Photojournalists on War
Photojournalists on War
The Untold Stories from Iraq
With previously unpublished photographs by an incredibly diverse group of the world’s top news photographers, Photojournalists on War presents a groundbreaking new visual and oral history of America’s nine-year conflict in the Middle East. Michael Kamber interviewed photojournalists from many leading news organizations, including Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Magnum, Newsweek, the New York Times, Paris Match, Reuters, Time, the Times of London, VII Photo Agency, and the Washington Post, to create the most comprehensive collection of eyewitness accounts of the Iraq War yet published. These in-depth interviews offer first-person, frontline reports of the war as it unfolded, including key moments such as the battle for Fallujah, the toppling of Saddam’s statue, and the Haditha massacre. The photographers also vividly describe the often shocking and sometimes heroic actions that journalists undertook in trying to cover the war, as they discuss the role of the media and issues of censorship. These hard-hitting accounts and photographs, rare in the annals of any war, reveal the inside and untold stories behind the headlines in Iraq.
With visceral, previously unpublished photographs and eyewitness accounts by an incredibly diverse group of the world’s top news photographers, Photojournalists on War presents a groundbreaking new visual and oral history of America’s nine-year conflict in the Middle East. The hard-hitting accounts of these practitioners would be rare in the annals of any war, yet here they reveal the inside and untold stories behind the headlines in Iraq. Each interview is logged with the year and location it took place, and is accompanied by a selection of the photographer’s work made on and off the battlefield.
Michael Kamber’s new book, Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq, is a vital record of a conflict that will shape America, and Iraq, for decades to come.
Anyone who wants to see the real war in Iraq would do well to buy a copy of Michael Kamber's new book, Photojournalists on War. It's a vivid contradiction to many of the images widely broadcast and published during the past decade.
The Photojournalist who covers a war is usually nameless and faceless... Now there is a new important oral history, Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq by Michael Kamber…Not all the photos are about war. Some show people in their daily lives, images, which depict the results of war on often innocent civilians. All are memorable.
The book—required reading for anyone interested in the way news is gathered an disseminated these days—collects Kamber’s interviews with 39 colleagues who covered the war…so these conversations are remarkably candid—confidences shared among friends that we’re privileged to be listening in on.
The book is wonderfully printed, which is of course important for a book of photographs. But I find it hard to know how to describe the book less superficially-that is, to describe the content. The story is painful but you'll find the images hard to get out of your head. The images in the book bust open a hornet's nest of emotions: amazement and horror, admiration and sorrow, gratitude and pain.
Photojournalists On War is THE reference book for any discussion of the War on Iraq and photography.
Photojournalists on War is the result of five years of interviews with some of the world's leading photojournalists. However, finds Gwen McClure, it's also the fruit of Michael Kamber's frustration over the harrowing images that were never shown or published before … The aim of the book … is to tell the uncensored story to the general public, an audience that hasn't been privy to much of what went on there. The photographs in the book are at once stunning and arrestingly graphic.
Except for the most famous conflict photographers, such as W. Eugene Smith and David Douglas Duncan, there are few interviews published that offer an extended view of the craft of conflict photography. . . . The interviews in Photojournalists on War give the experience a full voice, and I know of no other comparable collection for any post-Vietnam conflict. . . . Nothing approaches the depth of Kamber’s book.
Michael Kamber has worked as a photojournalist for more than twenty-five years. He covered the war in Iraq as a writer and photographer for the New York Times between 2003 and 2012. Kamber was the Times’s principal photographer in Baghdad in 2007, the bloodiest year of the war. He is the recipient of a World Press Photo Award.
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