Christoph Bangert

War Photography holds a particular fascination for me, perhaps it is as James Nachtwey says, a photograph which shows the horror of war is by its very nature and anti war statement – it is necessary.  I re-watched the Nachtwey TED prize speech on the bus on saturday on the way to a workshop with Christoph Bangert, a photojournalist who, despite only being a working photographer for 5 years and being only 30 years old,  has worked and documented war and conflict in many war zones across the world.

Christoph gave a workshop to local photographers in Manchester in conjunction with redeye on Saturday and despite the graphic and harrowing nature of the photographs gave an engaging and often funny account of the trials of his job, from basic survival tips (go to texas to buy your flak jackets) to dealing with Contractors in Iraq (don’t photograph them… ever) as well fielding questions from the photographers present, which ranged from ’so how do you get insured’ to the old arguments for and against photoshop, it seems that a complaint Chrsitoph hears is that his photos are too beautiful, and it is true, the overall theme of the photos is the warm tonality and colours that almost provides the narrative, but does this make the photo less ‘real’? its a very interesting argument and one that almost appears to be backed up by the winner of the 2008 World Press Photo – perhaps we need our war reportage to be blurred or badly focussed before we believe that it is war.

Christoph also touched on the oft-repeated quote by Capa – “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” “Bullshit” declares Bangert, however he does concede that getting close to the people you are photographing is essential.

To do this, one must ‘embed’ fully, this was discussed at length as well as the trials of arranging ‘fixers’  when arriving in a country. There were some areas which Christoph was hesitant to discuss, ‘how does this affect you, the photographer’ was one, Christoph chooses not to answer this as, as he sees it, the photograph is not about him but the subject, stressing that he can always get a flight home – his subjects can’t.  Another Christoph chose not to answer was ‘why do you do this’ – citing two complex an answer that would also take away from the photos.

Those two questions aside Christoph gave a hugely entertaining and informative workshop, and he certainly will be a very interesting photographer to watch over the years to come.

Christoph currently has an exhibition ‘Iraq: The Space Within’ running at the Artland Gallery in Manchester, please do go and see it.

This entry was posted on February 01st, 2009 and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.