James Nachtwey

James Nachtwey is a self-taught photographer

James Nachtwey was born in Syracuse, New York on 14 March 1948. He spent his childhood in Massachusetts and studied art history and political science from 1966 to 1970 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. After graduating, he first worked in the merchant navy and as a truck driver for a shipping company, but around 1972, influenced by the American civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, he decided to become a photographer. He pursued this goal for a whole decade without publishing a single picture. He viewed these years as a type of initiation period in which he acquired the craft of photography autodidactically through the study of the relevant teaching books and experiments in the dark room. Amongst the great photographers whose work he eagerly studied during this time were Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978), Josef Koudelka (born 1938) and Don McCullin (born 1935).

Photographing in the eye of the storm – in mortal danger

From 1976 to 1980, James Nachtwey worked for the Albuquerque Journal, the biggest newspaper in New Mexico. He then established himself as a freelance photographer in New York and soon received contracts from major media sources. This breakthrough brought him his first picture reportage, for which he photographically documented the riots in Belfast in Northern Ireland in 1981 and the trouble spots of the world thus became Nachtwey’s particular subject in the following years. He undertook trips to Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Israel, Lebanon, Ruanda, Somalia and South Africa, documenting at great personal risk the unrest and upheavals such as the end of apartheid and the civil wars over the territory of the falling Soviet Union, and also sustained several serious wounds. He was also present when the American journalist Michael Weisskopf (born 1946) lost his right hand in an attack on Iraq in December 2003. 

A legacy for humanity’s conscience

James Nachtwey is one of the best-received and respected war reporters in the world. He is driven by the desire to protect past injustices from being forgotten, to keep them visible as a lesson for mankind, and to stimulate a social learning process for the better with his photographic legacy. James Nachtwey conceives his pictures with great self-awareness and sense of mission as a contribution to the collective memory of mankind. He has received a great number of prizes and awards for his work as a photographic chronicler, and has been honoured five times with the Robert Capa Gold Medal by the Overseas Press Club, was twice the winner of the World Press Photo Award (1992, 1994), and for his complete work has received the Dan-David-Preis (2003), The Heinz Award (2006), the Dresden-Preis (2012) and the Prinzessin-von-Asturien-Preis (2016). He has been a member of the Magnum photo agency since 1986.

James Nachtwey lives in New York.