It's hard to imagine a photography book more searing and influential than James Nachtwey's "Inferno." Published in April 2000, the book was a wake-up call to a media-jaded world. A collection of Nachtwey's photojournalism from the last decade of the 20th century, it told of recent wars, famines, crushing poverty and the aftermath of horrific acts of cruelty. The images were often hard to look at, but harder to ignore.

Nachtwey knows the necessity of creating such images. In the 1990s, whether sent by a news publication or drawn by his own conscience, he traveled to places ranging from Romania to Somalia, from Bosnia to Rwanda. Often, he worked with the knowledge that any one of his photographs could make a life-or-death difference for the people in front of the camera.

These strikingly powerful images, as well as Nachtwey's unwavering commitment to his vocation, have won him respect the world over. His numerous awards include the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award (which he has won twice), the Magazine Photographer of the Year award, and three ICP Infinity Awards for Photojournalism. It was our privilege to speak to him recently while he was on a speaking tour in San Francisco.

Sarah Coleman: Inferno is an extraordinary photography book in many ways -- in size, emotional impact, and also, possibly, in some of the intentions you have for it. After ten years of doing this work and having it in news magazines, how does it feel to see it collected in this book, in this form?

James Nachtwey: I think there can be various functions for documentary photography. The primary function of my work is to be in the mass media, at the time that the events I'm photographing are happening. But a secondary use is to enter the collective memory, to be an archive, so that what we've learned from history won't be forgotten. That's what Inferno is. It is not a standard issue photography book. It's not my 150 best pictures. It's an archive. An archive of memory.

SC: The response to the book has been amazing. Were you expecting anything like it?

JN: Not at all. We thought that a few hundred aficionados of photography might buy it and then, that it would perhaps sell to some libraries and universities. But to get the mainstream response that we've had - we simply didn't expect that. It's very gratifying to know that people are interested in this subject, that they want to connect with it. They're not turning away from it, they're actually seeking it out.

SC: In the section on Romania, you write that you wanted to flee the place yourself. It was hard to stay, and it must have been pretty difficult in Somalia and Bosnia as well. What do you tell yourself in those situations?

JN: That I have a purpose being there. There's only one reason for going to a famine with a camera, and that's to get help for people. You need to keep that idea clear in your mind because the suffering is so intense. To look at someone starving, and then to raise a camera and try to make a picture of it is, you know, very troubling. But I will say, and I think people should know this, that most of the pictures that are published of famines are taken in and around feeding centers. When you see people in a state of starvation, it doesn't mean they're not being helped -- they're still in very dire straits physically, but they're being helped. It's not as if we go in and photograph and then just leave people to starve.

SC: Going to Rwanda must have been disturbing in a different way. You have that amazing image of a Hutu man who spoke out against the genocide, and who barely survived a machete attack to his face. What have you learned ­ in particular, what do you think brings people to a point of which they perpetrate such horrific acts of violence?

JN: Even though I've witnessed it, it's very hard to understand and come to grips with. It's beyond my understanding actually -- how that much fear and hatred can be generated. Ethnic cleansing is very personal, that's why it's done face to face. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of the capacity of human beings.

SC: And yet it seems you've captured a lot of moments of hope in the midst of these crises; people helping each other out, feeding each other. You say in your afterword that "humanity continues to evolve." Do you feel positive about the evolution?

JN: I think we have to have hope. I think it's too easy to give up, it's too easy to despair, and I don't think we can afford it.

SC: In the book's introduction, Luc Sante writes about you as being someone who's gone from being a war photographer to an anti-war photographer. How did that shift come about?

JN: It's complicated, but I think it's a sense of personal ambition evolving into more of a sense of mission. I think it's the maturing and the deepening of the whole meaning of a career in documentary photography. That I'm not simply photographing the dynamics of a war or of a famine, or of some political injustice -- I'm trying to put it in human terms. Trying to make an appeal to people's best instincts, with a belief that they will refuse to accept what is unacceptable.

SC: You also talk about how you used to want to get just the best few shots, and how now that's evolved more into telling a story. Now, does that mean that you're not as concerned about things like the composition of an individual shot? JN: No, not at all. I've always been concerned about composition, up to the point that it serves the subject, where it's not for it's own sake. Where it allows the viewer to make a very immediate and direct, powerful connection with the image, but not get hung up on the cleverness or self-consciousness of the composition for its own sake.

SC: Can we know something about your background? I read in Russell Miller's book on Magnum that you're self-taught, is that right?

JN: Right.

SC: How did you go about teaching yourself?

JN: By reading books about technique, learning the mechanics of developing and printing. I hired darkroom space, practiced what I'd read. More importantly, I used books as a source of inspiration. I looked at monographs by the great photographers -- Cartier Bresson, Eugene Smith, Don McCullin, Josef Koudelka. I used to go to the bookshops, early on when I had no money at all, and stand in the aisles and look at these books - it was what I called a 'free university'. It took me several years to get what I thought was sufficient training, to feel that I was legitimate and that I really had something to offer. The self-training was followed by four years at a small newspaper, and then I began to travel and do this kind of work. And, I think from the very beginning, when I first went to Northern Ireland in 1991, it felt like the right thing to doit felt like, "Yeah, I can do this, I understand the value of this, I think I can make a difference."

SC: You were taking photographs of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland.

JN: That's right.

SC: What did you learn, then, about going in to a situation like that, a very heated situation, and communicating it to the world outside?

JN: It was very instinctual, it was very intuitive. There were no guidelines for it, I think it was kind of spontaneous improvisation with history as it's being written in real time. It was intense. Ten men starved themselves to death one after another. People on the streets were expressing their willingness to sacrifice everything to get what they felt were basic rights, things that I had been given and was allowed to take for granted! I found it very moving and exciting. I felt connected, straight away.

SC: After Northern Ireland, were you mostly in war zones for the next few years. How do you decide where to go? Potentially there are a lot of war zones, there are a lot of areas of conflict in the world. How do you make those decisions?

JN: It's subjective. Sometimes it's very obvious. When there is something happening, you know, to the degree of magnitude of genocide in Rwanda, it obviously becomes a moral event, and it's about getting it to the public attention. There are other things that are less obvious, such as the story of the Untouchables in India, or the orphanages in Romania. They're not in the public eye, but they're obviously worth documenting.

SC: When you went to the orphanages in Romania, you went under your own steam, and you had to pay for it yourself.

JN: Yes, that's right. I couldn't get any of the magazines I normally worked for to get interested in the story, but I was committed to it, so I went on my own. It was the same when I photographed the famine in Somalia, again, there was no support.

SC: There seems to be a kind of catch-22 situation in some of those cases. I was reading about this new famine in Southern Ethiopia, and they said that until the TV crews go in, until the photographers go in, the governments won't come up with aid. But without the public awareness, they won't send TV crews in.

JN: Well, I think this current famine is interesting because it actually is getting quite a bit of coverage, even before there's been mass starvation. The last Ethiopian famine wasn't known about until it was well underway. Tens of thousands of people had already died, and nothing was done about it until the pictures came out. You could say the same about the Somalian famine in '92, that the pictures actually saved lives. There was a direct relationship between documenting the problem and relief going in.

SC: You have one picture from Somalia, where it's two images on a single page, and the top one a guy is being handed a packet of rehydration salts by Unicef, and then in the bottom one the packet of salts is just lying by him on the ground and he's lying there. That seems as though it could be an indictment of Unicef and of the relief workers: "Here, have these rehydration salts," but he's not even able to use them.

JN: Yes, in fact that's not how rehydration salts should be distributed. They should be mixed with water. I think this was a volunteer from the area who wasn't well educated in that particular means of rehydration, and didn't know better. There were other people around supervising rehydration and medical care, and eventually the man was given the proper care.

SC: What's your impression in general of how the aid agencies are working? Is there anything they could be doing that they're not, or that they can't because they aren't getting enough support? JN: Generally, I applaud what they're doing. They're up against a lot of political problems, enormous logistical problems. I think, you know, one criticism would be sometimes they seem to be weak ­ they could take a stronger stand in the face of a regressive regime that's trying to curtail aid. I think, sometimes, that if they stood together they could make a stronger show, but basically, I think they're doing tremendous work. I think that the work that I do, and the rest of the press does, in these kind of humanitarian emergencies goes hand in hand.

SC: You've said that there have been times when you've put the camera down because you felt like you'd make more of a difference.

JN: Oh yes, oh, absolutely! There were times when I know that I'm the only one who can save someone. I've carried wounded out of battlefields when there weren't enough people to carry the wounded. I've pulled people out of lynch mobs because there was a chance that I could do it, so I tried. There were times during a famine when I've taken people who've come in from the countryside and don't know where the feeding center is, and they collapsed on the edge of town, and I realize that once I turn my back on them they're going to die. So I take them to the feeding center. But those are things that anyone would do, I think, faced with those circumstances. You have to be a human being first.

SC: You've been wounded a couple of times. . .

JN: Yes, I've taken some shrapnel. I've had several very close calls. There's been several times when people right next to me were shot or killed. There were times when rockets landed a few feet away and didn't blow up ­ just stuck in the earth. I've been in ambushes when bullets have gone through the headrest of my car and I didn't get hit. It's just I've been very very lucky to have survived.

SC: It never made you think twice about taking a desk job??

JN: If you think about it too much then you won't do it. I try and just go on, call it luck, and keep moving.

SC: What about when you come back to the U.S., and you see the kind of decadence and over-consumption that's characterized the last decade in this country. How do you feel? Does it sicken you?

JN: It's gotten a little worse in the last few years because there is so much wealth being generated now in the Western world ­ in America in particular. And yet, there's less awareness of what's happening in less fortunate parts of the world. It's a broadening gap that I'm desperately trying to fill in my own way, along with a lot of other journalists, and we're not getting the cooperation from our publishers and editors. It's not so much that I judge people for having a good life. I'm happy for them ­ I don't judge it negatively. But I think there should be more awareness, so that people have a perspective on where they are and what they have, and the effect they could have on situations that need to be attended to. Public opinion is what creates an impetus to change, and everybody can be part of that, but they have to have the awareness. If there are fewer pages allocated in mass media publications then it's harder for that awareness to be created. That's what bothers me ­ with all this wealth and power, we should be able to use more of it in beneficial ways.

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SC: Do you think there's any likelihood that the media will go back to more extensive coverage? JN: Well you know, people vote with their feet. And it's interesting that an organization like Benetton has created ads which often have more content than the editorial pages of the magazine they're in. You see the content now in the advertising and not in the editorial pages. I mean, to a small degree, but it's ironic. SC: Does that prove anything, though? Isn't it just a cynical marketing ploy?

JN: Not entirely. They've obviously determined that people want to know, and are attracted to those things, and by communicating them they can make people aware of their product. I think it's an interesting concept. I wish more editors and publishers would think along those same lines ­ give viewers more credit. Because they actually do want to be engaged with what's going on in the world in some way. And they need to be given that opportunity.

SC: It sounds as though you have no intention of slowing down.

JN: Absolutely not! As far as my own work is concerned, I can only keep trying. I have access to the press, I have established credibility, nobody tells me what to do or how to photograph. And because I have this position within the press, I have to do my best to exert pressure from within. The work I do is my personal work: I'm using photography to make statements about what's going on in the world. Giving up would be useless.

SC: I want to thank you for doing this interview, and also for the work that you're doing.

JN: You're welcome. Thank you for making space for it.

(c) Sarah Coleman 2000.