28 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
T
he invasion of Ukraine has been
described as the first social-me-
dia war, and a key aspect of
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s lead-
ership has been his ability to rally his
country, and much of the world, via
Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, and Twit-
ter. At the same time, war photogra-
phers in Bucha, Irpin, and beyond are
working—in the tradition of Mathew
Brady at Antietam or Robert Capa on
Omaha Beach—to capture the grisly
realities of what Vladimir Putin insists
that his people call a “special military
operation.” James Nachtwey, now sev-
enty-four, is among those keeping their
eyes trained on the realities. Influenced
by the photography that emerged from
the civil-rights movement and Viet-
nam, he began his career at the Boston
bureau of Time and then took a job at
the Albuquerque Journal. When he read
about the hunger strike in Northern
Ireland, in 1981, he headed for Belfast.
Four decades of covering conflict en-
sued, bringing him to El Salvador, Af-
ghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda,
Chechnya, and many other places. He
has been injured in the field, lost col-
leagues and friends; his hair was once
parted by a bullet. Nachtwey calls him-
self an “antiwar photographer.”
After an exhausting day in Ukraine
recently, he sent this text before get-
ting some sleep: “The barbarity and the
senselessness of the Russian onslaught
are hard to believe even as I witness them
with my own eyes. Bombing and shell-
ing civilian residences, firing tank rounds
point-blank into homes and hospitals,
murdering noncombatants in militarily
occupied areas are all tactics being em-
ployed by the Russians in a war that was
inflicted on a nonthreatening, neighbor-
ing sovereign state.... ‘Ordinary’ peo-
ple are displaying extraordinary cour-
age and determination, if not downright
stubbornness, in the face of tremendous
destruction and loss of life.” His refusal
to avert his gaze from the true costs of
conflict belongs to a larger mission: to
keep the world from doing so.
—David Remnick
In late March, flames and smoke rose after a Russian attack in Kharkiv. Ukraine’s second-larg