“If I don’t photograph it, it won’t be known,” was her guiding principle. The power of her images lies in the gift of recognizing the special in a moment and showing what the machinery of war does to the people affected.
Pictures which refer to human violability
Reportage photography always has something to do with people, and it always has a documentary character. Anja Niedringhaus’ photographs document war. But despite their dramatic nature, these war testimonies are more than one-dimensional images of reality. The camera does not merely reproduce what came before the photographer’s lens. Anja Niedringhaus’ works follow a compositional will that decides on timing, motif, perspective and detail. And takes a stand, otherwise the picture would lose itself to the arbitrariness of the moment. What kind of face does war have? How exactly do we want to see it? Can we bear it at all? Anja Niedringhaus has had the unvarnished reality before her eyes. Her photographs, however, treat us gently: They let us sense the horror in approximations and refer to the vulnerability of man in external destruction.
(Courtesy by Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, author: Anne-Marie Beckmann)
