From my boyfriend, but still. He brought it to Cambodia, and I don't know if it was the fact that I brought no books with me (doh!) or the cool-guy cover, but I kept casually picking it up when he would leave it around, pretending I wasn't that captivated by it. This past week, I actually committed to the book and read the majority - officially asking to borrow it while traveling.
My take: If you've ever wondered about the stories surrounding the photos in the newspaper, this book is for you. Expectedly, it's not all sunshine and roses, and isn't exactly a beach read. It's a very realistic, very personal look at a group of war photographers in South Africa in the early 90s who struggled with the tension between documenting conflict and taking a human role in response to suffering. Two of the photographers won Pulitzer Prizes, and one of those two, who took this picture, took his own life when what he'd seen and done became too much.
The book gives a very honest, non-idealistic version of the stories behind the Bang-Bang Club's photos, and of course it includes dozens of the photos mentioned. It also chronicles a turbulent period of South African history that I shamefully knew little about. A story that makes you think, a book that makes you want to Google lots of names and historical events to learn more. Though we're not all war photographers (not that I'd ever wanted to be one, but this book also confirmed that I never could be), the questions raised by this book are still important, for example: In a time of media saturation, when are we voyeurs and when are we complicit in inaction?
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