Though he is probably the world's most honored recent war photographer, James Nachtwey calls himself an "antiwar photographer," as the preeminent critic Luc Sante notes in his excellent foreword to Inferno, a landmark collection of 382 war-crime photos. Nachtwey has taken shrapnel and had his hair literally parted by a bullet, but he's never lost his compassionate outrage. The stunning images in this huge-format book--brutally abused Romanian orphans, Rwandan genocide victims, a rat-hunter family of Indian Untouchables barbecuing dinner, skeletal dehydration victims in Sudan, the miserable in Bosnia, Chechnya, Zaire, Somalia, and Kosovo--are excruciating to look at, yet impossible to tear your eyes away from. Nachtwey's art is meant to force us to face unbearable facts. Faces are the key: you can't gaze into the eyes of a Romanian toddler tied to a bed, or wired to a primitive "electromagnetic therapy" device, and not grasp the horror more fully than you would by watching a TV news item or reading a newspaper piece. (The book's text explains each photo's context.)

Inferno is also a masterpiece in strictly aesthetic terms. The power of Nachtwey's images transcends journalism. Bloody handprints on a living-room wall in Kosovo, the ghostly imprint of a Serb victim's vanished body on a floor, a Hutu with crazed eyes displaying the machete gashes he received for opposing the Tutsis' butchery, a howling orphan in a crib, one eye contracted in anger--these are compositions that depend, like Goya's, on the artist's skill as much as the subject's legitimate claim on our conscience.

Nachtwey's photographs make us capable of imagining that it could have happened to us. They are hard to forget, or forgive. --Tim Appelo

From the Publisher
A document of war and strife during the 1990s, this volume of photographs by the photojournalist James Nachtwey includes dramatic and shocking images of human suffering in Rwanda, Somalia, Romania, Bosnia, Chechnya and India, a well as photographs of the conflict in Kosovo. An essay by the author Luc Sante is included. The book is published to coincide with an exhibition of Nachtwey's work at the International Centre of Photography, New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Humanitarian and photojournalist James Nachtwey is above all a witness on the side of the victims. In the disturbing worlds of conflict, rivalry and cruelty he sets out to communicate horrors that we often choose to ignore, addressing the victims' suffering and powerlessness with a clear and unflinching gaze. Working with unrivalled commitment, travelling from one disaster to the next on a harrowing schedule, Nachtwey has, over the last twenty years, confronted war, famine and the gravest geopolitical issues of our time. With a brutally compassionate stance, he witnesses the tragedies of today that frighteningly could be buried and forgotten. His pictures are inspired by an overwhelming belief in the human possibility of change, despite evidence to the contrary.

The work of a perfectionist, Inferno is Nachtwey's first major monograph. Featuring photographs from the last ten years, it guides us through Somalia's famine to genocide in Rwanda, from Romania's abandoned orphans and 'irrecoverables' to the lives of India's 'untouchables', from war in Bosnia to conflict in Chechnya, disclosing some of today's gravest examples of man's inhumanity to his fellow man.

Nachtwey's uncompromising images are published in all the leading international news magazines. A master in his field, he has built a reputation as one of the most fearless and focused of photographers and is the only four-time winner of the Robert Capa Medal for photography, an award that requires exceptional courage.

FROM THE CRITICS

Colin McGinn - Civilization

Nachtway, who works mainly for Time magazine, himself risked death and injury during his visits to Somalia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Romania, Rwanda, Sudan, India, Kosovo, and Zaire in search of these pictures. He is clearly a compasionate and concerned man, intent on bringing home to us the world's horrors.

David Rieff - LA Times Book Review