Regarding the Pain of Others Read Online Free Page B

had an “author”—that photographs represent the view of someone —although it was precisely in the late 1930s that the profession of bearing individual witness to war and war’s atrocities with a camera was forged. Once, war photography mostly appeared in daily and weekly newspapers. (Newspapers had been printing photographs since 1880.) Then, in addition to the older popular magazines from the late nineteenth century such as National Geographic and Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung that used photographs as illustrations, large-circulation weekly magazines arrived, notably the French Vu (in 1929), the American Life (in 1936), and the British Picture Post (in 1938), that were entirely devoted to pictures (accompanied by brief texts keyed to the photos) and “picture stories”—at least four or five pictures by the same photographer trailed by a story that further dramatized the images. In a newspaper, it was the picture—and there was only one—that accompanied the story.
    Further, when published in a newspaper, the war photograph was surrounded by words (the article it illustrated and other articles), while in a magazine, it was more likely to be adjacent to a competing image that was peddling something. When Capa’s at-the-moment-of-death picture of the Republican soldier appeared in Life on July 12, 1937, it occupied the whole of the right page; facing it on the left was a full-page advertisement for Vitalis, a men’s hair cream, with a small picture of someone exerting himself at tennis and a large portrait of the same man in a white dinner jacket sporting a head of neatly parted, slicked-down, lustrous hair. 3 The double spread—with each use of the camera implying the invisibility of the other—seems not just bizarre but curiously dated now.
    In a system based on the maximal reproduction and diffusion of images, witnessing requires the creation of star witnesses, renowned for their bravery and zeal in procuring important, disturbing photographs. One of the first issues of Picture Post (December 3, 1938), which ran a portfolio of Capa’s Spanish Civil War pictures, used as its cover a head shot of the handsome photographer in profile holding a camera to his face: “The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa.” War photographers inherited what glamour going to war still had among the anti-bellicose, especially when the war was felt to be one of those rare conflicts in which someone of conscience would be impelled to take sides. (The war in Bosnia, nearly sixty years later, inspired similar partisan feelings among the journalists who lived for a time in besieged Sarajevo.) And, in contrast to the 1914–18 war, which, it was clear to many of the victors, had been a colossal mistake, the second “world war” was unanimously felt by the winning side to have been a necessary war, a war that had to be fought.
    Photojournalism came into its own in the early 1940s—wartime. This least controversial of modern wars, whose justness was sealed by the full revelation of Nazi evil as the war ended in 1945, offered photojournalists a new legitimacy, one that had little place for the left-wing dissidence that had informed much of the serious use of photographs in the interwar period, including Friedrich’s War Against War! and the early pictures by Capa, the most celebrated figure in a generation of politically engaged photographers whose work centered on war and victimhood. In the wake of the new mainstream liberal consensus about the tractability of acute social problems, issues of the photographer’s own livelihood and independence moved to the foreground. One result was the formation by Capa with a few friends (who included Chim and Henri Cartier-Bresson) of a cooperative, the Magnum Photo Agency, in Paris in 1947. The immediate purpose of Magnum—which quickly became the most influential and prestigious consortium of photojournalists—was a practical one: to represent venturesome freelance