Bang-Bang Club

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Bang-Bang Club is the name of a group of four photojournalists who were active in the townships of South Africa during apartheid , particularly between 1990 and 1994 . This group includes the South Africans Kevin Carter , Greg Marinovich , Ken Oosterbroek and the Portuguese João Silva , although they worked with many other photojournalists.

history

The name "Bang-Bang Club" comes from an article in the South African magazine Living in which the group was first referred to as "The Bang Bang Paparazzi ". The members saw their work misunderstood by the term paparazzi , which is why it was replaced by club . Bang-Bang , on the other hand, arose from the language culture of the townships, which used the term colloquially to refer to the violence and onomatopoetically described the sound of gunfire .

On April 18, 1994, Oosterbroek was killed by crossfire in a gun battle between national peacekeepers and supporters of the African National Congress . His colleague Marinovich was seriously injured. A judicial investigation into Oosterbroek's death began in 1995: the magistrate ruled that no party should be held responsible for the death. In 1999 Brian Mkhize, a member of the National Peacekeeping Force, said he believed the bullet that killed Oosterbroek was from the National Peacekeeping Force.

On October 23, 2010, Silva stepped on a land mine while accompanying US soldiers on patrol in Kandahar . He lost both legs below the knee.

Awards

Two members won Pulitzer Awards for their photographs: Marinovich won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991 for his coverage of the killing of Lindsaye Tshabalala in 1990. Tshabalala was suspected of espionage and burned by supporters of the African National Congress. The photo showed a man who hit the already burning Tshabalala with a machete . This is how Marinovich describes the situation in the retrospective:

“This was without doubt the worst day of my life, and the trauma remains with me, despite some twenty years and a lot of coming to terms with the incident, my role and what it means to be involved in murder. This mudered happened a month after I had witnessed the one in Nancefield Hostel, and I was determined to redeem myself by not just being an observer. I neither saved him, nor redeemed myself, though at least I did not act shamefully. "

“That was without a doubt the worst day of my life. The trauma remains with me despite twenty years and more frequent confrontation with the incident, my role and what it means to be involved in a murder. This murder happened a month after I witnessed the murder at Nancefield Hostel and I was determined to break away from the observer role. I neither saved him nor redeemed myself, yet I did not act shamefully. "

Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer for Featured Photography in 1994 for his photo of a vulture watching a starving child in southern Sudan .

Books

  • G. Marinovich, J. Silva: The Bang-Bang Club: snapshots from a hidden war. Basic Books, New York 2000, excerpts as digital copies .

Movies

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A. Feinstein: Journalists under fire: the psychological hazards of covering war. JHU Press, 2006, pp. 15-18.
  2. ^ Greg Marinovich: The fight for freedom . Retrieved July 4, 2011.