James Nachtwey is a hero

[...]Now, in case you're wondering why I have a certain interest, or fascination lets call it, with torture and beheadings and all of those things I have mentioned, is because each of these items reminds me in life over and over again what beasts we human beings really are. When you get right down to it human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro Magnon people who lived twenty five thousand years ago. No different. Our DNA hasn't changed substantially in a hundred thousand years. We're still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain.Fight of flight. Kill or be killed. We like to think we've evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater, we can write a sonnet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We're barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the fucking jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.

- George Carlin

James Nachtwey has given his life to serve truth and justice by capturing the pain, horror and devastation caused by the madness of war, through his photographic lens while at the same time using his artistic skill and vision to make the images he produces striking and immediate.

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allowed genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other; and to that extent, I can accept myself. - James Nachtwey

The legacy of chemical warfare in the Vietnam war, photos by James Nachtwey
The Vietnam syndrome, essay by Christopher Hitchens