purpose and discipline, use that emotional content and put it into the pictures.

Some of the pictures look almost biblical, like classical religious art. For instance, there's one taken in Zaire of what appears to be a mass burial. It's a mound of bodies, partially covered in dirt, and it looks like Auguste Rodin's "Gates of Hell" or part of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

It was indeed a mass grave, in Zaire, where people were dying of cholera so fast they had to be bulldozed into the earth. To me it was the gates of hell. Only hell was where those people had just come from.

These were the gates out of hell, rather than into it?

Yes. It's interesting to me that so many photographs, not only my own but also those of my colleagues, resemble classical or biblical motifs -- a mother grieving for a dead child resembles a Piet`; a mass grave resembles Rodin's "Gates of Hell"; carrying a wounded man resembles the Deposition from the Cross. It's absurd to think that we go around trying to imitate paintings of the past -- that's preposterous. What's closer to the truth is that those painters and sculptors from the Renaissance and classical periods were creating their art from life itself. The way a mother grieves for her child is universal. Those studies from life were then put into a biblical or classical context. I believe that we are now witnessing the same thing that the artists of the past witnessed. These are universal symbols of life itself. And I think that by painting them as classical or biblical scenes, they sanctified life itself and what happens to ordinary people on this Earth.

Next Page: "Maybe the gods themselves are depraved"

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