James Nachtwey '70, a photojournalist whose images have mined the depths of human despair in troubled regions all over the world, gave a moving account of his calling yesterday at a press conference in the Hood Museum.
The conference was occasioned by the exhibition of his photographs, curated by Timothy Rub, the Hood's Director. Nachtwey, on leave from an assignment in Haiti, travelled here from his New York home to describe his mission as a photojournalist, which has taken him from Belfast and Bosnia to Somalia, Romania and Rwanda among other zones of unrest.
"There's a necessity to communicate, to create pressure for change," Nachtwey began. "Pictures save lives. Without the visual information it would be difficult to rally support or aid." He described how the press has influenced foreign policy, specifically how photographs of Kurdish refugees and starving Somalians have stirred the United States' conscience to action.
Nachtwey photographs the effects of war, famine and brutality on the human spirit; his images leap from the pages of the western press and tug at one's heart. Recently the term "compassion fatigue" was coined to describe the public's weariness with these sorts of images and their refusal to comprehend the suffering they record.
"I don't believe in the theory of compassion fatigue," Nachtwey stated flatly. "People have boundless compassion."
One might think that someone who has witnessed global misery for fifteen years might become jaded, but Nachtwey testifies that "you only become more sensitive. It puts a certain weight on your soul. I'm there for a few weeks, then I get on a plane and go home. Those people are there dealing with those problems their entire lives."
Nachtwey said that his interest in photojournalism began at the College in the late 1960s, when regarding Vietnam, "The government was telling us one thing, and the photographs another. I believed the photographs. They speak louder than political rhetoric."
Despite the photographs' display in the Hood, Nachtwey insists that they are "pieces of communication, not works of art." His mission is to focus the world's attention on these despair-riddled regions so that the suffering endured by their peoples might be alleviated.
Nachtwey closed the conference with these words about his experiences in Rwanda this summer:
"It was incomprehensible. I know what happened there, I saw what happened there, I know the rationale for what happened, but I can't make sense out of it. A half million people were killed there, at close range, with primitive weapons. That takes a tremendous amount of work, and a tremendous amount of will."
