The Scripps College Humanities Institute presents a lecture and film screening with one of today’s most influential war photojournalists, James Nachtwey. The event is part of the Institute’s fall 2005 program, “The New Documentary Impulse.”The award-winning photographer will discuss his work documenting wars and conflicts around the world on Monday, September 12, at 7 p.m. in Balch Auditorium. James Nachtwey will also introduce and host a question and answer session after the screening of the Swiss documentary War Photographer, directed by Christian Frei about Nachtwey’s work. This lecture and film screening are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Humanities Institute at (909) 621-8326.
Nachtwey is one of the world’s most widely published and honored photographers. He has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal an unprecedented five times. Among other awards, Nachtwey has received the World Press Photo Award twice, Magazine Photographer of the Year seven times, and the Bayeaux Award for War Correspondents twice.
Influenced by imagery from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement, James Nachtwey became a self-taught photographer. In 1976, he began working as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico. Nachtwey moved to New York in 1980 and started working as a freelance photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. He has been a contract photographer with TIME magazine since 1984. He was a member of Magnum Photo, a world-renowned photographic agency, from 1986 until 2001. He co-founded VII, a photo agency and archive in 2001.
Nachtwey has worked on extensive photographic essays in Romania, Somalia, India, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya, Kosovo, the West Bank, and Gaza. He created a photo-essay from the World Trade Center wreckage called “Shattered” for TIME.
He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, Culturgest in Lisbon, and the Carolinum in Prague, among others. The Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles is hosting an exhibition of Nachtwey photographs September 8 through October 15.
Once marginal, documentary cinema and documentary photography have joined documentary writing such as investigative journalism, as reality-driven modes of representation that bear witness to our times and help us understand and define our historical moment. Documentary filmmakers, documentary photographers, film scholars, art historians, and journalists will join the Humanities Institute in the exploration of these modes of representation located at the intersection of art and news.