James Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer. He has worked aboard ships in the Merchant Marine, and while teaching himself photography, he was an apprentice news film editor and a truck driver.

In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 - 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. (Bio)

To learn more about James Nachtwey, I strongly recommend watching the documentary War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001).

Artist’s statement:

In my work this romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment. These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world. In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats. In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices. (read on)

First spotted via Who Killed Bambi.

Wikimedia Commons: “Destruction of Leviathan”, 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré.

I first found this photo over at Washington’s Blog. The post where it appears makes a (short) argument about the ban of media coverage apparently imposed by BP and US officials and the alleged suspension of the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution it represents. At the very end of the post, the author seems to put forward a legal argument supporting the publication of such pictures as the one shown above:

In addition, use of such images is also protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Specifically, reproduction is protected under the “Mai Lai/Zapruder line of cases”, since:

(1) The images are of historical significance;

(2) They show facts which cannot be conveyed effectively in any other manner, and

(3) Therefore the Constitution trumps copyright law. (more)

Now, what exactly are those “Mai Lai/Zapruder line of cases” ? It’s not a law, but a “line of cases” and it could plausibly be used to challenge the ban of some media access to the site of the catastrophe (see The New York Times: “BP and Officials Block Some Coverage of Golf Oil Spill”). More thoughts about this over at Aphelis.

The New York Times: “In transit, Kyrgystan to Afghanistan, April 5: Soldiers in full gear on a C-17 military transport from the Transit Center at Manas to the Mazar-i-Sharif Airfield” by Damon Winter [click for full scale]

In “A Year at War,” The New York Times will trace the steps of the men and women of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division during their yearlong deployment in northern Afghanistan. Damon Winter, the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, followed the battalion in late March and early April as it made its way from Fort Drum, N.Y., to Kunduz Province. Over the weekend, as the first installments of the series were published, he spoke about the project with James Estrin. Their conversation has been edited and condensed.

From The New York Times:

““Exit” is billed as “a Banksy film,” but Banksy, the notoriously reclusive British street artist, appears only rarely, face hooded and voice distorted. Even so, it is Banksy whom audiences will come hoping to see, stimulated by the canopy of hype that this artist has carefully erected, in interviews and on the festival circuit. What they will find is, like Banksy’s best work, a trompe l’oeil: a film that looks like a documentary but feels like a monumental con.” (more)

Visit the film’s official website.

“Minor Martin White (July 9, 1908 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. […] After serving in military intelligence during World War II, White moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro and developing his own distinctive style. He became involved with a circle of influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams; hearing Stieglitz’s idea of “equivalents” from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White’s mature post-war work.” (wikipedia)

Minor White was John Clendenen favorite photographer when he took up photography.