Substance, Not Style The Nexus of Concerned

Substance, Not Style
The Nexus of Concerned Photography
Jessica Steigerwald
Imaging International Conflict
AMST 40140
27 April 2011
In 1965 Cornell Capa, renowned photojournalist and brother of the famed war photographer Robert
Capa, proposed a photography exhibition of the work of six photographers to Oriole Farb, Director of
New York's Riverside Museum. Cornell was challenged by Farb to find a theme which would unify the
work of the proposed photographers – Robert Capa, Werner Bischof, David Seymour (“Chim”), Dan
Weiner, Andre Kertesz and Leonard Freed. After much consideration, Cornell was finally able to
define the tradition that the six photographers represented, “It is a concern for mankind that connects
their work; it's not their style.” And so, the phrase “concerned photographer” was coined and became
the unifying theme of the exhibition and the book published in 1966. 1
This theme, this tradition of concerned photography, was not invented by Cornell Capa; nor was
it invented by, or limited to, the six photographers of the exhibition. In fact, Cornell looked back to
Lewis W. Hine for inspiration and a more detailed definition of concerned photography. Hine, using
photography as a force for social change and labor reform, is best known for his work of exposing the
harmful and dangerous conditions of child labor in the United States in the early 1900s. He wrote,
“There were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected; I wanted
to show the things that had to be appreciated.” 2 “Those first six photographers included in the
Concerned Photographer book and exhibit chose diverse approaches, subject matter, and aesthetic, but
all shared Hine's philosophy.”3
Indeed, it is the philosophy that defines the concerned photographer and their work; it is the
substance, not the style, of the photographs that define this genre. Concerned photography existed
before Lewis Hine's call for labor reform. Concerned photography existed after Hine's call and before
Cornell put a name to the idea. And concerned photography certainly has continued to exist after the
book and exhibit neatly presented the concerned photographer philosophy. Therefore, the tradition of
concerned photography has endured not only tremendous technological changes, but historical and
cultural changes as well, which together have allowed for great differences in the photographic style of
concerned photographers over time. This is clearly apparent in the work of Jacob Riis, Robert Capa
and Sebastião Salgado, who are all considered hugely influential concerned photographers, but have
each worked in vastly different periods of time and each with a unique photographic style.
Yet even concerned photographers working at the same point in time have greatly varied styles.
Cornell was able to show this in the 1966 Concerned Photographer book and exhibit, and again in
1972 when he published The Concerned Photographer 2, honoring the work of eight additional
photographers.4 Since concerned photography cannot be defined in terms of style, it allows for an even
greater emphasis to be put on the philosophy, the content and the substance of the genre. It also allows
for closer examination of what characteristics define the concerned photographer.
Howard Chapnick, photojournalist and retired president of Black Star Photo Agency, wrote that
the concerned photographer cares about the world in which we live, loves learning for its own sake and
uses photography as more than a means to a financial end. Additionally, the concerned photographer's
“overwhelming personal dedication to and concern for mankind is transcendent … The pantheon of
concerned photographers encompasses those who choose humanity over self-interest, feeling over
dispassionate observation.”5 When James Nachtwey, often considered the world's greatest living war
photographer, was asked how he chooses sides when he covers war, he simply responded, “I'm on the
side of humanity. That's the only side you can take.” 6
To examine the work of every photographer who has been “on the side of humanity” and to take
into consideration every ethical question related to concerned photography would take many years and
constitute an encyclopedia-sized book. By laying the ethical questions aside 7 and focusing on the lives
and work of just three concerned photographers – Jacob Riis, Robert Capa and Sebastião Salgado – it
will be evident that the power of concerned photography as a genre derives not from the style but from
the substance of the images and the philosophy of the photographers.
Jacob Riis wrote in his autobiography, The Making of an American, “I am downright sorry to
confess here that I am no good at all as a photographer, for I would like to be.” However, Riis then
explained that he took up photography “not exactly as a pastime. It was never that with me. I had use
for it, and beyond that I never went.”8 Riis's particular interest in and use for photography did not
begin in his home country of Denmark or even when he arrived in New York City in 1870. He spent
three years searching for a job after his arrival in the United States; in 1873 he was hired as a
newspaper reporter and in 1877 was hired by the New York Tribune and promoted to police reporter.
The reporter's office and police headquarters on Mulberry Street were in the middle of a slum where,
often working overnight, Riis “became intimate with the worst doings of New York's poor.” 9
Yet Riis believed that “it is not the squalid people that make the squalid houses, but the squalid
houses that make the squalid people.” 10 In fact, Riis's written reports show a clear sensitivity for the
immigrants who had no other choice but to live in the shabby, degraded slums. In one report he wrote,
“In one single block of buildings consisting of 132 rooms, 1324 immigrants, mainly workmen, slept in
bunks with more than ten people huddled in every room.” 11 But even over time his words seemed to
make no difference and it was only after years of growing frustration that Riis turned to photography in
order to raise the general interest of the public and make an impression. He was “confident that the
shocking visual impact could give rise to a strong reaction which would drive the government to find a
permanent solution” for the appallingly poor living conditions of New York's immigrants. 12
As a reporter, Riis argued that crime “was not the result simply of moral and genetic failures.
Rather, it was the effect of an environment which suppressed all positive impulses and influences, and
substituted greed, desperation, and moral laxity.” Riis understood the fundamental logic that saw
crime, ignorance, vice and poverty as effects rather than causes. 13 He used new photographic
technologies, such as the magnesium-powder flash and lantern-slides, to photograph and present his
arguments and evidence to the public. Riis garnered substantial attention from his first lantern-slide
lecture in January 1888 where, for two hours and using 100 slides, he presented “The Other Half, How
It Lives and Dies in New York,” which led to his groundbreaking book How the Other Lives published
in 1890.14 Riis's work was further publicized and popularized in 1947 by Alexander Alland, who made
prints from Riis's original negatives for the Museum of the City of New York's exhibit “Battle with the
Slum.”15
As Riis mentioned in his autobiography, he had a particular use for photography – to raise
public awareness about the living conditions of New York City's immigrants and to campaign for
reform – and his work with the medium stopped there. After his second project and book, Children of
the Poor, was published in 1892 and Riis was able to accomplish two political objectives with the help
of police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt – the closing of police lodging houses and the construction
of a small park – he ceased photographing and returned to writing and lecturing until his death at the
age of 65.16
“Riis took great photographs but was not a great photographer. He brilliantly exploited the
power of photographs as evidence, but … he did not compose pictures with the camera, nor did he
attempt to master the craft of photography.” 17 Because Riis was not a particularly skilled photographer,
and because of the photographic technology at the time, his images took on a distinct style. However,
Riis was aware of this style and used it to reinforce what he wanted to say about his subject matter and
the need for reform.
What Riis wanted, and what he found in his photography, was a means of hiding his hand, erasing his
presence as authority, and transferring that authority to an apparently irrefutable medium of proof. This
was crucial to Riis's entire mission as a reformer … Riis's lantern slides and his books were not meant to
entertain; they were meant to demand of his middle-class Victorian audience a complete and active
commitment to the cause of social justice and economic reform. To obtain this commitment Riis had to
arouse their emotions, make them uncomfortable, threaten their worldview. Photographs – his
photographs – succeeded where no other medium could. 18
Just as he had intended, Riis's photographs carried a huge emotional charge, and still do today, in part
because they were so technically crude and raw. “The blurred motion, the harsh flash, the imbalanced
composition, the overcrowded spaces, and the odd vantage points all contribute to our sense of
immediate, direct encounter with the subjects.” 19
Riis is commemorated not only for his unique style but also for setting a precedent for
concerned photography and reform photography. Prior to his work, reform photography only existed in
a few photographer's scattered experiments. Riis “provided the model from which a reform tradition in
photography could be developed. Because of Riis, social reformers from 1890 to the present would
look to photographs as the logical source of publicity for their efforts.” 20 With his tenacious reform
mentality and novel photographic style, Jacob Riis became a concerned photographer (long before the
term was coined) whose work would not be forgotten. Beaumont Newhall, a historian of photography,
stated of Riis's work, “The importance of these photographs lies in their power not only to inform, but
to move us. They are at once interpretations and records; although they are no longer topical, they
contain qualities that will last as long as man is concerned with his brother.” 21
Some concerned photographers used the medium specifically and solely as a tool for reform, as
Jacob Riis did. For some others working in photojournalism, a natural concern for humankind became
apparent as the underlying theme of their work and driving force behind making photographs. This is
how Robert Capa, who primarily photographed conflict and war, came to be regarded as a concerned
photographer. Just as Lewis Hine wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected, as well as the
things that needed to be appreciated, “Capa's photographs show us that human beings suffer, and make
us want to know why; they show us that human beings endure, and make us want to know how.” 22
Robert Capa was born Endre Friedmann in 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, which is also where he
grew up, went to high school and became interested in literature and politics, thus deciding to make his
career as a journalist.23 Documentary photography, largely inspired by the work of Riis and Hine, was
prevalent in Hungary in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time when Capa was becoming seriously
interested in social and political reform. 24
Outraged by the horrible inequities of capitalism and rural feudalism, [Hungarian photographers] focused
their cameras on the worn faces, the dehumanizing work, the squalid homes, the inadequate clothing, and
the meager tables of impoverished men, women, and children. The unsentimental directness, the graphic
boldness, and the passionate reformism of the work of these “Szociofoto” [Socio-Photo] photographers,
all of them affiliated with the Munkakör [Work Circle, an artistic and political group in Budapest], were
surely among the earliest direct influences on Robert Capa. 25
Although Capa was interested in and influenced by photography in Hungary, he would not take up the
medium until he was studying journalism in Berlin where he had to begin providing for himself but did
not speak German very well. “While pursuing my studies, my parents' means gave out, and I decided
to become a photographer, which was the nearest thing to journalism for anyone who found himself
without a language,” Capa explained. 26 And so began the career of “the world's quintessential war
photographer from the 1930s until the mid-1950s.” 27
The list of people, places, events and conflicts that Robert Capa photographed during his short
life (he was killed by a landmine while photographing in Indochina on May 25, 1954 28) is quite lengthy
and sincerely impressive. Although Capa is best known for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War,
in particular “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman” (1936), and World War II, specifically his images of
troops landing on D-Day (1944), “his best photographs are not those of warfare itself.” 29 “For Capa, it
was imperative that war be documented, witnessed, and exposed, especially as it became the main fact
of life and of death for millions of people between 1936 and 1945. But it was the lives people lived
and the societies they built that compelled him most strongly.” 30
Capa's focus on the humanity and dignity of people in the midst of war is what truly defined his
work as concerned photography; and his political beliefs and views led to a personal philosophy that
perfectly characterized him as a concerned photographer. At a young age Capa adopted, and
maintained for his entire life, “a political philosophy that was democratic, egalitarian, pacifistic, semicollectivist, with a strong emphasis on the dignity of man and rights of the individual in society.” 31
Although Capa held strong political viewpoints and was devoutly anti-fascist, he had a
profound sympathy for the sufferings of individuals regardless of their politics. “Capa was always –
throughout his entire career – primarily a photographer of people, and many of his pictures of war
(even those taken in the midst of battle) are not so much chronicles of events as extraordinarily
sympathetic and compassionate studies of people under extreme stress.” 32 Capa was not solely
interested in photographing individuals in war; he also put an emphasis on relationships in war. “The
tenderness of human relationships, even at the front, was a key motif for Capa … In Capa's view, war is
not a natural disaster, a mythic adventure, or an inevitable fate: it is a human activity that must be
visualized in human terms.” 33
Capa certainly visualized war, as well as everything else he photographed, in human terms. He
had “a natural eye for dramatic impact, narrative drive, emotional insight, and the revelatory detail.
This was an ethical capacity more than an aesthetic one: Capa was, quite simply, extraordinarily alert
to the world.”34 He had a distinct photographic style (although he denied that he had any) 35 as a result
of many factors and a blending of both his ethical and aesthetic capacities.
Capa always regarded photography as a form of journalism rather than art; and his images were
not formally perfect, nor formally daring. But he did have a “love of motion” and an “eye for
illuminating details.” 36 He typically photographed using a Leica and other small, lightweight cameras
with no flash, which allowed him to always be immersed in the action. His famous words, “If your
pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough,”37 have become scripture in the world of
photojournalism. Working in his own style, which has been described as romantic and optimistic
though not foolish or naïve, Robert Capa truly succeeded at communicating the drama of war, rather
than simply documenting the facts of it. 38
Beginning with the success of the “Falling Soldier” photograph, recognition, adoration and
commendation would be heaped on Capa for the rest of his life. “His political commitment, his easy
camaraderie, and his courage made Capa not just a famous photographer but a deeply admired one.” 39
The magazines and newspapers that published his images would boastfully refer to him as one of the
world's best photographers and would devote numerous covers, and pages upon pages to his work. 40
“Capa richly deserved all the praise. He had made an extraordinary body of photographs, distinguished
from most other pictures of war by the great compassion and intelligence they reflected, by their
respect for the dignity and tragedy of their subjects, by their directness and by their powerful graphic
impact.”41
For Cornell Capa, his brother's death made a deep impact on his own life and work. Cornell
was in grieving but was also worried by what would become of his brother's extensive body of work.
From 1956 to 1967, Cornell took over Robert's previous position as president of Magnum, the photo
cooperative started in 1947 by Robert and a number of other photojournalists. Also from the time of
Robert's death and for the rest of his life, Cornell continued to work on his own photojournalism as
well as working to fulfill an obligation he felt to his brother and other deceased colleagues. In addition
to The Concerned Photographer books and exhibition, Cornell established the “International Fund for
Concerned Photography” in 1966 and devoted much of his time to the fund and its activities. In 1974,
he also became the director of the International Center for Photography in New York City which still
has many programs devoted to photojournalism and houses Robert Capa's photographic archive. 42
The annual Robert Capa Award “for superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and
enterprise abroad” was established in 1955 by Life and the Overseas Press Club of America, a further
memorial to the concerned photographer who “set a standard of bravery and compassion for all war
photographers who have followed him.”43 For some, Capa may be best remembered for his
photographs that have become iconic war images or even for his romantic style of photographing war.
But for most others, Capa's legacy is rooted in his sympathy, compassion and concern for humankind
that is so unmistakable in his life's work; and he will continue to be remembered as not only a great war
photographer but also as a great concerned photographer.
As Howard Chapnick dutifully noted, “No discussion of concerned photography would be
complete without recognition of the work of Sebastião Salgado.” Salgado has been described as a
photojournalist “who makes the invisible visible. He finds in the people he photographs a state of
grace, he finds in them a sense of success, a sense of victory, a sense of human dignity, pride and
strength tempered by the uncertainty of the conditions under which they live.” 44 The differences in the
photographic styles and subject matter of Jacob Riis, Robert Capa and Sebastião Salgado are distinct,
but their sympathy and compassion for humankind– the driving force behind each of their work – is
what unites them as concerned photographers.
An activist as well as a photographer, Salgado has said that, “You photograph with all your
ideology.”45 Surely Riis and Capa would have agreed with this statement. They would have also
agreed with Salgado's motives for taking up photography. Salgado, who is from Brazil but now based
in Paris, studied economics, sociology and anthropology; and he worked as an economist before
beginning to photograph in the 1970s. Ultimately, he decided that photographs could better express his
concerns than could economic reports; that the camera, “this extremely ductile and direct instrument
could show the world much more than essays and charts.”46
“With my personal history as an economist, sociologist and anthropologist, it was inevitable that
my photography would hold a strong social conscious,” said Salgado. 47 Indeed it does, but “a strong
social conscious” is a serious understatement to anyone familiar with Salgado's impressive and
profound body of work. Salgado engages in heavily researched, extensive projects lasting many years.
“Each project undoubtably stems from his eyes, but also from the studies he carries out before he sets
off, from his thirst of knowledge and genuine curiosity, and from the urge to be a part of the very same
suffering and pleading humanity he is investigating.” 48 With each project, all of Salgado's images
“converge, supporting each other in a single, vast, and often epic vision of man and of the way he
inhabits this world.”49
Salgado's projects include (but are not limited to) 50 Other Americas, on indigenous life in Latin
America; Workers, a look at global manual labor; Sahel, in which he covered the famine in the Sahel in
Africa working with the medical relief group Médecins sans Frontières; Migrations, of human
migration on a global scale; and the more recent Genesis, “a search for the traces of that primordial
world where man and the environment lived in harmony.” 51 Photography critic Vicki Goldberg wrote
of Sebastião Salgado:
At times, Salgado has been a self-assigned emissary from the Third World, reporting the suffering and
endurance of people who have little say over their own fate, in hopes that people in richer lands will
understand that they cannot afford to ignore problems that at first may seem distant. His themes are large,
from famine in the Sahel and the close companionship of life and death in Latin America to the threatened
global extinction of manual labor.52
Though all of Salgado's work is plainly of the committed and concerned photojournalism kind, 53 many
would point to his project in the Sahel as the most obvious example, in part because “no photographic
coverage of that period did more to alert the world to the fate of the people of the region.” 54
In the 1980s “a long and harsh famine dealt a hard blow to the Sahel area. Its consequences can
be summed up in a few staggering figures: it affected twenty countries and 150 million people, 30
million in desperate need of food, leaving ten million refugees and probably up to 250,000 deceased.” 55
Salgado spent fifteen months working in the Sahel where he “used his art to narrate the deprivation,
desperation, and as in all his photographs, the profundity and greatness of human dignity.” 56 In 1983
Salgado worked on a story about starvation in Brazil which prompted him to then do work in the Sahel.
He realized that hunger was a global problem which required a global solution; furthermore “famine
was suited to Salgado's particular skills because it is less an act of nature than an economic
phenomenon, precipitated by acts of war or ecological damage, but above all being a matter of prices
and income.”57
Salgado's images from the manmade famine in the Sahel have been described as “sorrowdrenched.”58 Some of the photographs are “direct and profoundly disturbing,” even “extremely hard to
look upon in any sustained manner.”59 However difficult and harrowing it is to look at the subject
matter of these images, at the same time, it is undeniable that the photographs are astoundingly
beautiful. In fact, all of Salgado's work is formally and traditionally beautiful.
Salgado imbues his subjects with an unflagging respect that borders on reverence: these people may be
losers, but he praises them like famous men. His velvety black-and-white images are painstakingly
composed, dramatically theatrical, painterly in their use of light, gigantic, and eerily beautiful. But the
beauty is often fearsome: his subjects are drenched in sweat, dirt, or mud; dressed in rags; starving,
homeless, exhausted; overwhelmed by nature in her angriest modes. 60
Although Salgado has come under harsh criticism 61 for his particularly stunning style in photographing
suffering, he has simultaneously achieved great respect for his work and he maintains valid reasoning
for the ways in which he photographs his subjects.
Possibly the only stylistic aspect that is common to Riis, Capa and Salgado's work is the use of
black-and-white over color. But this was not exactly a choice for Riis and Capa. Color simply wasn't
available when Riis was photographing. Capa did experiment with color film shortly after it was
introduced to the market, but the picture magazines and newspapers for which he was working either
could not or did not regularly publish news photographs in color at the time. 62 For Salgado, the use of
black-and-white is a significant decision. “The great pleasure for me comes when I am able to
establish a relationship of deep complicity and mutual respect with people. Only the honesty and purity
of the black-and-white medium, stripped of everything but the essential, allow me to transpose the
richness of these human relationships into images,” he said. 63
The beauty in Salgado's photographs flows from the luminous monochrome tones, strong
formal design, and emphasis on geometry and visual contrast, as well as from the subject matter,
“especially in the grace of the people represented and the tenderness with each other.” 64 For Salgado,
beauty evokes sympathy; he does not simply make beautiful images for art's sake: “I wanted to respect
the people as much as I could, to work to get the best composition and the most beautiful light … if you
can show a situation this way – get the beauty and nobility along with the despair – then you can show
someone in America or France that these people are not different. I wanted Americans to look at the
pictures of these people and see themselves.” 65 Furthermore Salgado believes the camera and the
photographer are not the exclusive producers of beauty, but that there is something inherently aesthetic
about the subjects themselves.66
Stylistically the photographs of Sebastião Salgado are worlds away from those of Jacob Riis or
Robert Capa, but all three concerned photographers are bound by a deep compassion for humankind
and the need to show the world its wrongdoings in hope of a better future. As Salgado said,
“Everything that happens in the world must be shown and people around the world must have an idea
of what's happening to the other people around the world.” Additionally, “the photographer must have
a big concern. You must have a big ideological affinity with the subject you will be shooting, because
if you don't, you cannot remain sincere and empathetic for long.” 67 Salgado is a genuinely sincere and
empathetic photographer. “His critical eye is intense and concerned: he not only feels, but also
appreciates and understands.”68
When Cornell Capa was introducing The Concerned Photographer project, he aptly stated,
“Images at their passionate and truthful best are as powerful as words can ever be. If they alone cannot
bring change, they can at least provide an understanding mirror of man's actions, thereby sharpening
awareness and awakening conscience.”69 Every concerned photographer is unique in their style and
subject matter but linked by their philosophy and the substance of their images. This is what connects
Jacob Riis, Robert Capa and Sebastião Salgado; they have in common the decision not to look away,
but to commit themselves to revealing violence and suffering that needed to be corrected and showing
humanity that needed to be appreciated.
Jacob A. Riis
Jacob Riis, 1906
How the Other Half Lives, 1890
Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement – 'Five Cents In the Home of an Italian Ragpicker, Jersey Street, New York,
a Spot,' New York, 1889
1889
Minding the Baby, New York, 1892
'Slept in that Cellar Four Years,' New York, 1892
Robert Capa
Robert Capa, Paris, 1951
Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Spain, 1936
Women in Mourning, Naples, Italy, 1943
Cornell Capa's The Concerned Photographer, 1968
Troops Landing on D-Day, France, 1944
Immigrants Living in a Village Built for the Blind, Israel,
1950
Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado, 'Africa' Exhibit, 2009
Sahel: The End of the Road, 2004
Canadian Firefighters Battle to Seal an Oil Well, Kuwait,
Workers project, 1991
Famine Victim, Mali, Sahel project, 1985
Antarctica, Genesis project, 2005
Coffee Plantation, Brazil, Coffee project, 2002
Notes
1 Howard Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1994), 21.
2 Ibid.; Alessandra Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights (Rome, Italy:
Contrasto, 2007), 45.
3 Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism., 22.
4 Ibid., 24.
5 Ibid., 20.
6 Ibid., 20.
7 For a small sampling of photographic theory related to ethics and human rights see: Gretchen Garner, Disappearing
witness: change in twentieth-century American photography (JHU Press, 2003); John Berger, About Looking (New York:
Vintage International, 1980); John Taylor, Body Horror: photojournalism, catastrophe and war (New York: New York
University Press, 1998); Keith Tester, Compassion, Morality and the Media (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open
University Press, 2001); Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby, Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in
Photographs, Film, and Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Kerry Tremain, “Introduction: Seeing and
Believing,” in Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers (Washington and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977);
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Susie Linfield, The Cruel
Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8 Bonnie Yochelson, Jacob Riis (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2001)., 3.
9 Ibid., 5-6.
10 Ibid., 6.
11 Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights.
12 Ibid., 31.
13 Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1984), 167-168.
14 Yochelson, Jacob Riis.
15 Ibid.; Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, 32.
16 Yochelson, Jacob Riis., 13.
17 Ibid., 5.
18 Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915, 193.
19 Yochelson, Jacob Riis, 15.
20 Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915, 163.
21 Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, 33.
22 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, 202.
23 Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 3, 16.
24 Ibid., 11-12, 15.
25 Ibid., 15-16.
26 Ibid., 29, 30.
27 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, 176
28 Whelan, Robert Capa., 297-300.
29 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence., 177.
30 Ibid., 185.
31 Whelan, Robert Capa., 16.
32 Ibid., 105.
33 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence., 198.
34 Ibid., 179.
35 Ibid., 191.
36 Ibid., 178-179, 183.
37 Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism; Whelan, Robert Capa; Hanno Hardt, “Remembering Capa,
Spain and the Legacy of Gerda Taro, 1936–1937,” On Photography, History, and Memory in Spain. Ed. Maria Nilsson.
Hispanic Issues On Line Debates 3, (Spring 2011): 30-38, http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/doc/02_HARDT.pdf.
38 Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York: Basic Books, Inc.,
Publishers, 1989); Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence.
39 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence., 176.
40 Ibid.,176; Whelan, Robert Capa, 156.
41 Whelan, Robert Capa, 157.
Notes
42 Val Williams, “Cornell Capa: ‘Concerned’ photographer,” The Independent (May 29, 2008),
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/cornell-capa-concerned-photographer-835820.html; Whelan, Robert
Capa; Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism.
43 Whelan, Robert Capa, 302.
44 Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism., 27.
45 Ken Light, Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers (Washington and London: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2000), 108.
46 Ibid., 108; Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, 201.
47 Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, 201-202.
48 Ibid., 202.
49 Ibid., 202.
50 For a comprehensive look at Salgado's work see his agency website: “Accueil - Sebastiao Salgado,” Amazonas Images,
http://www.amazonasimages.com/accueil.
51 Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights; Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside
Photojournalism; Light, Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers.
52 Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism, 27.
53 Julian Stallabrass, “Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism,” New Left Review (1997): 131-160.
54 Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism., 28.
55 Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, 201.
56 Ibid., 201.
57 Stallabrass, “Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism.”
58 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, 38.
59 Stallabrass, “Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism.”
60 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, 42.
61 For an overview of criticism on Salgado and other human rights photography see: Linfield, The Cruel Radiance:
Photography and Political Violence, 42-62; Stallabrass, “Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism.”
62 Whelan, Robert Capa, 145-146.
63 Chapnick, Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism, 337.
64 Stallabrass, “Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism.”
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid. Salgado wrote on the subjects of Sahel: “Sometimes we from the Southern hemisphere wonder why you in the
North think you have the monopoly of beauty, of dignity, of riches. Ethiopia is a country in crisis, where the people are
suffering so acutely, yet Ethiopians are probably among the most beautiful, most noble people in the world. There is
really no point in going there to deny this reality.”
67 Light, Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, 111, 113.
68 Mauro, My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, 203.
69 Ibid., 9.
Notes
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