Bleak Beauty Blog

Lynsey Addario’s (#lynseyaddario)

Lynsey Addario’s (@lynseyaddario)

 picture of dead children near Kiev is one of the  truly great war photographs.

She has some competition. Gardner’s picture of a dead civil war soldier, his rifle by his side.

(Garner moved the rifle and might have moved the soldier’s body too.) Capa’s death of a Spanish soldier at the moment he is hit. (It’s been suggested this was an impossible shot, and it was staged). Even the incredible flag pictures Yevgeny Khaldei (he was Jewish and born in what is now Donetsk, Ukraine) of the Soviet flag (his uncle made the flag) above the Reichstag and a burning Berlin, and Joe Rosenthal’s flag over Mt Suribachi – in both cases the photographers brought the flags with them to make the picture. My friend Don McCullin’s amazing picture of a dead North Vietnamese soldier’s face, the foreground strewn with photographs of his mother and family. Those were soldiers. Addario, a mother herself and former Pulitzer (and MacArthur) prize winner made her perfect photograph of children and a family. In those puffy winter jackets we all wear. She stands right over them in an area under bombardment with mortars. We see the children’s faces and the face of the mortally wounded man trying to help them across the street. They almost look like they are sleeping. This is a masterpiece of war photography, because it is both beautiful and sickening. You grieve for the family and you hate Putin, the monster that did this.