Prints Of Darkness

By Richard Lacayo

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to bring on the end of history, a time when great power confrontation would give way to the mere frictions of the global marketplace and the lotions of consumerism would keep everything running smoothly. Maybe someday. What we know for now is that all around the edges of the peaceable Banana Republic, history is still being made the old-fashioned way, with land mines and machetes.

James Nachtwey, a contract photographer for TIME and one of the best-known photojournalists of the past 20 years, works along those edges. His passport has been stamped in some of the most chaotic spots of the postwar era--Northern Ireland, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Lebanon, Afghanistan--places where history always seems to finish its work in a room where there is human waste spilled across the concrete floor and blood smeared on the wall and the bare light bulb of reason is not much help or comfort.

Inferno (Phaidon; 480 pages; $125) is the record of what Nachtwey saw in the 1990s. After the fall of the communist dictator Ceaucescu, he visited the ghoulish places where Romanian orphans were warehoused. He moved on to Somalia and the Sudan--where famine was used as a weapon of mass destruction during civil war--and he photographed in the refugee camps. In 1994 he worked in Rwanda and Zaire during the unsupervised ferocities of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis and the regional chaos it set in motion, including what may have been the largest refugee exodus in history. Two years later he went to Chechnya when Russia made its first ham-fisted attempt to suppress the breakaway republic that it has recently bombed into submission again. He went to Bosnia and Kosovo, where words have failed over and again to convey the sheer sadism of what neighbor did to neighbor.

It's precisely when words fail that pictures like his are most needed. Some of them are obscene in one literal sense of that word--from ob scena, Latin for offstage--the sights to be kept from the view of the audience. In the parts of the world where Nachtwey does his work, public affairs have become not much more than a subdepartment of the larger human impulse toward bloodlust. People are regularly dismembered and disfigured. Their arms are blown off, their teeth are broken, and they are starved. "I am trying to upset people," Nachtwey said recently. "I am trying to interrupt their day."

Sometimes, as we see from his pictures, people suffer in a setting stripped of anything that identifies this as the modern world. There are no cell phones, no plastic bags, just rigor mortis on bare ground, and each shot is a primordial scene in which you recognize what the late 20th century had in common with, say, the darkest moments of the 6th. Sometimes his pictures include unnerving bits of modern flotsam. In a Rwandan refugee camp in Zaire a young man lies dead in a heap of used plastic intravenous bags. Elsewhere in the camp the corpses are pushed into piles by bulldozers. In Chechnya a man's body leans against a wall while a neighbor helps himself to a carton of American cigarettes that the dead man had been carrying. Then someone else steals his hat and leaves his frozen body in the snow.

It would be hard to call this book hopeful, but it does at least end in Kosovo, the place where the West finally found the will and the means to intervene effectively in a regional calamity. Inferno is a book with the weight and density of one of those great 20th century works of broken-hearted testimony, of the Holocaust documentary Shoah or the string quartets of Shostakovich. With 382 black-and-white pictures spread across oversize pages, it has the heft of a gravestone, which is not so different from what it is, a cenotaph for the last victims of the 20th century. What it tells us is that history did not end with the conclusion of the cold war. It just moved to places where its worst work was harder to see, or would have been if Nachtwey had not gone there.