Award-winning photographer James Nachtwey to visit Dartmouth

Posted 03/19/02

Award-winning photojournalist, James Nachtwey, often recognized as the world's greatest war photographer, will speak at Dartmouth on Monday, April 1, at a free, public presentation at 4 p.m. in Cook Auditorium. Nachtwey, a 1970 Dartmouth graduate, will offer his thoughts about his career and discuss his experiences in Afghanistan in 1996 and 2001. This talk is part of his residency as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth April 1–5.

Nachtwey's powerful photos have chronicled some of the most remote areas and intense situations on the planet. He has photographed deadly conflicts in Grozny, Beirut and Bosnia; famine in Somalia; orphaned, neglected children in Romania; massacres in Rwanda and Zaire, to name just a few locales. In the United States, Nachtwey has captured images of police work and prisons. He also happened to be at home in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, and documented the scene as the World Trade Center towers fell after being attacked.

His photos have appeared in Time magazine, Life magazine, National Geographic, The New Yorker and Paris Match, among other national and international publications. In addition to magazines, his work has been the subject of museum exhibitions around the world, in Rome, Madrid, New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Prague, among other cities. He has won numerous awards and honors, including most recently the Henry Luce Award in 2002 and a special Robert Capa Gold Medal for his September 11 photographs. Nachtwey is also the focus of the recent film "War Photographer," one of five nominees in this year's Academy Award category for feature documentary. In conjunction with Nachtwey's visit to campus, a selection of his photographs from the last ten years will be on view at Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art from March 26 through May 12.

At Dartmouth, Nachtwey will also participate in a free, public discussion on April 3 at 5:30 p.m. in Loew Auditorium, with Michael Ignatieff, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The two will talk about interethnic warfare in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Chechnya and Afghanistan. This presentation is sponsored by the Hood Museum and Dartmouth's Leslie Humanities Center.

Nachtwey's visit to Dartmouth is funded by the Montgomery Endowment, established in 1977 by the late Chicago attorney Kenneth F. Montgomery '25 and his wife, Harle, to "provide for the advancement of the academic realm of the college. . . making possible new dimensions for, as well as extraordinary enrichments to, the educational experience" at Dartmouth.