Photographic Negatives

Insight on the News, Nov 13, 2000 by Lesley McKenzie

Surviving members of the `Bang-Bang Club' -- the name given the photographers who covered the violent aftermath of apartheid -- talk about the moral dilemma at the center of their work.

Award-winning photographers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva covered the breakdown of apartheid rule in South Africa and its aftermath, the subject of their new book, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (Basic Books, $26, 254 pp). While their work is powerful and shocking, they say they have paid a price to get their pictures -- and the exposure to violence and death from behind the camera continues to haunt them.

"We are not [nongovernmental organizations]," says Silva, the 1992 South African Press Photographer of the Year. "We are not medics. Yes, we have helped, and we have also stood by and watched people die."

During a recent talk at the Newseum in Arlington, Va., Marinovich spoke of a particular incident in which he stood by and watched a man being murdered before his eyes. He was deeply upset by the experience and, when confronted with a similar situation a month later, chose to intervene. He was attacked and the victim still died, but Marinovich took from the experience some peace of mind. His photographs of the second incident belong to part of a series which earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

Marinovich and Silva are the two survivors of the four member "Bang-Bang Club," a name taken from the title of an article about the photographers -- "bang bang" is journalism slang for violence involving guns.

The original group consisted of Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek, Marinovich and Silva. They covered the "township wars" -- political bloodshed motivated by rivalry between the African National Congress and the mainly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party -- that broke out after apartheid collapsed.

Of the four, Carter committed suicide because of a combination of pressures, including the ethical dilemmas to which his work exposed him. Oosterbroek was shot dead by the side of his companions while covering violence in the Thokoza township in 1994. Silva and Marinovich acknowledge having experienced depression, irrational anger and thoughts of suicide brought on by the gruesome and horrific scenes they witnessed.

In their book, Silva and Marinovich describe the ethical dilemma of photographing stabbings, shootings and "necklacing," a practice in which a gasoline-soaked tire is placed around a victim's neck and set ablaze. "We discovered that one of the strongest links among us was the question about the morality of what we do: When do you press the shutter release and when do you cease being a photographer?" Silva and Marinovich write in their book: "We discovered that the camera was never a filter through which we were protected from the worst of what we witnessed and photographed. Quite the opposite -- it seems like the images have been burned onto our minds as well as our films."

The two men describe how they were affected emotionally when confronted with the moral choice of intervening or standing back and photographing history. Both photographers believe it was necessary to take pictures of the violence occurring in the townships. "People were being killed indiscriminately," says Silva. "We were on a mission." The violence they photographed "was driving the politics of the country."

Or, as Desmond M. Tutu writes in a foreword to The Bang-Bang Club: "Now we know a little more as the veil is lifted on the ways this remarkable dreed operated, how frequently they had to be callous, to the extent of trampling all over corpses without showing too much emotion, so that they could capture that special image which would ensure that agencies would want their work. Now we know a little of the cost, the constant gambling with death, of being part of what they call, with macabre humour, the Bang-Bang Club."