Are the photographers simply trying to ask important questions or is chasing a thrill also a part of it?
I think it definitely does. If you read what anyone like Sebastian Junger or Chris Hedges has to say about their own relationship to covering combat zones, they refer to how compelling it is. When you’re doing that kind of work for some time, you miss it when you’re back home and you’re not doing it for a while. So, I think there is an adrenaline rush that people who are drawn to that kind of work are often in the grip of. I don’t think that is the only reason they do that kind of work, but the excitement is a part of it.
João Da Silva has said of his war photography that – “People think you do this to chase adrenaline. The reality is hard work and a lot of time alone. ”
Both of these things are true. There’s a lot of slog, a lot of waiting around, but photo-journalists like João are very drawn to conflict zones and I know that João is someone who before his tragic accident was racing motorbikes on Sunday mornings when he’d come back from a gig in a combat zone.
[Spoiler alert] Ken Oosterbroek’s death was later found to be the result of the South African National Peacekeeping Force. Why didn’t you go into that in greater detail?
There was a political controversy over who was responsible for Ken’s death and Greg [Maronovich - played by Ryan Phillippe in the film] being shot which involved whether the police had been properly trained and whether the bullets had come from Inkatha members shooting from the hostel or Comrades to the right of them or whether it was peace keepers. In the end it was peacekeepers. I didn’t want to play the controversy, in the end what mattered was that they were finally injured and the Bang Bang Club finally had a casualty. It occurred in the fog of war, in the middle of a gunfight, but I didn’t want to make any more of it than that was the moment when their time had come.
Kevin Carter dies by his own hand. His death bears out the dangers of the hidden effects of such close involvement in conflict, in addition to the physical dangers.
I think that photo-journalists, the good ones at any rate, are not wired the same we are. There is quite a bit of evidence to say that they don’t react in dangerous situations in the way that we do. We tend to panic, we get tunnel vision, our ability to process decisions is often severely compromised with increasing levels of adrenaline. Whereas for photo-journalists like João da Silva, it’s not that they’re not afraid, they are, but their ability to function is less compromised and sometimes even enhanced. They are able to process decisions, they can sense danger, they can move around in a dangerous situation in a way that keeps them a lot safer than someone who is not a pro. That doesn’t mean that they’re then able to deal with that work when they bring it home – there are cases when people aren’t able to contend with what they’ve seen and what they’ve had to document and they will often self-medicate like Kevin did. So I think that the great photo-journalists are those who are able to cope with that kind of danger on one hand, but can also deal with it when the shooting stops.
Read The Bang Bang Club reviewed on The Film Review here.
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