Photos: Four Generations of Fearless War Photographers



1 / 4 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Sean Thomas. Englishman Don McCullin, in Miami. Photographed at Soho Beach House.

At a time when images of inhumanity overwhelm us—and people the world over walk around with cell-phone cameras—the role of the war photographer might seem obsolete. But no. Today’s conflicts demand experienced chroniclers to record a nuanced truth—and to counter the rampant distortion and propaganda of the Digital Age. On these pages, then, we honor war photography’s Mount Rushmore: four of the modern masters who have created unparalleled bodies of work across four generations.

Don McCullin, 80, began his career photographing a gang of London thugs named the Guv’nors. Soon, he was covering wars from Cyprus to Biafra to Lebanon, from Northern Ireland to the current conflict in Syria. McCullin almost died twice in Cambodia: once when his Nikon stopped a sniper’s bullet; next when he was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar that killed a paratrooper in front of him. Devastating as his battle images have been, his depiction of poverty’s human toll in industrial England may be just as arresting—and over time prove just as enduring.

James Nachtwey, 68, is the most celebrated working photojournalist devoted to covering combatants and victims. He was part of the fearless Bang-Bang Club in South Africa, spent weeks hiding from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and was badly wounded by a grenade during the Iraq war. In January—near death in an Athens hospital (after surviving a scrape while covering the European refugee crisis for Time)—he was asked how many of his nine lives he had already used up. “Fifteen,” he remarked. In recent years, Nachtwey has divided his time among Dartmouth (where he has an academic fellowship), Thailand (where he was shot in the leg during a 2014 riot), and Manhattan, where he happened to be on September 11, 2001. His frame showing the cross atop the Church of Saint Peter—with the World Trade Center’s south tower collapsing behind it—is one of the iconic images of that terrible day.

Forty-two-year-old Lynsey Addario, who lives in London, worked as a photographer in Buenos Aires before traveling to Afghanistan in 2000 to document life under the Taliban. Since then, the MacArthur “genius” fellow—who, along with three New York Times colleagues, was captured and held by Libyan forces in 2011—has covered every stage of the ongoing war on terror, including her stunning images of American soldiers in Afghanistan’s infamous Korengal Valley. Among her chief themes: the plight of women and the displaced in conflict zones such as Lebanon, Congo, Darfur, and South Sudan. In early 2015, Steven Spielberg optioned her memoir, It’s What I Do. Naturally, Jennifer Lawrence is set to play the intrepid Addario.

The current dean of war photographers is David Douglas Duncan, who in January celebrated his 100th birthday. The Kansas City native became a photojournalist by chance while studying archaeology in college. When a local hotel caught fire, Duncan caught images of one of the guests repeatedly trying to get into the building to rescue a suitcase. The guest: bank robber John Dillinger. (The suitcase turned out to be full of cash.) Duncan joined the Marines in World War II and documented combat in the western Pacific, then went on to make some of the classic pictures of the Korean War, for Life, as well as memorable work during the Vietnam War, of which he was a vocal critic. Duncan, who just published his 28th book, My 20th Century, lives in the South of France, having been inspired to move there by two close pals: Robert Capa, another icon of 20th-century war photography, and Pablo Picasso, of whom Duncan took an estimated 10,000 photographs.