| Hachiko |
May 4, 2004 01:00 |
Picture this...
Quote:
With soldiers silhouetted against dramatic desert sunsets, or helicopters swooping over cityscapes, most mainstream-media photographs we see of the war in Iraq are nothing if not models of artistic composition and taste.
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Ryuichi Hirokawa
For the most part, though, they are also devoid of the human tragedy that everybody knows is happening there minute by minute.
One view in the news industry has it that readers should be spared the depressing details.
Then there is Ryuichi Hirokawa's view.
Hirokawa, 60, a photojournalist with nearly four decades' experience reporting political hotspots, has laid down his camera for now to launch Days Japan, a Japanese-language monthly magazine that shoves the war in Iraq and other serious issues, such as Hansen's disease and domestic violence, right in its readers' faces.
On the cover of the inaugural April issue there was a photo of an Iraqi man cradling his 9-year-old niece, whose right leg has been shredded by a cluster bomb. (The tatters of her foot, hanging by a tendon from a leg bone stripped of flesh are plainly visible in an uncropped version of the photo inside the magazine.) Also included are bleak images from war-torn Chechnya by James Nachtwey, and of starved desert wanderers in Mali by Sebastiao Salgado; both photojournalists are among the best-known in the world.
Such photos may shock, says Hirokawa, but anything milder amounts to cheerleading for war or turning tragedy into entertainment.
A controversial view, certainly, but Hirokawa's opinions are founded on firsthand experience few could rival. In addition to decades of photographing war and other strife (he visited Iraq three times last year) he has also made numerous television documentaries and written both fiction and nonfiction books on issues including guerilla campaigns against Israel, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and AIDS.
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A boy paralyzed from the neck down in March 2003 by a coalition cluster bomb is tended by his father at their home in southern Iraq.
In 1982, his photos from the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon -- taken immediately after a massacre there by Israel-supported Phalangist Christian militia forces -- won him the Yomiuri Shimbun's Shashin Taisho photo award, just one of a long list of coveted journalism honors that have made him a legend among Japanese photojournalists.
In this recent interview with The Japan Times, Hirokawa is harshly critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. However, he also tells how, after graduating in sociology from Waseda University in 1967, he moved to a kibbutz there to work and study Hebrew, only returning to Japan in 1970. Of his three children, two -- born to Israeli-born former wife Ruti Yoskovici -- are, like their mother, Jewish.
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Japan Times |
