James Nachtwey's "Inferno"

I want to go back to what we were discussing earlier, the idea that things can be both horrible and beautiful, and that beauty is often found in these horrible situations. Given that, what is your take on artists who work that area of intersection but not in a journalistic way. I'm thinking of people, for example, like photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and late British painter Francis Bacon. What is your impression of their work?

I find Joel-Peter Witkin extremely disturbing. But he is not going to those places; he is creating situations in a studio. So it's different. I had a very hard time accepting his work for quite a while. I don't think I really understood what he was doing; I was so horrified by the fact that he was actually manipulating cadavers and body parts. I couldn't quite get over that.

But I now understand that in a way he's trying to tell us that the gods who we want to believe are so benign might not be. Maybe the gods themselves are depraved; the forces that rule the universe are not benign in the way we like to comfort ourselves by thinking that they are. Perhaps, in fact, they're depraved and cruel and twisted and tortured themselves. It's not necessarily my belief, but I think it's a valid subject for an artist to explore. Given the results of some of the scenes I've witnessed, it certainly leaves it open to debate. But Witkin's not really dealing in other people's tragedies.

In "Inferno," there's a sequence of four photos taken in Chechnya, the first of which is a man's bloody hand on a plastic shopping bag. Then below it is a picture of two men in fur hats. One is slipping a carton of L&M cigarettes into his coat.

There are several spreads throughout "Inferno" where I tell a story within a story.

Some of them are almost cinematic, like stills from a movie.

Yes, within the larger framework of a situation, I'll focus on what's happening to one individual and follow it for several frames. It is a kind of cinematic experience, where you're seeing this story unfold in a few frames. In that particular sequence, the dead man was returning from some kind of expedition to acquire supplies, and while he was out in the open he was blown away by a Russian mortar shell. He was discovered by a woman who had been his neighbor. As you can see in the second frame, she is upset and being consoled by a group of men who had come along. And then one of the men scavenges the dead man's carton of cigarettes. And in the final frame, the dead man's left in the middle of the pathway; his hat's gone, his bag is gone and he's been left and forgotten.

And you just happened to be there?

Yes. It was as if they didn't even see me. Although I was standing right next to them, they just ignored me.

In the Zaire pictures taken during the cholera epidemic, there are several images of big tractors scooping up bodies for mass burial, with masked relief workers standing nearby. You've now seen so many of these situations with the United Nations or Red Cross, or whoever it is, coming in and trying to manage or clean up after these catastrophes. What is the mental and emotional condition of these people, the relief workers?

The mass burials in Goma, Zaire, were being carried out by the French military. I suppose they were under orders and did what they were told to do by their commanders. Those images underline the biblical scale on which the deaths were taking place. As for the relief workers, I believe they are motivated by a sense of purpose. They understand they've got a job to do. They understand the value of that job. And they're very focused on doing it.

One of the most surprisingly powerful pictures in the book -- because it's so apparently benign and banal -- is of a man's loafer, a shoe, sitting in weeds, filled with water.

That was in Kosovo. It is a very personal image, very instinctual and intuitive. It's a relationship between myself and what I was experiencing. Somehow that man's shoe, full of water -- and you can see leaves reflected in the water -- spoke to me as an emblem of the destruction of everyday life as we know it. It's a perfectly good loafer. And it was once worn by a living man, and now there's just a pool of water because the man's been blown away. I thought it to be eerie and emblematic.

Then there's a double-page spread in the section on Rwanda. It's just a vast pile of machetes. Especially given what we know now, it's a very chilling photograph.

The pile of machetes was such a spectacular thing to see -- thousands of them. And they were the weapons with which the genocide in Rwanda was carried out. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered at close range with these primitive weapons, by hand. It was a lot of work and it required a great deal of determination and organization. It is something beyond my understanding. I saw the evidence of it, I know it happened and yet, to this day, I don't understand how it could have been done. And that picture of the machetes, I think, sends a chill through you because it does indicate how massive was the genocide and with what instruments it was performed.

Is there anything further you want to say about your work?

Yes, there is one thing that is important for people to understand -- that's perhaps a misconception about how the press works in these situations -- and that is, especially in the case of famines, when we're photographing victims of starvation, we're not just walking away from them and leaving them there without food or help. We're photographing the famine victims in feeding camps and feeding centers that have already been established by humanitarian organizations. They are already being helped as much as they can be helped at that time.

If there has ever been a time when I've discovered someone during a famine who was not at a feeding center, who couldn't reach it or couldn't find it, I would take them myself. And I think any journalist would.

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