Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Now, *that* was fine. Whatever personal sense of inadequacy Anthony may feel about his war photography, he need feel none about his writing. My goodness... I do appreciate fine writing. If only I could write so well. <sigh> Thanks for taking the time to key that in. :-) - -Bruce P.S. Is his last name actually "Loyd," or might it be "Lloyd?" - ----- Original Message ----- From: "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net> To: <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 2:35 PM Subject: [Leica] Talk amongst yourselves... > about some fascinating observations by a young British vet of the Gulf > War and Northern Ireland who went to the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya > as a freelance photographer and writer for a London paper.... > > Anthony Loyd, "My War Gone By, I Miss It So," Anchor, 2000, p 109, 110 > > > "The photographs I had taken that day were useless. Take away the sound, > motion and atmosphere from a scene of fighting, transpose an image onto > a two-dimensional surface, and you have to have something really special > even to communicate a trace of the madness you have witnessed. My shots > were clumsy and empty: blurred figures running with guns; even the > firing looked cardboard, meaningless. I had been there, I knew the > reality. Friends there knew it. They were all wise enough to know what > might lie behind a fuzzy shot of a soldier running. But people who had > never been to war? Their understanding of combat was the Hollywood > version, in which you watch one man fire and the other man fall, a > tandem you hardly ever seen in war, and if you do the chances are it > happens too quickly to get on film. > > "When a photographer does capture 'the moment' in war, what ever it is, > it leaves all the other mediums of reportage so far behind as to make > them almost irrelevant: a single punch to the consciousness that will > not go away until you close your eyes or look at something else. Yet I > was not a good photographer, and was too often frustrated by my > inability to capture on film the essence of what I was witnessing. > Words, though open to different interpretations by different people, at > least allowed me greater opportunity to explain was was happening, if > only to myself." >