Some images have the power to make us confront horror. We must not look away.
 | By Louise Loftus Staff Editor, Opinion |
A dead man lies inside a black body bag. The zipper is open a few inches and a little bit of his face is visible. The man's eyes are open, though only one can be seen. |
"It's an intimate and puzzling image of death," David Hume Kennerly writes of the photograph, taken in Ukraine, "and I've never seen anything like it." |
Kennerly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his pictures of the Vietnam War, emailed us recently to say that he'd seen the photographs that were coming out of Bucha, Ukraine, as the Russian military retreated. He thought they were significant and he wanted readers to understand what he saw when he looked at them. |
He worked with one of Opinion's photo editors, Jeffrey Henson Scales, to curate a selection of them along with iconic images from other conflicts and, for reasons Kennerly explains, the Jonestown Massacre. In his accompanying essay, Kennerly argues that some of the images from Bucha, Mariupol and Kyiv belong in the pantheon of war photography with "Napalm Girl," or "Saigon Execution." |
"Many of the photographs of the war in Ukraine deserve to live as indelibly on the public record as those photos of Vietnam," Kennerly writes. "We can only see the extent of the Russian-made horror because of these photos and the photographers who have risked, or given, their lives to get them." (In early April, Maksim Levin, a Ukrainian videojournalist, became the sixth journalist killed in Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict.) |
We added a warning at the top of the essay that many of the images depict graphic violence, which is something The New York Times, like many news organizations, does occasionally. The practice irks Kennerly a bit: "The best photographs of war might make us want to look away," he writes. "It's imperative that we do not." |
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