The 10 Images That Shaped This Photojournalist's Career
📸For Your 👀 Only: Mike Kamber has had many, many lives — the founder and executive director of the Bronx Documentary Center worked as a documentary photographer for over two decades, and his work has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Kamber lived in the Bronx for a period in the 1980s and dreamed of making an educational space that would bring arts and education to the South Bronx. Founded in 2011, the Bronx Documentary Center is a nonprofit organization and mecca for photography lovers from both the Bronx and all over the rest of the city.
We asked Kamber about the photographers and images that have influenced him over his lengthy career, and we're previewing some of them here in our weekend newsletter before the story is out next week. 1. Larry Burrows, Vietnam Larry Burrows I was born in 1963, and my first memories photographically are images from Vietnam. Larry Burrows was easily the greatest color photographer of that generation, and his photos were the ones that affected me first — I saw them in Life magazine. And Burrows' photos of war are not heroic — no war photo should ever be heroic. Yet Burrows' photo here of a wounded soldier reaching out to help another wounded soldier lying on the ground is biblical in scope and brilliant in composition. It gives you a sense of the quagmire that was the Vietnam War.
Burrows was shooting Kodachrome with a Leica M4: no light meter, extremely difficult to get the light right, and no room for error. And yet Burrows' use of light and color reminds me of Goya's paintings of war from hundreds of years earlier. To me, this is just an epic, sad, and futile photo of war — but also says something about brotherhood and sacrifice. Larry Burrows was killed alongside Henri Huet, another of my favorite photographers, when their helicopter was shot down in 1970. 4. Tim Hetherington, Liberia Tim Hetherington This photo is by my friend Tim Hetherington, who was killed in 2011, and his death pushed me to start the Bronx Documentary Center, which he really helped plan out. We talked about a nonprofit like this for a couple of years. And when Tim was killed in the civil war in Libya, a group of friends came together and helped me get the BDC going.
I guess you could call him a war photographer, but he was never interested in pictures of people shooting guns, and in that way he was like Larry Burrows and Henri Huet. He was always looking for something that showed how the wars were fought on the backs of civilians. Tim studied the classics and knew the Homeric wars, chapter and verse. He saw conflict as a modern tragedy, a sort of farce, that leaders played out, destroying the lives of men, women, and children along the way. I always loved this photo because it showed what war had done to the Liberian economy. It was once one of the fastest growing in West Africa. And by the time Tim and I got there in 2003, the country was in complete shambles. There'd been no electricity or running water for years, but we were lucky enough to finally come to the country. 5. Mike Kamber, Iraq Mike Kamber I took this photo in Iraq in 2007, [which] was the bloodiest year of the war. I went with Damien and Diana Cave, a husband and wife who are also a reporter and videographer, into the Sunni triangle to do a story on some American soldiers who had been ambushed and kidnapped. They eventually turned up dead. As American soldiers went out to search for them, they also were being ambushed and killed. We went out before dawn with the 10th Mountain Division, and as we walked down trails through the countryside and the sun began to creep up over the horizon, I stepped over a landmine [that] had been buried in the trail and a guy behind me stepped on it and was killed instantly. A number of others were wounded, and I helped bandage them as I photographed. The Pentagon tried to stop publication of these photos. I actually had a bizarre phone call with a colonel in Washington, DC, who kept coming up with new reasons why I couldn't publish these photos. The New York Times backed me, and we published them anyway. When Damien Cave went back to see the unit, a year or two later, they called him into a conference room. He went in with some trepidation, afraid of what might happen. Instead, the soldiers thanked him profusely for telling Americans back home what the war was really like and showing people their sacrifices. 8. Trevon Blondet Trevon Blondet This photo is by Trevon Blondet — he's part of a group of Bronx photographers that I've been helping to train for quite a few years. Trevon has really taken to shooting black and white film with an old Hasselblad camera, and he's great with people and has a real instinct for a good photo. He's been doing portraits in a Bronx housing project where he once grew up, and I love everything about this photo: the composition, light, and feeling of a confident young man trying to move into adulthood on a hot summer afternoon in the South Bronx. And of course it's incredibly rewarding to see a student like Trevon take what you show him and then surpass you. A YEAR AFTER JAN. 6, AN EXHIBIT TRIES TO UNRAVEL WHAT HAPPENED THAT DAY Christopher Lee / TIME, Bronx Documentary Center THESE PHOTOS OF AMERICA'S BEST DINERS ARE AMERICANA WITHOUT THE NOSTALGIA Leah Frances SOME OF OUR FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS SHARED THEIR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS WITH US DeSean McClinton-Holland
THINGS WE LOVED THIS WEEK 1. The Knicks pulled off a stunning win in the last quarter at Madison Square Garden this past week, and the basketball-juxtaposed-with-fine-art Instagram @ballhaus was ready.
2. In news that is very much related to that Knicks win, I have not been this hungover since 2009. This spicy ginger tea helped me rehydrate, and I highly recommend it.
3. @mynailsmatchnyc reminds us that it's OK to touch things again (just wash your hands!)
4. Can't wait to get my hands on "Paradise Falling," a photo book by Alana Celii.
5. If you haven't yet seen this stunning story on what it's like to leave prison in a pandemic, please make sure to read Hannah Yoon & David Gonazelez's New York Times opus.
LAST LOOK Carla Rhodes I've been laughing all week at the cheeky animals caught by wildlife conservation photographer Carla Rhodes in her photos of the visitors she gets at her bird feeder in the Catskills. "We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us." — Ralph Hattersley That's it for this week! Kate + Pia
📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. Pia Peterson is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. You can always reach us here.
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