A Photographer Shot a Shot Photographer

On the making of Apocalypse Now, director Francis Ford Coppola famously remarked that, “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.”

It was an exaggeration, but not a wild one. A catastrophic shoot in the Philippines included lead actor Martin Sheen having a near-fatal heart attack, a typhoon that destroyed Coppola’s elaborate set, and helicopters that were called away by President Ferdinand Marcos in order to combat a real-life insurgency in the jungle. A six week schedule of shooting dragged on to sixteen months. By the end of it, Coppola was threatening suicide.

Since hearing Mr. Coppola’s strange remark about his own film, I’ve become fascinated by works of art that are what they’re about. I don’t see them often, but this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography went to Adrees Latif, who made an image that’s like a mirror facing a mirror.

Latif’s image is deceptively complex. It shows Kanji Nagai, a photojournalist, seconds after he was fatally shot by soldiers during a civilian protest in Yangon, the capital of Burma. Sprawled on his back, he’s using the last moments of his life to shoot video of the soldiers who killed him.

In other words, we have a photojournalist who risked his life to take a photograph of a photojournalist who risked his life to take a photograph. Every time I see this picture, I get the uneasy feeling that a second after taking this photo, Mr. Latif himself will be shot dead by a Burmese soldier, thereby repeating the death of Kanji Nagai, which had played out in his viewfinder in the previous second. (And maybe another photographer is also nearby, taking the photo of the death of Adrees Latif, as well. Who wins the Pulitzer Prize in the event of an infinite regress?)

I also wonder if this photograph reflects our changing attitudes toward surveillance. Surveillance has gotten a bad name of late, with cameras in mobile phones, shopping malls, and governments of the world installing video recorders in public intersections, freeways, airports, and border crossings.

But Latif’s photograph takes our Minority Report paranoia about surveillance, and turns it on its head. Now the public surveils the government, not the other way around, and the results are entirely for the good. Nagai watches the soldiers, while Latif watches Nagai watching the soldiers.

None of it is enough to prevent the tragedy, but the photograph does accomplish a few important things. It exposes the shameful acts of the Burmese government. It protects journalists by warning governments of the world that when cameras are everywhere, the world sees everything. And Latif’s photograph both glorifies the courage of photographers like Nagai, while protecting them from the very danger that makes such courage possible.

That’s a lot for a single image.

When two mirrors face each other, you can gaze into infinity and never see the last reflection. And in the end, Mr. Latif’s photograph leaves us with a similar mystery about the image within the image. Although we can’t say for sure, the most compelling image is the one we'll never see: Kenji Nagai’s last moments of video, which he took while the soldiers approached him as he was dying on a the street. What does that video look like? What words were exchanged between the dying Nagai and the soldier who killed him?

Only the Burmese government knows what Nagai’s camera recorded in those final seconds. But authoritarian governments like the one in Yangon are too busy surveilling their own citizens to bother putting the mirror up to themselves. The last images of Kenji Nagai are likely to remain a mystery forever.

Comments

[JBrad]

The lens must always be focused on repressive governments around the world (including in this country). I have seen this image before, and it is very powerful. Excellent post.