Renowned Time Magazine photojournalist James Nachtwey captures life-changing images such as the ruins of central Grozny in Chechnya in 1996.
Many of Nachtwey's photos can be found online at www.jamesnachtwey.com.
The work and life of humanitarian and photojournalist Nachtwey will be featured during the second annual Ray and Mary Giles Symposium on Citizenship and Public Service Oct. 29 on the USAO campus, where Nachtwey is scheduled to be the keynote speaker.
Based in New York City, he has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine for 25 years. In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer.
His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.
Nachtwey was in New York during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and produced a body of work documenting the attacks. Although he had been injured in his work before, Nachtwey received his first combat injury in Baghdad in 2003 when an insurgent threw a grenade into Nachtwey's humvee. Nachtwey took several photographs of a medic treating Time correspondent Michael Weisskopf before passing out.
USAO’s 2009 Ray and Mary Giles Liberal Arts Symposium is made possible through a generous gift from the Ray and Mary Giles Fund in the USAO Foundation.