Three Photographers Offer Different Looks at War

AN EMBEDDED PHOTOGRAPHER SHOOTING A WAR invariably produces the expected pictures: soldiers, destroyed landscapes, human suffering. In the new exhibit opening this month, Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers, three award-winning photographers move beyond those images of documentary war photography. The photos in this exhibit illuminate the daily lives of people caught in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The exhibit, hosted by The Center for Documentary Arts at The Sage Colleges, takes a humanitarian approach to documentary. The narratives in these featured photos are not merely a journalistic record of events, but show real compassion for their subjects. Each photographer gets into the minds of the people photographed.

The photographers, Cheryl Diaz Meyer, Balazs Gardi, and Teru Kuwayama, are all international award recipients and use their work not only to record and document, but also to interpret what they see.

In 2004, Cheryl Diaz Meyer shared the Pulitzer Prize with David Leeson for Breaking News Photography. Her work captures raw human feeling, in both those moments of high emotion, and also, introspection. For example in one photo men lie on the ground, their hands bound behind them. The silent anguish and disbelief on the face of one man who faces the viewer is clear.

Balazs Gardi is a Hungarian photographer who focuses on humanitarian crises affecting local communities. His black and white photography often demonstrates a dramatic chiaroscuro. The women in this photo (right), taken in 2007, are newly recruited Afghan female police officers trained by the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF in Pol-e-Khumri, Afghanistan. Complete collections of Gardi’s work are posted on his Flickr account.

Teru Kuwayama is co‐founder of Lightstalkers, a professional and social network of photographers, media professionals, NGO workers, military personnel, and other “unconventional travelers.” Whether shooting soldiers or the local population, Kuwayama’s work places the viewer directly in the scene, as if the viewer himself is taking the photo.

Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers runs from October 22 through December 19, 2010 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, New York.