The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich & Joao Silva

I read The Bang Bang Club quite a few years ago, long before I became interested in photography, and found it utterly compelling although harrowing.  The fact that I had grown up in SA where most of it takes place, and that the photographers worked at The Star newspaper where my mother and step-father were journalists might have made the book fascinating in itself but it is also well written and extremely moving.

I read it again last year (while I was probably meant to be reading the dreaded Sontag book).  I am writing about it now because I think it raises several important points about ethics of, and voyeurism in, photography.

The Bang Bang Club is written by surviving members of a group of photographers who worked during the troubling and extremely violent years following Nelson Mandela's release from prison and before he became president.  We left SA in 1986 when I was 16 and Mandela hadn't yet been released; not until 1990. Those intervening four years and the ones after his release saw the violence escalate to barbaric levels. However, it had certainly started in force before we left.  I do remember hearing about the necklacing, where someone is put inside a tyre filled with fuel and burnt alive when I was a young teenager living in Jo'burg.  The violence was undoubtably one of the things that made us return to the UK.

Because of my mother's job, I knew in the years before we left that much was not reported fully or at all.  The Star and other centre and left wing papers got around restrictions imposed by the ruling National Party by leaving huge gaps across newspapers where column inches should have contained text and images, but instead contained just a few words along the lines of 'due to the State of Emergency we cannot print this story/photograph' or, simply, 'This article has been censored'.  The lack of information, the absence of print, said a great deal, not only about the violence but also about the government and what the editors of those newspapers thought about the censorship.

Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silver worked at a time in SA when the boundaries of a didactic and authoritarian state were being violently dismantled.  They witnessed and photographed some shocking things, young people murdered by angry mobs using machetes, necklacing as well as shootings.  They did not hold back from photographing the most disturbing scenes, and the book looks at the opposing tensions they all felt in their jobs.  They wanted to record what was going on, not only the sickening treatment of the black population but also the fighting between the Xhosa and Zulu factions.

In order to fulfil these assignments they all had to find ways of coping.  Emotional detachment, propped up with alcohol and drugs led to problems for each of them.  But the most tragic was Kevin Carter who shortly after receiving a Pulitzer prize for his photograph of a vulture sitting behind a starving child committed suicide.  I have to say when I look at photographs of him I imagine I see the frailty in his expression and gestures, and his eventual suicide does not seem surprising given the trauma photographing such scenes must have had on all of them.  Not only were they witness to truly shocking scenes, they each had to come to terms with the fact they had witnessed these things without intervening, choosing instead to take photographs.

The moral implications are are not clear cut.  It was of course imperative the world outside of Soweto and other townships were aware of what was going on and photography has the capacity to share stories at a very immediate and visceral level. There is something about images being pre-verbal, and maybe therefore capable of 'speaking' to our emotions in a very different way to words (sure there is a dissertation in that sentence but I'll have to expand another time).  And had anyone intervened they would very likely have been killed. As it was each of them risked their lives each time they ventured out, some were indeed shot and recovered, but Ken Oosterbroek was shot dead in a gun battle shortly before Carter's suicide.  So, although the moral implications might be difficult, there is no denying their immense bravery in telling stories about atrocities and telling them from as close to the centre of it all as you can be.

The authors explore this dilemma, about how complicit they were by the fact they were present at all, choosing to photograph what was going on.  I am not sure that even they are always a hundred percent convinced by their arguments. "I was one of the circle of killers, shooting with a wide-angle lens just an arm's length away, much too close", says Marinovich when describing one of his first encounters with gang murder close-up, and "I was as aware of what I was doing as a photographer as I was of the scent of fresh blood, and the stench of sweat from the men next to me."

But the authors also say that if the pictures of atrocities exist they should be seen. "To censor pictures that are too strong, indecent or obscene was to make decisions for the reader that was not theirs to make."

In the end photographers have to try to live with themselves, whatever they choose to shoot. Kevin Carter describes how the trauma affected him and the authors agree they all felt the same at times.

"I suffer depression from what I see and experience nightmares.  I feel alienated from 'normal' people, including my family.  I find myself unable to relate or engage in frivolous conversation.  The shutters come down and I recede into a dark place with dark images of blood and death in godforsaken dusty places."

Carter's image of the little girl and the vulture caused uproar as well as praise.  People wanted to know what happened to the child, why had he not helped, how could he have taken a photograph of a child suffering like that rather than dropped his camera and run to pick her up, did the vulture take the child.  He gave vague and contradictory answers.  The reality is he had been working, looking for a story, and Marinovitch describes a probable quotidian and emotionally detached scenario that took place.  All those questions by all accounts put an incredible amount of pressure on a man who had always struggled mentally.  The intense focus on him and his photograph, the emotional difficulties witnessing so much extreme violence must have caused him, cannabis (or daga as it is know in SA) and cocaine all contributed to eventual serious clinical depression.  After he lost some rolls of film for Time magazine he was found dead with a pipe leading from his exhaust to the inside of his car.

Ultimately the elections took place and the four journalists had documented, at enormous cost to themselves, an incredibly important process where human beings were as vile as they can possibly be to each other.  You can see some of the images Kevin Carter photographed here, including the first photograph of a necklace killing which is so shocking and utterly horrifying to think about.  It is of course critical that these actions by humans against other humans are recorded and shared.  Who does it though and how is another matter.

The book is really worth reading whether you're interested in photography, journalism, even South African history or not.  It is written with an admirable honesty and sense of humility, a retelling of a moment that must have been extraordinarily painful to revisit at times.

Quotes from The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich & Joao Silva Random House Books 2001