"In the midst of such frenzied mayhem"

Stephen Debros

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The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a hidden war
Random House
ISBN 0-434-00733-1

In the run-up to what we have now come to experience as the new South Africa there was a twilight world inhabited by men and women from the media. Hated by the authorities, who watched them from behind riot-police shields or from the top-hatches of township-patrol Casspirs, a handful of crazy photojournalists brought back the images which most white South Africans did not want to see.

The book opens with a preface by the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, whose comments mark the ethos of this important and compelling book. “And why had no-one ever described what happened in Northern Ireland or in Bosnia, Kosovo, et al with its vicious brutality as examples of white-on-white violence?” asks Tutu, foregrounding South Africa’s obsession with labelling township conflict as an enigmatic “black thing”, a typical display of black-on-black violence. In unveiling the reality of secret government and sinister third-force involvement in the “troubles” (to apply a Northern Ireland phrase to our South African context) Tutu applauds the photographers who brought back visual evidence of a terrifying world within worlds — South Africa at war with itself.

“Just how could they have managed to capture such images in the midst of such frenzied mayhem? They must have been endowed with extraordinary courage to work in death zones with so much nonchalance and professionalism,” suggests the clergyman. But … There’s always a but.

“Now we know a little more as the veil is lifted on the ways this remarkable breed operated,” continues Tutu, “how frequently they had to be callous, to the extent of trampling all over corpses without showing too much emotion, so that they could capture that special image which would ensure that agencies would want their work.”

The book tells the story from the insiders’ perspective, narrated by Greg Marinovich as a joint project with Joao Silva. What we read is an account of the methods four media personalities, impressive icons in their own right, used as coping mechanisms in their professional and private lives. So draw up a comfortable chair and meet the famous members of the “Bang-Bang Club”.

Marinovich won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News in 1991 for his image of a man trapped inside an Inkatha hostel and methodically stabbed to death with pangas and roughly-sharpened, rusty, iron rods. Silva has also consistently won awards for his photographs and covered conflict across the globe. And when Ken Oosterbroek was gunned down by the friendly fire of peace-keepers in Thokoza township on 18 April 1994, it was Silva who instinctively photographed the last moments of a dying friend’s life. The picture on the cover of this book was taken by Oosterbroek and shows Kevin Carter aiming his camera at his fellow photographer. Around them lies the debris of chaos as Soweto residents run from the bullets of police moments after protesting the assassination of Chris Hani in April 1993. For his (in)famous image of a vulture seeming to be coldly stalking a dying child in the Sudan, Carter became, simultaneously, an international media scapegoat and a role model for, among others, a generation of Japanese schoolchildren. For that image he received a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. In little more than three months after Oosterbroek’s death, and having received his Pulitzer, international criticism and the adoring letters of his young Japanese fans, Carter would commit suicide.

In 1992 Living, a South African lifestyle magazine edited by Chris Marais, published an article on the new breed of South African photojournalists who were prepared to sacrifice everything, it seemed, in their pursuit of the image which would get on the newswires and keep making them famous. The story called this elite group, “the Bang-Bang Paparazzi” and while shunning the loathed label “paparazzi” the intimate group of friends took on the name and became self-styled members of the “Bang-Bang Club”.

The book and its accompanying images tell a compelling story of four men, and others too, who gambled literally everything in the pursuit of one overriding passion — photographs. It narrates the thrill of chasing a perfect moment and capturing it on a negative, then the sometimes harrowing fight to guard that image and see it appear on the wires and in print. It also relates the anguish of trying to cope with the psychological turmoil of this profession — broken relationships, crazy nights of alcoholic binges, too many drugs and yes, thoughts of suicide.

This is a powerful book which will confront or confirm your perceptions of South Africa in the 1980s and challenge (at least) some of your comfort zones. For some, like those who knew the people behind the photo-credits, the book feels too raw an experience to endure. For others it is a reminder of why so many young journalists, writers and photographers feel inspired and compelled to pursue their misunderstood and reckless vocation.

In 1992 Marinovich and Silva were in Somalia reporting the famine there. Narrating his feelings, and with hindsight to public responses to Carter’s vulture picture, Marinovich considers how neither he nor Silva personally assisted dying people, though they saw hundreds. Their role in that space was, arguably, purely to document, to be the best image capturers possible.

Marinovich seems to distill it perfectly in a statement I am sure Oosterbroek would understand: “Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for. But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released.”

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