Photography in the Aftermath: Part 2 (Rwanda)

In our age of instantaneous communication, what is left for the still camera? Is it truly stuck with the unenviable task of clean-up? Does the noble tradition that gave us Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Danny Lyon and Susan Meiselas now just putter around in the rubble? Is there another way for photography-after-video to engage in the civic discourse?

Thinking about those question in my previous post, I thought first of Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences series. Torgovnik is a photojournalist of the old school who’s been a contract photographer for Newsweek since 2005. Visit his website and you’ll see classic breaking-news work, much of it assignment-based (the Haitian earthquake, elections in Guatemala, meth addicts in America).

But with Intended Consequences, he entered into the story long after the news had broken and the media apparatus had moved on to the latest disaster du jour. These pictures, many of them double portraits, depict Rwandan women and their children born of rape during the 100-days-long genocidal fury that scorched their country in 1994.

But rather than the ruins of war, the “wreckage” Torgovnik portrays is literally human. As with much documentary work, the meaning of these pictures is deepened by the accompanying text – the women’s testimonies about what happened to them. The narratives the women tell are, sadly, of a piece: about the killing, about slaughtered family, about repeated rape, gang rape, abduction, sexual brutality, HIV, and, for some, a chilling and thoroughly understandable ambivalence about their own children.

But Torgovnik is interested in far more than recounting a nightmare: “My project is about Rwanda but it’s not about Rwanda,” he says. Many of the militia who killed and raped in Rwanda escaped, setting up for business in neighboring nations. “The same guys who were raping in Rwanda are raping today in Congo,” he explains.

In 1968, Cornell Capa wrote, “The concerned photographer finds much in the present unacceptable which he tries to alter. Our goal is simply to let the world also know why it is unacceptable.”
In 2008, Torgovnik explained, “What I’m trying to do really is to show the consequences and, hopefully, through this project and through seeing how severe these consequences are people will maybe be a little more active and help people who are going through it now. Yes, Rwanda happened 14 years ago but it’s still happening today.”

“It’s beyond my understanding how the world is letting this happen now,” he adds. Like the classic concerned photographers that Capa acknowledged 40 years ago, Torgovnik wants to wake us up to, and take responsibility for, the nightmare of our collective making.

Click here for Part 3.

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Note: Jonathan Torgovnik has also produced a series of videos that incorporate the still images, film footage, and the interviews. You can view them here.