PHOTOS: New book unveils unique insights from behind the lens of conflict photography

“[P]eople in the United States, or perhaps the Western part of the world, find images like this one highly intrusive, like I’m invading the special and highly private space of people who are in a great deal of pain. But in the areas of the Middle East where I’ve spent over a decade, people don’t mind showing the world that they loved someone so much that it makes them cry hysterically when that person dies.”

– Andrea Bruce, photographer

“[O]n news imagery, I have no regrets in terms of what we have published. The only remorse is that there have been times when we should have explained better why we were running certain images. But sometimes, because you’re in the moment and you want to get the story out, the context doesn’t get well enough elucidated.”

– Marion Mertens, Senior Digital Editor at Paris Match

“[F]or me, this was the strongest of the pictures I had taken. But the editor said to me, ‘Why are you trying to spread alarm among the people?’ But he didn’t mean the people; he meant the white population. This newspaper was very pro-government. [Rhodesia, a former British colony, was under white minority rule.] This was a war of rebellion, and the paper’s position was that no one wanted the rebels there. Yet here is photographic proof of a fighter being given a hero’s welcome. But that was the wrong narrative for the Rhodesia Herald. So the image never ran in the paper.”

– Alexander Joe, photographer

“[T]he other constant struggle throughout my twenty-three years at UNICEF was to end the predominance of clichéd representations of the child—as either the pathetic, suffering victim or the happy, aid-recipient child. There, the needle barely budged.”

– Ellen Tolmie, former Senior Photography Editor at UNICEF

“The attack happened on a Tuesday morning. An issue had come out on Monday of that week, and we came out again on Thursday [September 13]. So we had thirty-six hours to come out with this edition. It’s a black-bordered edition with no ads. […]

[M]y job, largely, is to fight against apathy, but also it’s to educate. And it’s not just educating about the content of the story; it’s to raise the visual literacy. A good visual narrative has the same pieces as a good article: your lede, your nut graf, the middle of the story, the arc, the ending. So the thing about being an effective photo editor is you have to be able to talk to people through images. Simplify the story down to its moving parts. You can’t write a sentence that doesn’t make sense—it’s the same with visual journalism. So the images strung together tell a story, and if the images are journalistic, they tell a true story.”

– MaryAnne Golon, Director of Photography at The Washington Post, former Director of Photography at Time

“Often, my relationship to the subjects I photograph is fleeting. I feel a tremendous empathy for many of these people. But let’s be frank, I have a passport in my back pocket, an American passport. And at the end of many days, I get to go back to a hotel while they stay in some condition of suffering. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to understand what they’re going through. But I would never claim to fully understand. That would be insulting.”

– Spencer Platt, photographer

“That photo, which was taken at Cuesta del Plomo, is from four decades ago, and if I were thinking about a more contemporary setting, let’s say witnessing one of the ISIS beheadings, I’d ask, ‘What would I do now? Would I not make an image? If I make an image, what do I do with the image?’ Obviously, ISIS has used images, which they make themselves, to shock us, and they have achieved that very effectively. But if you were the documentarian witness, right there on site, what would your responsibility be?”

– Susan Meiselas, photographer

“I documented brutal mining conditions, overseen by both rebel and government militias, vying for power and money. Sometimes children are forced to work, excavating minerals like tungsten, tin, and gold, which get used in computer electronics that are omnipresent in the West. Think: laptops, cell phones.

[…] For nearly fifteen years I worked in eastern Congo covering conflict minerals, pushing people to make changes. That body of my documentary work is directly responsible for the Intel ban [on the use of conflict minerals in its microprocessors], but it could not have achieved success without people signing petitions and similar acts of public pressure behavior. When the consumer says “Enough!” then the corporations respond.”

– Marcus Bleasdale, photographer

“I’ll tell you an anecdote. After that cyclone, an American friend of mine was talking about how terrible it was because another friend of ours could not keep his beer down. He was so affected by the images he saw that it made him ill. It hit me that this is the same as the ‘breakfast table standard’—someone who is having breakfast with a copy of the New York Times, and the editors have to be careful that that person’s breakfast is not really affected by any of the imagery. I find that problematic. I want to affect that person’s zone of comfort. I want to ensure that person wakes up to the huge injustices that go on. In particular, people in the United States need to know that the extreme violence, terrorism, and excesses of their own government upon people all across the globe happen constantly, and they’re being shielded from that with a rhetoric of the ‘good wars’ that America fights. The media should be able to penetrate that defense system to shake people and wake them up.”

– Shahidul Alam, photographer

“As for the emotional toll, which can be enormous, I think for myself I’ve also been very lucky in that I was able to understand the impact of what I was doing from early on. I find that—or at least I’m using that as—an amazing rationalization for being there. If you feel like you’re constantly failing and nobody’s paying attention, I think there’s no way to keep at it. But if you believe there is or can be an audience, that at some point people are going to pay attention, then that doesn’t take away the emotional impact, but it helps because it feels like there’s a purpose.”

– Ron Haviv, photographer

“She is a picture of strength and dignity, if not beauty. And she’s not the clichéd image of a displaced person or a refugee.”

–Michael Goldfarb, Communications Director at Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)-USA

“I struggled to publish the pictures. I contacted many publications, but no one was interested. […] In the end, I put my pictures on Facebook and decided that I will not travel again to cover an event if I cannot be sure of publishing the work.

– Eman Helal, photographer

“As a journalist, of course, you have to be 100 percent sure of what you’re documenting. You have to be suspicious yourself, looking for any cracks or gaps in the evidence. So we stayed two months on this; we had to be there and working to figure out the truth of this story. Once we had the evidence that the government was using chemical weapons in its attacks, we had to have it recognized by a body like the UN.”

– Laurent Van der Stockt, photographer

“Everything here is dirty, but this man’s face looked holy to me. He was calm; he was polite. I wanted to show that he isn’t just ‘a poor drug addict.’ He was observing everything. His demeanor made me think of him as a philosopher. I want viewers to understand the gravity of the situation without looking down on the subject.”

– Newsha Tavakolian, photographer

“[I]f I’m asked to go to one of these ignored crises, I will not go without one of the best photographers in the world. It’s unthinkable for me to try to get attention without the images. That’s just the way the world works.”

– Peter Bouckaert, former Emergencies Director at Human Rights Watch