Saturday, October 17, 2009

James Nachtwey


I watched the documentary War Photographer about James Nachtwey from 2001 on DVD last night. He has been a photo journalist for over 30 years, shooting in locations around the world like Kosovo, Rwanda and Indonesia to name a few. I first saw his work only a few years ago in the New Yorker but was immediately drawn to the intensity of his photographs.


They mounted a small video camera on his 35mm and you are able to see what he is shooting and the subjects reacting to their situations in real time. You also watch his finger changing the aperture and the shutter speed and you hear the click of his camera firing.


"I also had to learn in taking pictures how to develop a personal vision, how to express my own feelings about it, in order to do that I had to get in touch with my own feelings and it was through photography, through the discipline of the frame I learned about the world, it became the way in which I discovered the world and it also became the way in which I discovered myself."
- James Nachtwey

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