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This Is War evolved out of my work as a photographer covering some of the bloodiest conflicts of the late 20th century. The imagery is not pretty, nor could it be. But seeing it—looking squarely at the misery delivered by leaders who promised to do good for their people—is important. More than that, refusing to see it, whether out of personal or political discomfort, is a form of misinformation.

The book tells the story of war through the experiences of both civilians and combatants. The civilians were entering a labyrinth of grief that they would occupy for the rest of their lives. Many of the combatants naively viewed war as an opportunity, only to discover that their bodies were mere fodder for the powerful.

I first picked up a camera in El Salvador in the mid-1980s. I photographed the bodies that the notorious death squads left on street corners at night. In the early ’90s, I was posted to the former Yugoslavia, and later, to Africa. Unscrupulous leaders, driven by ego, profit, and ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas, waged war on civilians and turned villages into killing fields.

To be a war photographer is to forge an intimate relationship with the dead and dying. We occupy disparate worlds, empathizing with those reeling from profound loss, even while interacting with those who take human lives. To witness brutality is to sustain psychic damage: What the eye sees, the brain records and cannot erase. For the war photographer, the conjunction of horror and opportunity adds a further twist.

1993, Sarajevo, Bosnia: Women and children wave to their loved ones as humanitarian convoys evacuate to safety hundreds of women, children, and the elderly suffering from indiscriminate attacks, hunger, and hardship. 1993, Sarajevo, Bosnia: Muslim women and children, who typically do not attend burials, grieve the deaths of several children killed by mortar fire.

I understood this ambivalence while photographing street battles between rival militias in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1996. I came upon a man foraging for food in a destroyed shop. A group of fighters pounced on him. They ignored his pleas for mercy as they dragged him through the streets and, moments later, executed him.    

Developing the film in the quiet of my hotel room, I retched as I relived what I had seen an hour earlier: A group of teenagers stripped an unarmed man who did not expect to die that day to his underwear and socks and murdered him in a ditch for no apparent reason. But I was also gratified when I discovered that the photos were in focus and powerful. I knew they would distinguish my career, and they did.  

May 1996, Monrovia, Liberia: A combatant fires a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) into a neighborhood occupied by the rival faction. May 1996, Monrovia, Liberia: Thousands of Liberian civilians crowd onto a ship to escape heavy fighting in the Liberian capital that had killed hundreds and brought Monrovia to its knees.

My life as a war photographer was punctuated by such moments of cognitive dissonance. Photographing the wounded in frenetic hospitals, mothers rocking in grief, soldiers stepping on land mines, and militiamen taunting, torturing, and killing one another, I wrestled with the awareness that the most painful episodes of these people’s lives were also occasions on which a part of me thrived.  

I produced this work at a frenzied pace: airport, war, photograph, airport, war, repeat. My images exposed atrocities, signaled the beginnings of epidemics, and set off alarms in world capitals. But as the years passed, I became aware that with each war, what I gained in stature as a photojournalist, I lost in human empathy.

The realization drove me from my profession and led me to another: documenting war crimes in West Africa for a human-rights organization by means of witness testimony. Immersing myself in a world of policy, justice, and state building, I worked to stop the atrocities I had witnessed as a conflict photographer. I had a daughter, I fostered a son, and I didn’t look back.  

September 1989, San Salvador, El Salvador: Wounded Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front combatants, and a little boy who sits beneath the amputated leg of his father, occupy the national cathedral to demand medical care. September 1993, Mostar, Bosnia: A little boy, wounded when a shell was lobbed by Bosnian Croat forces into the Muslim quarter of Mostar, stands in his destroyed home.

I stuffed boxes of negatives from my photojournalism days into footlockers. And then, 20 years later, I pulled them out again and saw the images I’d made through a different prism. I had spent decades analyzing how states fail and why wars persist. Raising children had forever altered my understanding of the aching magnitude of loss, and how this loss, if not managed, drives ever more violence.

This Is War represents a deeply personal journey—a reckoning with what I witnessed over a tumultuous decade and the toll it took on me. But the book is also my contribution to the historical record of the conflicts covered and the role women have played in conflict photojournalism.

June 1998, Mek’ele, Tigray Region, Ethiopia: A man wounded during an Eritrean air attack on a civilian neighborhood in the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region is carried from the scene minutes after the attack. May 1994, Benako, Tanzania: Hutu refugees, many of whom participated in the massacre of 500,000 Tutsis, reside in a camp just across the border with Tanzania.

My work is also a call for reflection on why conflicts relapse. Way too many of the images I took decades ago could be taken today. At the time of writing, war has returned to Sudan, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it never left. El Salvador’s ideological war has been replaced by bloody gang violence. In Bosnia, ethnic tensions are on the rise. In too many places, the factors that drove conflicts in decades past—predatory governance, corruption, and crushing poverty—continue unabated. These images are a reminder that the parts of the world that are broken still need a durable fix.

To be the last person a dying woman, or a condemned man, sees on Earth is a morally uncomfortable thing, but also one that conveys a certain responsibility. War photographers are historians, artists, trespassers, and emotional bandits with complicated motives, some virtuous, some not. The images themselves, at their best, extract the essence of conflict, beseeching the viewer to honor those who have perished and to protect the rest of humanity from its worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.  

This article was excerpted from Corinne Dufka’s book This Is War: A Decade of Conflict: Photographs

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