I got through watching the DVD of War Photographer, a film by Christian Frei, a few times and found it not only to be insightful to the man, James Nachtwey, but also into effective photography/photojournalism. Frei collaborated with Nachtwey in order to follow him around the world and cover his work, style, and the man from a perspective I don’t think anyone else has: right over his shutter button.
I’ve seen documentary films about other photographers such as Anne Leibovitz and Henri Cartier-Bresson and found them to be impressive, but I find Frei’s approach and Nachtwey’s unique intimacy with human-on-human violence to be much more compelling. None of the documentaries on Cartier or Leibovitz place you as close to the photographer’s eye as War Photographer does. I believe that splaying in the first-person perspective in with more traditional documentary elements sets it apart from other films about other top-notch photographers.
The film is effective in allowing others, especially other photographers, to see how Nachtwey sees. The first person camera allows photographers to see what his eye is hunting for and his sense of timing. Juxtapose that with interviews and samples of his photography, most of them done during filming, and the film gets really powerful.
He’s patient and artful in the face of raw, mostly negative, human emotion and action. And above all that, he is sincerely respectful of his subjects and their plight. He is compassionate to the point where it translates not only into access and invisibility, but also into his images.
Additionally, the few glimpses that are given of the gear he’s using are brief and overall unimportant. The fact that he’s shooting Kodak film, Canon, or whatever is extremely secondary. No, no, the gear is at the bottom of the totem pole. The reality of photography is not the gear, it’s everything else. Frei’s film does a wonderful job of driving that fact home: that it’s not the camera, but the man that makes the photograph.
Aside from being a great documentary film overall, I believe that this film should be in every photographer’s collection of educational material, especially if they do photojournalism. It gives you a taste of the level of dedication, sacrifice, and sheer talent needed to the kind of work Nachtwey does. For photographers, the film is packed with a ton of gems that will improve your photography tremendously without even touching gear, composition, or technique.
Nachtwey’s approach is simple, as excellent photography should be, and taken from one of the masters of photojouranlism, Robert Capa.
If your pictures arent’ good enough, you aren’t close enough.
In my next section we’ll take a look to see if Nachtwey’s proximity to his experiences made his pictures “good enough”