War Photographer

...i first saw War Photographer four years ago. With another viewing, i am ready to offer my thoughts.
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James Nachtwey documents people ravaged by war, famine, racial conflict, and abject poverty. Nachtwey’s persona is very much the Zen stoic, yet his photojournalism ranks among the most expressive images ever published. It’s this paradox that makes War Photographer such a fascinating documentary. It’s as if Nachtwey must deaden a part of himself emotionally in order to stay physically present while among the ruins of humanity.

War Photographer is not only a story of Nachtwey’s high-risk work in devastated conflict zones, it also takes up some of the difficult questions raised by Susan Sontag in the seminal On Photography—namely, what does it mean to document someone’s suffering? and where is the line between a photojournalist’s genuine compassion and personal ambition?

Christian Frei directs the film, and he’s at pains to reveal (and thereby tacitly comment) on Nachtwey’s process. Thus, a micro-videorecorder sits atop Nachtwey’s camera. This feature allows the audience to see what Nachtwey’s final prints exclude: the way he gains access to such intimate suffering. At times, we are galled by Nachtwey’s seeming intrusion upon the pain of others; and yet, how else to direct 1st World attention to 3rd World suffering?

The film also takes up the ethical uncertainty of war photography as fine art. We see Nachtwey’s prints being meticulously micro-managed during the darkroom process (darkening for drama here, lightening for effect there), and we see white urban professionals sipping wine and casually chatting at the opening of Testimony, a retrospective of Nachtwey’s most poignant photo essays.

It would be easy to demonize Nachtwey as an ambulance-chasing photographer, a vampire behind the lens. But such easy caricature would be to willfully ignore Nachtwey’s bravery and heart in the face of violent unrest, and it would be to willfully ignore the dignity of his photographs that, ultimately, suggest his work is not war photography, but anti-war photography.

Rural Subject, Urban Audience

...i just saw this 2002 documentary. here are my notes.

The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia

For over thirty years, the camera of Shelby Lee Adams has been fixed on the denizens of the Appalachian landscape. Whether this portraiture serves to exalt or exploit its subjects, however, is an open question. Importantly, the idea that Adams’ work might be inadvertently betraying and disgracing the very people he seeks to honor does not hover silently over the documentary; instead, the film directly confronts this debate by not only giving voice to art critics and professional photographers, but also through first-person testimonials from Adams himself and the subjects he documents. Arguments can be (and are) made for each case, and the film draws much of its tension therein.
Adams’ portraits capture Appalachians up close and posed among their hardscrabble wares. Their faces—photographed in stunning black and white—radiate with grief and stoic candor. Some subjects beam with beauty and some overwhelm us with suggestions of abject poverty and mental disability. Is Adams Othering these individuals, or does his work challenge our consumer-based, often Barbie-based beauty norms?

In the film’s second act, Adams’ portraiture centers on the Appalachian subgenre of religious serpent handling. And when one handler nearly dies from a rattlesnake attack, the audience can’t help but wonder whether the camera’s presence made this outcome more likely.

The True Meaning of Pictures works as a meta-statement upon the contested definition and practice of Documentary. The film also reads as an invaluable behind-the-lens look at the prints that populate our galleries and coffee table books.

(Here's a useful link for this film.)