Lens: Beyond the Myth of the War Photographer

Many of the images are well known, as are some of the back stories, and yet the frankness with which photographers — four of them women — reveal struggles with post-traumatic stress, depression, and other personal hardships reflects a shift. The predominantly white, Western, and male-dominated industry has traditionally shied away from openly discussing mental health.

After documenting the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Sebastião Salgado felt a profound sense of sadness coupled with a conviction that mankind had lost its way. Yannis Behrakis, a Greek photographer for Reuters, survived an ambush in Sierra Leone that killed two of his colleagues, one of them his closest friend, Kurt Schork, before crawling three hours through the bush to safety. He later suffered bouts of depression so severe he could barely get out of bed in the morning. Peter Magubane, a black South African who documented inequality under Apartheid, was locked in solitary confinement for 586 days without being convicted of a crime. Another South African, João Silva, a photographer for The New York Times, spent years covering the violent end of apartheid and countless wars, losing friends along the way, until he lost both legs after stepping on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. Accompanying his profile are three frames he snapped in the aftermath of the blast, his legs shredded, one foot dangling.

Some blows don’t come from the battlefield or at the hands of brutal regimes, but from careless editors . After 25 years of covering conflict, during which she earned four Pulitzer Prizes, the Washington Post photographer Carol Guzy struggled with flashbacks of dead women and babies. What pushed her over the edge was not war, but the declining health of family members and the death of a friend, followed by a letter from her newspaper informing her, with no explanation, that her position had been terminated. Losing her job robbed Ms. Guzy of her identity, she said. She felt humiliated.

“At that time I was as broken as I had ever been,” she told Dr. Feinstein. “Everybody is around for the Pulitzer parties, but then you enter that darkness and find out who really loves you.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/lens/shooting-war-photograper.html?partner=rss&emc=rss