This is War presents a tour de force of one of most celebrated women war photographers of her generation. From 1988 to 1999, Capa Gold Medal winner and Pulitzer Prize–nominated photographer Corinne Dufka covered some of the bloodiest conflicts of the late twentieth century. The devastatingly powerful and intimate images in this book chart revolutions and coups, separatist movements, and mass atrocities across nine different countries on three continents.
Starting in El Salvador during the Cold War, This Is War moves onto Bosnia, and then Africa, where Dufka reported on the Rwandan genocide and conflicts in South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia, and the Congo. Her photographs are as brutal as they are tender, as mournful as they are meaningful, and are, above all, a testament to the profound toll conflict leaves in its wake. Her images interrogate abuse of power, celebrate defiance, and seek out the humanity of civilians and combatants who lives were torn apart by war.
More than just a documentary, This is War is an extraordinary photographic record of war and personal enlightenment. It adds to the historical record of many under-covered conflicts and of the role of women in photojournalism, and urges the viewer to interrogate why conflict in many countries covered in the book, persist to this day.
After leaving photojournalism, Dufka went on to a career as a war crimes investigator, for which she was, in 2003, awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In her introduction to This is War, she notes: “These images beseech us to work harder to honor those who have perished and protect the rest of us from humanity’s worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.”
