children and military helicopter in El Salvador, by James Nachtwey, courtesy of BBC News
Toronto. … promise made is a debt unpaid … as Robert Service wrote in his 1907 epic Yukon poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee“. Service was born in England and lived in many places, including Canada (he once worked for the Toronto Star).
The ‘debt unpaid’ is by all of us to the photojournalists of the world who bravely burst into areas of natural disaster, human disaster, and conflict (war, civil insurrection, etc.) to bring us more timid souls the stories and photos of what is happening.
It should be noted that our society has had many Canadian photojournalists as guest speakers over the years, most recently Louis Palu in May of 2019.
Typical of photojournalism is the life and work of, “James Nachtwey: The last of the great photojournalists” as captured by Jonathan Head for the BBC News.
As to Nachtwey, who often worked in black and white film, Head writes in part. ” … In some images, though, the colour really stands out. An early photograph from the El Salvador civil war [top, left of this post] shows a military helicopter evacuating an injured soldier. But it is the three little girls crouching behind a tree in the foreground, their dresses of white, pink and pastel blue standing out in the orange dust cloud, who give the image its haunting loveliness.”
My thanks to my good friend, George Dunbar, who recently came across this BBC News article and shared it with me.
