He moved on to Somalia and the Sudan where famine was used as a weapon of mass destruction during civil war - and he photographed in the refugee camps. Two years later he went to Chechnya when Russia made its first ham-fisted attempt to suppress the breakaway republic that it has recently bombed into submission again. He went to Bosnia and Kosovo , where words have failed over and again to convey the sheer sadism of what neighbor did to neighbor. It's precisely when words fail that pictures like his are most needed. In the parts of the world where Nachtwey does his work, public affairs have become not much more than a subdepartment of the larger human impulse toward bloodlust.
People are regularly dismembered and disfigured.
Their arms are blown off, their teeth are broken, and they are starved. I am trying to interrupt their day. Sometimes, as we see from his pictures, people suffer in a setting stripped of anything that identifies this as the modern world. There are no cell phones, no plastic bags, just rigor mortis on bare ground, and each shot is a primordial scene in which you recognize what the late 20th century had in common with, say, the darkest moments of the 6th. Sometimes his pictures include unnerving bits of modern flotsam.