Inferno

Inferno
by Luc Sante

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Book Summary Information

Author: Luc Sante
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-01-01
ISBN: 0714838152
Number of pages: 460
Publisher: Phaidon Press

Book Reviews of Inferno

Book Review: I can't believe myself
Summary: 5 Stars

I'm not really reviewing this book, I'm reviewing myself, my reaction to the book. Because there is nothing that is not perfect about this book. It's stunning. Dazzling. The only thing that's wrong is my reaction to this book. I wish I could make myself read part of it every day, because I know that if I don't look at at least one picture, I'll forget the books entire impact. I have that ability, to just wipe sad things from my mind. That's probably the sickness that grasps the American people as a whole: the ability to just forget, no matter what they've been shown. They can just forget, and go on living as if each day in the safest country on earth were an adventure. But if I do read this book, I go insane. I'm infused with an unquenchable desire to DO something. Doesn't matter what. I'm that way, too. I need to fill the void that these pictures create in me with action. But what can I do? That is my mantra. What can I do for thousands starving, being beaten, sufering at the hands of others, nature, themselves. The answer is nothing. I can do nothing. I want to apologize to every person in this book for my uselessness. I as an individual can do nothing. But I as a group can do a lot. I as a group of people can accomplish anything, and I think that as well every time I read this book. I think that if I were part of a group, I would be able to help. So I want to apologize for not being part of a group yet. I'm sorry I can do nothing, yet.

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Summary of Inferno

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.

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

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