MANCHESTER, NH.- On September 11, 2001, award-winning photojournalist James Nachtwey saw the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers from his apartment in lower Manhattan, just a short distance away. While others raced away from the crumbling towers, Nachtwey ran toward them with his camera. His photographs are among the most iconic and compelling visual accounts we have of that day. Many of those images, along with pictures he took in Afghanistan and Iraq in the years surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center, are the focus of the exhibition Witness to History: James Nachtwey—Afghanistan, Ground Zero, Iraq, on view at the Currier Museum of Art from September 11 through December 14, 2015.

The exhibition reveals war's tragic effect on combatants and civilians, and includes highly personal images of American troops and their families, as well as photographs of Iraqi and Afghani civilians and their families. The Currier worked directly with Nachtwey to acquire 17 of the 24 photographs in the main area of the exhibition.

“James Nachtwey’s photographs have been the standard-bearers for documentary photography for more than 30 years,” said Kurt Sundstrom, exhibition curator. “While most war photography exhibitions focus on combat photography, Witness to History reminds everyone of the struggles our troops face when they come back to the States. His photographs have the capacity to change a stubborn mind, open a closed heart and motivate the indifferent.”

The Exhibition
The main area of the exhibition unfolds chronologically in five parts: Afghanistan, 9/11 New York City, post-9/11 Afghanistan, the Iraqi war and Nachtwey’s photographs of American soldiers and their families coping with the physical and psychological aftermath of war. While most of the images have appeared in mass circulation publications such as Time and National Geographic, this is the first time so many of Nachtwey’s works have been displayed in large format, each image approximately 30” x 40”. In all, there are 24 photographs in the main area of the exhibition.

A separate room contains Nachtwey’s monumental 32’ long photo mosaic, The Sacrifice (negatives, 2006-7; print, 2015). These images, taken in American military medical units in Iraq, tell stories of life and death in the aftermath of battle. While often unsettling, the images bring home the realities of war to a country that mostly received sanitized versions of the conflict from embedded reporters. The title, The Sacrifice, confronts viewers with the human cost of war. The mosaic is made up of three rows of images, each containing 20 photographs.

Nachtwey worked exclusively with one of America’s premiere digital printers, Cone Editions of Topsham, Vermont, to print the photographs in this exhibition.

The Currier has reached out to several local communities in order to inform the interpretation within the exhibition. We are indebted to our Veterans’ Advisory Committee, which worked with us on our Vietnam exhibition in 2013, and members of the local Iraqi community, for adding their perspectives to the photographs on view.

Museum admission during the opening weekend of the exhibition (Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13) will be free.

James Nachtwey
NH resident James Nachtwey (born 1948) graduated from Dartmouth College in 1970 and began his career as a documentary photographer in 1980. Since then, he has photographed numerous historical events including the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the war in Chechnya, civil unrest in Northern Ireland, the genocide in Rwanda, the liberation struggle in South Africa and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Some of Nachtwey’s most compelling and poignant work is on view this exhibition, including images of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the challenges faced by American soldiers returning from these wars.

Nachtwey’s photographs have been featured in numerous books, scholarly articles and regularly appear in international magazines including Der Spiegel, National Geographic and Time. He has received numerous prizes and awards including the World Press Photo Award (twice), Magazine Photographer of the Year (seven times) and the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal an unprecedented five times. Nachtwey received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors. His work has also made the rare leap into the art world, having appeared in countless one person and group shows in museums worldwide.