Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]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."