the bang bang club snapshots from a hidden war

The danger and excitement of the kind of work they did eventually spilled into their private lives, where another saga involving the actual distance between tragedy and transcendence was revealed. The young photographers involved in this quest were known as the Bang Bang Club, which comprised mainly of Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, Joao Silva and Kevin Carter, although there were other photojournalists such as Gary Bernard and David Brauchli who were associated with the so-called club.īecause of their success in depicting not only the horrors of apartheid but also black-on-black violence, they became cult heroes, if not recognizable public figures. It was a dangerous and adventurous task that ended up portraying a much larger drama of human yearning and possibility. Largely, between 1990- 94, a tight-knit group of South African photographers sought to capture the last days of the savagery of apartheid by documenting the violence in black townships and hostels. The boldness that earned the group its nickname, that prompted them to rush headlong into dangerous situations in pursuit of an image, forces them to consider difficult questions that lie at the heart of their work: When does their sense of humanity overwhelm their ambition and professional duties? When do they put aside their cameras and their impartiality and get involved? These are the moral dilemmas that the Bang-Bang Club grappled with on a daily basis.What are the moral decisions involved in the act of taking a photograph that captures extreme human anguish and moments of demeaning death (or even moments preceding it)? Along the way we accompany them on free-lance assignments to other war-torn regions, including the former Yugoslavia and the Sudan, where one member of the group shoots what has become a world-famous photograph of a starving child stalked by a vulture. In this stunning new book, the group’s two surviving members recount their political, emotional, and personal journeys through these violent years as South Africa moved toward democracy. The Bang-Bang Club is the story of four young photographers who covered the last years of apartheid, taking many of the most memorable photographs of the period.

The bang bang club snapshots from a hidden war