Photojournalists these days face an almost impossible task. In a culture saturated by images, with a 24-hour news cycle in which a Hollywood actor’s eating disorder is bigger news than an African famine, they must make us care about intricate, difficult problems. A war halfway across the world, fought by groups with baffling causes. A five-year-old orphan, mutilated and abandoned. Who wants to dwell on such matters? It’s so much easier to look away, tune out, focus on the latest Steve Carrell movie or iPod upgrade.
Paolo Pellegrin’s images challenge us not only to look but to stay, think, and respond. Remarkably, they do this by getting beyond the sensational aspects of the stories he covers. In these images there are no hacked-off limbs, no brutal executions — instead, Pellegrin picks out quiet, contemplative moments in the middle of conflict zones, and depicts them with a rare visual poetry. Raw, impressionistic, full of mystery and shadows, his images are like stills from our dreams. Bypassing our brains, they find a direct route to our guts and hearts.