The Story of 'The Bang Bang Club'

Jan. 4, 2001 -- A picture tells a thousand words. But in some cases, even that’s not enough. A picture tells a thousand words. But in some cases, even that’s not enough. A picture tells a thousand words. But in some cases, even that’s not enough. A picture tells a thousand words. But in some cases, even that’s not enough. A picture tells a thousand words. But in some cases, even that’s not enough.

Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva are two photojournalists who were widely acclaimed for their pictures of South Africa’s transition from apartheid in the early 1990s.

Along with two of their colleagues, Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbrook, they became sowell known for getting the best pictures of the violent revolution in their country that newspapers gave the group a nickname: The Bang Bang Club.

The group’s members won just about all the prizes that could be won: local prizes, national prizes — even two Pulitzers, the highest accolade in the profession.

Yet, 10 years after they covered this milestone era in their country’s history, Marinovich and Silva thought they still hadn’t told the whole story.

So they wrote a book, also named The Bang Bang Club.

Why They Wrote

Marinovich is a tall man, with a closely-shaved head and a menacing brow, and the self-described build of an aging soccer player. He provides the bulk of the narrative for their book.

“We wanted to tell the story of people who we knew that lived in these conflict areas and what their lives were all about — what it really meant, and they’re the people that this story is obviously about,” he said.

“We also wanted to use the story about ourselves and the story of our friends as part of narrative” — a narrative that includes the deaths of Oosterbrook and Carter.

His colleague, Silva, is short but powerfully built and although engagingly jocular, the co-author of the Bang Bang Club is reticent about telling his life story.

However, he has his own reasons for wanting to publish the book: “As much as we were believing in what we do, as much as we believing in what we were trying to expose, the images [we made] kind of helped propagate the opposite,” said Silva.

The pair was philosophically against apartheid, but their pictures, they realized, could often be used to promote it.

“All [our pictures] really show is black people killing one another and that’s what the apartheid government [was] happy for to us to do,” he said.

Prize for Propaganda?

For example, Marinovich won the Pulitzer for a picture of a black man set afire after being attacked by a black mob.

But the pair refuse to regret the work they did. They say they were players in a business, and such pictures were only part of being professional.

“You have to have money; you can’t live on fresh air. We had to make money like everybody else has to make money and I don’t have a problem with that,” Marinovich said.

They also realize there’s an implicit lack of context with the medium of photography

“Do the pictures tell the whole story? I doubt it,” said Marinovich.

“You try all you can and we’re out there working every day to get this done and it was trying to get at the truth photographically.”

‘This Was Our Country’

For the most part, Marinovich and Silva accept the misgivings of their profession, and probably would not have written a book if they had not covered South Africa.

The group had been in hot spots around the world, from the war in Bosnia to the genocide in Rwanda, but they say South Africa was a special instance.

The land that brought them their fame was also the land closest to their hearts, the country where they lived for most of their lives, and the country whose revolution would also claim the lives of the two other members of their exclusive club.

“This was our country. You know it’s quite different going to some other war zone and covering the story and no matter how much knowledge you have it’s not your country,” said Marinovich.

“This was our society, our country our people and it’s where we live and it was a whole different ballgame.”

Consequently, Marinovich and Silva both say they don’t think they’ll write another book, despite all the places they’ve been, and all the incomplete stories presented by their photographs.

“We’d have to live another 10 years liked we lived and I don’t want that,” Silva said. “The emotional price tag is just too high. It’s not possible even if we continue to do war zones for the next 10 years — it will never be the same, that level of emotional commitment.”

“It’s a certain epoch in history that will never be repeated,” Marinovich said.