Guest post by Steve Raymer, author of Somewhere West of Lonely
I never set out to be a photographer of conflict and tragedy—famines in Bangladesh and Ethiopia and wars on five continents at last count. In my early twenties, I saw enough blood, heard enough lies from military and civilian officials, and lost close friends while serving as an officer in the United States Army in Vietnam. Back home and finishing graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971, I turned down a desk job in Saigon, capital of the former South Vietnam, as a picture editor with the Associated Press, the world’s largest news gathering agency. To my mind, if I was to ever again experience the constant fear of being killed, at least it would be looking through the lens of my Nikon cameras.
My work for National Geographic Magazine in places like Cambodia, where I was wounded in 1974, and in embattled corners from the world— the Middle East, Afghanistan, South Asia, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador—was often part of reporting larger global issues. For example, genocidal Khmer Rouge guerrillas fired rockets and mortars at innocent Cambodians receiving American food aid and I was in the middle of the mayhem, following a shipment of California rice for a story about the world hunger crisis. Fifty years on, we forget that Cambodia by 1974 was starving as the war in neighboring Vietnam spilled across its border, creating tens of thousands of refugees.
In another instance, I traveled the globe with the International Committee of the Red Cross, keepers of the Geneva Conventions, to document its humanitarian world in some 14 war zones. In El Salvador, about to return home after two weeks in the middle of the most violent conflict in the Western Hemisphere during the 1980s, the ICRC chief asked if I wanted to accompany doctors and nurses on a mission into the contested jungle to bring out a wounded Communist guerrilla fighter to a government hospital. She had a bullet in her brain. No one at National Geographic would have ever known if I had turned down this invitation of uncertain promise of more or better pictures. But it was my job. As it was, our convoy of Red Cross vehicles was fired upon by a Salvadorian or American helicopter, held up at rebel checkpoints, and twice forded a river seeded with mines.
That phrase—“it’s my job”—has been a constant beacon as I have looked at the dying in International Red Cross hospitals in Ethiopia in 1985 or at hundreds of children in Vietnam, born with heart-wrenching deformities as the result of residual dioxin in the environment—the active ingredient of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange that we Americans sprayed to deny Communist soldiers their jungle sanctuaries. In these and many other cases, it was my job, or calling, to take an unblinking look at the world’s heartaches. Or as I tell students, to be society’s professional eyewitness.
That drive to be a faithful eyewitness to some of the world’s headlines did not come naturally for a young man from a small town in Wisconsin. My first mentor, the late University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Wilmott Ragsdale—himself a former war correspondent—used to tell students, “Be bold and move toward the action.” In those days, the “action” was often violent anti-Vietnam War protests on the streets of Madison, but the lesson stuck. As I learned more about the great photojournalists of the twentieth century, another name stuck with me—Robert Capa. A Hungarian Jew born Endre Friedmann who took the nom de guerre Robert Capa, he moved from conflict to conflict—from Spain and China to North Africa and through Western Europe—until his beloved Paris was liberated from the Nazis. As I recount in Somewhere West of Lonely, Capa landed in the surf of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, with the first assault troops of the US First and Twenty-Ninth Infantry Divisions, which would suffer nearly four thousand casualties that fateful morning. Capa’s name and reputation for courage live on, in part through his famous aphorism that I have silently repeated to myself in some of the most difficult situations of my professional life: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
I tell students that the best foreign correspondents have a low threshold for injustice. It has been my privilege to work with a few and meet many. In Vietnam, Gloria Emerson of the New York Times wrote with what her newspaper called an “angry dignity.” She once nailed a general who asked subordinates to write him up for awards of valor for a battle that never happened. The author Frances FitzGerald reported the war first-hand for The Atlantic and the New Republic, then wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Fire in the Lake, after researching modern Indochina in four languages. From both women, I learned to never, ever trust the government’s version of events without seeing things for yourself.
In my experience, it is not the pay or the awards that motivate war correspondents, but a sense of moral outrage at the obscenities of our times. I dedicated Somewhere West of Lonely to friends and colleagues to have been killed telling the stories of the world, including wars. These men and women accepted the risks “to help citizens be free and self-governing,” in the words of journalism textbook authors Tom Rosensteil and Bill Kovach. And to my mind, those few eloquent words summarize what our work should be about—to help citizens be free and self-governing.
Steve Raymer is a former National Geographic photojournalist who has captured it all through the lens of his camera. The National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri named him Magazine Photographer of the Year—one of photojournalism’s most coveted awards—for his reporting on the global hunger crisis. He has also been honored by the Overseas Press Club of America for international reporting requiring exceptional courage and is the winner of numerous first-place awards from the National Press Photographers Association and the White House News Photographers Association. His books include Redeeming Calcutta: A Portrait of India’s Imperial Capital. His new book, Somewhere West of Lonely, will be available in April.
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