In Times of War and Peace - Hardcover

David Turnley is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer and filmmaker. He has covered many of the major news stories of the past thirty years, producing several books out of these experiences. He lives in New York City.

Peter Turnley is renown for his photography of the realities of the human condition. His photographs have been featured on the cover of Newsweek 43 times and are published frequently in the world’s most prestigious publications. He has worked in over 90 countries and has witnessed most major stories of international geo-political and historic significance in the last thirty years.

IN TIMES OF WAR AND PEACE

“Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call up the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death.”
from Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea

The documentary photograph is memory incarnate. Photography is a way of turning memory into images connecting the pat to the present. To that end, some photographers have stormed the world’s battlements to bring back photographs that testify to the chaos, disarray, death and destruction that man and Nature have wrought. In the process, they have produced a visual memoir that records history, stirs conscience and affects the collective psyche.

The history of the last decades before the millennium has been indelibly preserved by David and Peter Turnley, twins who share not only genes in common but also an ardent and intense commitment to discovery and enlightenment. Their assignments have taken them to seventy-five countries, many of them obscure with unfamiliar and recognizable names. Their photographs reflect their respect for the dignity of the individual, a compassionate solicitude for the plight of their subjects. They have succeeded in retaining their sanity and humanity in the face of repetitive obscenities that challenge imagination and desensitize normal emotions. Despite having been to hell and back, theirs is not an apocalyptic vision of the world. Though photographing a stormy and unsightly world, they often find oases of kindness and reverence for life that generates hope for the future of mankind. The nobility of their subjects often transcends the horror of the event.

Paris-based, the Turnley’s are nomadic beings responding to the demands of their news-driven careers. The glamour is elusive. The loneliness, overpowering. The pressure, unrelenting. The thrills, indefinable. Their working days are dictated by the amorphous, erratic, unpredictable flow of events and the relentless discipline of magazine and newspaper deadlines. Theirs is a subsistence existence in venues like Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Chechnya. They constantly stand on the edge of the precipice between life and death. They share much of the physical anguish and austere living conditions of the people they photograph.

These are not hit-and-run photojournalists, trading on shock and sensationalism. Throughout their careers they have stayed the course, often investing years in areas where they had the greatest contact and interest. David Turnley spent three years chronicling the inevitable destruction of South Africa’s apartheid system and the emergence of a democratic state in which black Africans voted for the first times in their lives. Peter Turnley has had a recurring interest in the plight of the fourteen million refugees wandering the globe and documented the decline and fall of the Communistic system in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. Both spent a Beijing spring in Tiananmen Square recording the bold and heroic but fruitless struggle for democracy by China’s youthful dissidents that culminated in the June, 1989 massacre.

This exhibition is not only a testament to the devotion and ardor that suffuses the work of the Turnkeys. It also recognizes that without the support of two segments of the much-maligned media the depth and breadth of these coverage would not have been possible. The Detroit Free Press created a ground-breaking international roving photojournalist designation for David Turnley, previously assigned to cover breaking news events in Detroit, Michigan. Newsweek has provided the wherewithal and the original forum for the publication of Peter Turnley’s photographs based on a yearly contract for his services. The Black Star Agency has disseminated their work to newspapers and magazines throughout the world.

These photographs remind us that ours is still an imperfect world. The Turnleys are in the forefront of a legion of like-minded photojournalists who give voice to the silent, succor to the pained, and hope to the defiant. Their torch of concern shines like a beacon in the dark and distant corners of the world.