Preserving Artisanal War Photography Culture

Trapped in the snowy wilderness in the hills outside Cincinnati, I've encouraged myself to dig deeper through this vast cavern of online media. Lalla Porter, a kindred spirit I've just discovered who runs StoryCulture, recently found an old Charlie Rose interview with photo-pioneer and Magnum co-founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The Rose-Bresson conversation reminds me of the modern crisis in the culture of war photography, a crisis that has witnessed a relatively small elite of film wizards lose much of their recognition and power in the decade's avalanche of new digital photographers willing to offer photos, even war photos, as a hobby.

Last fall, upcoming picture pro Bill Kotsatos and I met up at Jacques Bistro on Prince Street in Soho, Manhattan, to talk about brand new HELO Magazine and process the evolution of photo culture over wine. While he was concerned with navigating the market for shots on a wide range of pressing social issues, I couldn't help lock the discussion on the apparent, though not yet certain, denouement of the classic war photography culture.

As Bresson discusses with Rose in that interview, there are numerous factors in creating a lasting, memorable, and meaningful image. Although Bresson shot all kinds of subjects from staircases to politicians to lovers, he was one of the key leaders in the creation of war photography culture. Before the 1930's and Bresson's arrival on the scene, photos of war like those of Matthew Brady were purely documentary.

Here's where the story really turns me on. Alex Kershaw's Blood and Champagne, an absolute must-read for anyone considering crisis journalism, if not war photography, tells the story of Andre Friedman, a Hungarian Jewish kid who kept getting in trouble with the Quasi-fascist police in Budapest. Friedman follows hero photographer Andre Kertesz to Paris, landing a run down room in the Latin Quarter, and picking up his first camera. His brother Cornell was soon to follow. Friedman through Kertesz met the up-and-coming Andre Cartier-Bresson at a local cafe. The three, with future photo-legends Cornell Friedman, Chim Seymour and others rallied to try their hands at political photography.

In 1936, France faced an election pitting socialist candidates against fascists. While the young newcomers were all about "in-your-face" or straight political photos, Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz were setting an example by caring for the composition of the image, filling the frame, catching rare, subtle movements and reveals. Young Friedman found a model, Ruth Cerf, who then introduced him to a cocky young woman named Gerda Pohorylles.

That year, Freidman, Pohorylles, and the others flew south to cover the fiery war between socialist-backed loyalists and Nazi-backed fascists. For the very first time in narrative history, a family of artisanal photographers sought to combine the documentation of news photography with the sensitive story approach of an artist, in a crisis zone.

For a twist, Friedman and Pohorylles decided to improve their chances of distributing images overseas by shipping their film rolls together to an editor in Paris, under one name, Robert Capa.

Images from the Robert Capa team, as well as Bresson, Seymour, Cornell Friedman and others began to get picked up by Life Magazine. Legend has it that fellow Parisian artisan Pablo Picasso was so tormented by seeing his native Spain in flames through these photos that he produced one of his most celebrated works, Guernica (see below), to reflect that moment of stumbling upon a collection of black and white photos of war.

Now the global celebration of this new chapter in crisis journalism showered praise on young Friedman, as he was assumed alone to be "Robert Capa." To prove herself, Pohorylles took her own pseudonym, Gerda Taro, and set out on her own to cover the Spanish Civil War. Within a few months, she was killed during a complicated retreat.

Scarred, "Capa" along with Bresson, brother Cornell (now Cornell Capa), Chim Seymour, and those who survived Spain, traveled to New York and founded the Magnum photo agency as a means of unifying their movement to preserve not simply the news in war but the documentation of human spirit, survival in adversity, and shades of love in times of political turmoil.

Over the next decades, art photographers who covered war celebrated these pioneers and rallied to form parallel agencies like the now also legendary VII Photo Agency. However, the Second World War, Korea, the Suez Crisis, Vietnam, El Salvador, Bosnia, and other conflicts provided the movement both reasons to grow and reasons to quit. Despite surviving trench warfare in Spain, the invasion of Normandy, street fighting in Poland, and wild nights with Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood, Robert Capa (Friedman) only made it as far as the French-Vietnam War where he stepped on a mine. Chim Seymour fell after that in Egypt. Bresson and Cornell Capa, surviving, shifted to social subjects.

By the 1990s, war photography culture had transformed from elite crews and aspiring artists to corporate distributors including the great, if faceless, Getty Images, AP, Reuters, and so on. Sensing the gap, crisis journalists who longed for that artful, human approach to documenting war and other crises, began creating foundations and clubs to support those newcomers who could not get into Magnum and VII. The Pulitzer Center, founded in the 2000s, is one of these agencies seeking to cultivate new talent.

Today, war photography culture faces this new, unpredictable challenge of mass supply. Nearly anyone with $1000 can run out and snap a few shots. Leaders in the field have long been comforted by the fact that media publishers still required high quality images, and so it was predicted that the millions of newcomers, including thousands who would aid-work or backpack their way through war zones, would be weeded out in competition. But something surprising happened.

With the explosion in the supply of cheap photography, including war photo hobbyists among the soldier, aid worker, and rights advocate communities came also an explosion in the quantity of media looking for images and in the quantity of media offering amateur images for free.

Editors now faced a turning point, to pay well for deeply meaningful and beautifully-composed photos still tinged with sweat and blood from an artisanal war photographer, or take a lucky find or pretty good, if less well-composed, photo from a rally point like Flickr, for free.

Now I have to stop here briefly, as I did with Bill Kotsatos at Jacques, and admit that in my recent months as an editor I lusted after great photos despite not having a large enough budget to pay the photographers what they deserved and help them to develop their craft.

Despite how many of us still deeply believe in the war photographer as a vital category of artist, the bitter realities of the market are forcing many of us to screw them. Our solace is largely that amateurs, including locals from crisis zones, are much more easily finding their way to the hearts of the concerned public.

We now face another turning point in the war photography industry: With the war photo contributor population growing from a couple thousand to several hundred thousand in a market with relatively the same funding available to pay contributors, will there be fewer full-time artisanal war photographers, will everyone have to have dual-careers to make ends meet, or will the market correct itself to support the demand for high quality work?

Without pause, I bring in my personal favorites and colleagues for examples here. Zoriah, a phenomenal artist I'm hoping to meet who risks his life on many trips, just traveled to cover the earthquake in Haiti, leading crisis photography workshops to help fund his trip. In other cases, the new artisans are sacrificing a great deal for their work but remain unsure of whether the future offers a full-time career with recognition or a mixed bag in which, after getting shot at, sick, and exhausted in war zones their names and great work might be lost beneath an avalanche of amateur work.

Brendan Bannon, brings the public cutting-edge pics on issues from Somali piracy to HIV in southern Africa, offering much to aid agencies. Les Neuhaus crossed fighting lines in remotest DR Congo to document the struggles of women trying to secure food for their families. Timo Vogt ran through trenches in war-stalled Karabakh and outwitted Russian security scorn photographing insurgent houses in Dagestan.

Perhaps most aspiring photographers unsure of a full-time career will pursue careers that allow them to have secure futures while winning bonus trips to meet people facing extreme adversity. Lindsay Stark, an upcoming portrait artist with soon-to-be famous shots from Sri Lanka to Indonesia, takes her pics while on public health research trips for Columbia University. Nate "Down There" Miller, is such a hardcore photographer that even after surviving a horrific plane crash [scroll down] in Angola, he still took a few shots of the plane. He paid for his travels working for projects aimed at preventing malaria across Africa. Meanwhile, Ash Clements brings his camera along while flying humanitarian aid trips into Burma and other crisis zones.

If we in the crisis journalism community and its community of supporters genuinely wish to preserve that artisanal culture for war and crisis photography so that human survival is not only documented straight but also with precious depth, then we need to cherish these old heroes like Henri Cartier-Bresson. We need to cultivate the new generation's understanding of why this movement has been so vital, and why it is worth paying for when we can.

Photo 1: Loura Conerney (Henri Cartier-Bresson). Photo 2: Joaquin (Picasso's Guernica on a wall in Spain)