Customer Reviews

Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer

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Peter Howe has carefully crafted a stunning book. He combines the images of 10 renowned combat photographers with a stark, spare, and candid narrative, as each describes their work.
The book succeeds at many levels. Idealism, adrenaline and ambition are sometimes countered by regret. The photographers are complex and complicated. Some have been wounded -one deliberately by an Israeli soldier, it's alleged- all are battle hardened, streetwise and changed. The reality of war; blood in the snow; dying men; chilling bravado; starving children; crumbled buildings; is on every page. We know what war is like because the photographers are there for us.

It's not the photos in this book that captured me -- yes they're astounding, but I've seen many of them before -- it's the journalists' write-ups beside the photos that I found intriguing. I never realized before the angst that haunts war photographers, the guilt that plagues them when they file their photos and stories with their editors. They make money on other people's suffering, yet their photos often help the people who suffer by informing the world of what's going on. But for the most part they can't help the one person they've captured so brilliantly in one frozen moment in time, and because of that many can't sleep at night. They make the world a better, safer place, and pay for it with damaged psyches.

Peter Howe has assembled a powerful, moving collection of war photographs combined with the recollections of the photographers who made the pictures. At a time when we are on the verge of entering a conflict much like the conflicts covered by these photographers, "Shooting Under Fire" stands as a startling reminder of the grim, merciless and all-too-human realities of war.

Once I picked up this book I could not put it down. Peter Howe has engaged ten of the most articulate and talented war photographers. Each photographer gives compassionate details about their lives, the pictures they have taken, and the effects of war on themselves and the world. To truly understand why the world needs these photographers and why these photographers do what they do, then you must buy this book!

Shooting Under Fire is an amazing collection of photographs from 10 living combat correspondants (except for one who died while photographing the 9/11 attacks). The color images are stunning in their graphic portrayal of the horrors of war, and the black and white images are intense and gritty in their truth.

As a photographer and a Peace Studies major (recently graduated), there was really *nothing* about this book that I didn't love!

For the record, the best present I was ever given was a charcoal drawing of one of the photos in this book, created by the same person who gave me the book as a gift!

I found Shooting Under Fire to be a critical, thought provoking piece of work. Peter Howe, through a series of interviews, helps to shed light on the all to horrific world of war photography form both sides of the cameras lens. A bookshelf essential for war history buffs.

Peter Howe has collected firsthand accounts from ten of the world's leading war photographers in Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer. Riveting photographs are displayed with the stories, and the photos make the words spring to life as you read. Each story and related photos makes the reader a witness to unspeakable horrors, tragedies, and great courage. Every word engulfs all your senses in the war each photographer experienced. You feel as though you should be able to smell the fire, feel the bomb's shock-waves and hear the chilling screams of dying men. You are transported as you read your way through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Palestine.

The images are diverse - beautiful, horrible, violent and quiet. They show you truths that heroic and patriotic images usually shown during wartime do not. The truth is that soldiers, civilians, and civilizations are destroyed and obliterated in war. Wars shatter minds, hearts, and bodies. War is ugly. The photos force you to look at its ugliness.

Through the combination of words and images, I began to understand a little bit of the constant terror and danger that these photographers lived with while covering their respective wars. I also got the sense that photographing war changed them. Each describes the strangeness caused by being in a war zone by choice, with a camera, and yet totally unable to halt violence of any kind. The soldiers are sent there and the civilians cannot usually leave. But the photographers choose to be there. They stay to document history.

Even if you never speak of these conflicts and their photographs again, the photographers will have done their jobs by changing you as well. After you read this book, the conflicts and atrocities will have been uncovered, revealed, to one more person. That is something the perpetrators of the horrors depicted desperately did not want to take place. So go ahead. Be a witness. I dare you.

The photographs in this book are ... well ... amazing. Most of the most famous war photographs are included in this collection, and you will seen some, if not all of them before. But, it's nice to have them all together. Most of the captioning alongside the images shows that the photograhers are self-centered, egotistical social misfits (like most great artists) with an incredible eye for light and composition.

Great appreciation of what a war photographer goes through. Intense and famous photos included in this book. Get this one.

Very inspiring to an aspiring photojournalist. Also makes one aware of the risks involved and the state of affairs around the globe.