Posts Tagged ‘war photography’
Galleries: Combat and Worship
The past 24 hours have offered up two extremely contrasting galleries: one devoted to combat; the other to worship!
Combat
Kainaz Amaria on NPR’s ‘the picture show’ discusses a War Photography exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. She says, “it has the usual array of iconic war photographs” but the real strength of this exhibition is “in the presentation of our collective war story.”
Actually, another strength may be the exhibit’s sheer breadth and range: it features “more than 185 photographs from 25 nationalities with conflicts spanning 165 years.” Exceptional quality and selectivity are two more strengths: over one million photographs were viewed from which the exhibition images were culled.
The article includes 20-odd photos in a mini-gallery. See a sergeant treating a recruit to a staredown and compare it with a grunt’s glazed stare.
A photograph of Nicaraguan rebels is one of the most unusually colourful war photos you’ll ever see. Just like bursts of bright colour, ballet and art are not associated with war either, yet this photograph of infantrymen leaping over a trench is artistic and balletic exploring form, movement, and warriors in the abstract. If overt warfront action is more your style, this mini-gallery has you covered.
Flick through the gallery for even more overt photos, a couple of which may be gut-wrenching.
Worship
Today’s installment in Baltimore Sun Darkroom is a gallery of photographs revealing the inner workings of the seldom-seen Baltimore Carmelite Monastery where fewer than 20 sisters live of whom you can see three chanting vespers and five in prayer.
The gallery begins with the hint of a sunswept lawn seen through a dim corridor that is dominated by stained glass with a religious motif. However, this is a modern residence for women devoted to religion and not a hillside cloister: witness other photographs that are documentary and prosaic, such as this image of a sister gardening and one that could have been taken in any suburban kitchen.
That said, this modern-day monastery has a Seventeenth Century antiquarian book or two and its own religious relics.
Combat and Worship
We close with a convergence of our two topics by way of the Spanish Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona in which a holy day – a remembrance to a saint – is marked by combat in the bullring.
The festival took place last week. Kevin Fischer identifies two photos that are not the same old, same old. Here’s a photo of a bull being kept at bay by stick-toting men and another of a cow leaping over scared revellers.
Death Anniversary of Horst Faas: The Greatest of an Extinct Breed?
Execution of a Viet-Cong, Napalm Girl, and Reaching Out are the three iconic images of the Vietnam War. These photographs were taken by, respectively, Eddie Adams, Nick Ut, and Larry Burrows.
In all truth one other photographer’s name ranks right up there; though somehow none of his Vietnam War images became an instantly-recognizable global sensation, his body of work is perhaps superior to those of any of the other three photographers. In addition, he was also an AP Photo Chief; indeed, it was this very photographer-editor, based in Vietnam, who approved and pushed both, Adams’s Execution of a Viet-Cong and Ut’s Napalm Girl! And, arguably, it is one of this photographer’s War Photographs that unforgettably conveys the indescribable raw terror of war . . . .
Let’s remember Horst Faas, a War Photography titan, on his first death anniversary.
Last year Denver Post published a fantastic collection of Faas’s Vietnam War photos in high-res. (Caution: Some images are extremely graphic; others are equally distressing.) These are among the best, the very best, images of war you’ll ever see.
With Faas, you get harrowing, shocking images of an American GI implicitly bidding farewell to his dying buddy . . . and a Vietnamese woman explicitly bidding farewell to her dead husband.
You get art photography like this image of infantrymen crossing an arcing bridge or a minimalist nighttime silhouette of soldiers, smoke, and spotlight, each of which is suitable for framing and hanging.
Here is the chaos that ensues among well-drilled marines when a helicopter crashes. And there is the sheer, raw bedlam-horror of warfare.
There’s a village pathway littered with corpses. And what about children on motorcycles going along a road that is verily strewn with corpses as if this is a day-to-day reality?
If you’ve seen Apocalypse Now, here’s a photo that will play back Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in your mind.
Pure reportage yet superlative photography – a photo of a wounded soldier being treated; another of a wounded soldier being evacuated.
How about this brilliantly composed and executed photo of haphazardly collapsed soldiers fast asleep with one lad wide awake?
Even a simple photograph, by dint of its composition, perspective, and angle of elevation, becomes a riveting document of war.
This character study and portrait conveys what ‘all senses on red alert’ means. Here is another character study and portrait, albeit one that is radically different. Do we see dignity in this woman’s sorrow or is it just me?
Here’s a moving, wonderfully ‘tight’ (close-in) photo of tough warriors weeping for fallen comrades.
Faas brings us a smiling blue-eyed boy informing us that ‘War is Hell’ to be contrasted with a blonde lad with ‘KILL’ emblazoned on his hat.
You are thrilled by the drama of seeing a Hannibal-like elephant-back force crossing a river . . .
You are distressed at seeing a submissive captive being ‘pistol-whipped’ with the handle of a knife . . .
—And you have your heart rent by a photo that is the ‘Pieta’ of the Vietnam War.
Faas also covered the Congo Conflict, among other war zones, such as East Pakistan / Bangladesh. His photo of a wild-eyed Baluba warrior with a stick is as terrifying a photo as you will see.
All these photographs reveal that, besides being a gifted photographer, Faas was a very brave man; a man among men.
Perhaps Faas’s most famous image is the unnerving, shocking image of a Vietnamese peasant showing an apparently dead child to American troops on an armoured vehicle, almost as if saying, “Why did you do this? Why?”
However, Faas shot the haunting, unforgettable image of images that defines the raw terror of war – descriptions are superfluous. This photograph ought to be as famous as any other war photo. Look into the womens’ eyes (and contrast with the blissfully uncomprehending baby’s expression). Look once, you’ll never forget. How the photographer managed to shoot this particular instant in quite the way he did is beyond analysis. This image too needs to be distinguished by a universally-known name.
If someone declares that Horst Faas is the greatest of the extinct breed of authentic War Photographers, no argument would be made by this writer.
Reaching Out: Remembering Larry Burrows on his Death Anniversary
Larry Burrows (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On rare occasions photographs become so famous, so instantly-recognizable, so much a part of a culture, that they become known by a short, informal name. The Vietnam War spawned three such photographs: ‘Execution of a VietCong’ by Eddie Adams, ‘Napalm Girl’ by Nick Ut, and ‘Reaching Out’ by Larry Burrows. Tomorrow, 10th February, is Burrows’s death anniversary. He was killed in a helicopter crash after he had returned to Indochina in 1971 to cover the war’s spreading into Laos.
Larry Burrows was a staff photographer for LIFE and he travelled extensively, specializing, so to speak, in areas that were wracked with tumult and conflict. Burrows was a famously discreet Englishman with a modest nature and a brave heart whose photographs were regularly printed in LIFE – except for his touchstone image, which was photographed in 1966 but not published until 1971.
In ‘Reaching Out’, one looks into a devastated, otherworldly landscape; it is the slate on which a human drama seems to be playing out, frozen by Burrows’s camera: a wounded and stricken soldier is seated propped up against a blasted stump while a comrade, also wounded and looking equally stricken, seems to be ‘reaching out’ to him. The ‘co-star’ soldiers around the Michelangelo-esque twosome lend human interest to this tension-fraught photograph.
The fact that Burrows captured a special and unique moment is made evident in a subsequent frame which shows that all the tension and ‘fraught-ness’ that permeates the iconic image dissipated in perhaps a minute. That frame alongwith a remembrance to Burrows and his immortal photograph is available on LIFE’s Behind the Picture series.
You can see more Burrows photographs here and here where you will find a harrowing work of a bereaved Vietnamese woman and an emotional and touching one of a wounded youth receiving first aid.
No less than another fantastic war photographer, AP’s Horst Faas, who shot perhaps the most astonishing and remarkable portfolio of images of the Vietnam War, wrote: “Larry Burrows was the most versatile press photographer I knew . . . . If there would have been a vote for the most respected and loved newsperson in Vietnam, Larry would have almost certainly come out tops . . .”
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