Great Interview with Combat Photographer Joao Silva

The NYT has a impressive interview with combat photographer Joao Silva and a dramatic slideshow of his work up today. Silva, who was a member of the Bang Bang Club in South Africa, stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan last October. He talks about the experience (as well as the friends who have died, what it was like being a patient at Walter Reed, and other tough subjects) here:

Immediately, there were medics working on me. I picked up a camera, shot a few frames. The frames weren’t very good, quite frankly, but I was trying to record. I knew it wasn’t good, but I felt alive. Adrenaline kicked in. I was compos mentis; I was on top of things. So, I made some pictures. I dropped the camera, then I moved to Plan B, which was to pick up the satellite phone. I called my wife, Vivian, and told her, “My legs are gone, but I think I’m going to live.” Incidentally, I’m a father of two. I passed the telephone on to the correspondent so she could continue the conversation and keep Vivian calm.

Then I proceeded to lie back and smoke a cigarette. This is while the medics are frantically working around me, applying tourniquets, injecting me straight into the chest, and doing all sorts of really wonderful things. Those guys are amazing. They’re the ones who saved my life right there and then. The helicopter landed to take me to safety. I was completely conscious and totally awake, up until the moment that I got into the helicopter. That’s when I finally blacked out. I woke up in Germany, and then again at Walter Reed.

I cannot imagine another context in which lying in the dust with men “injecting me straight into the chest” could be described as a “really wonderful thing.”

The Stranger‘s short review of the recent feature film about the Bang Bang Club—short version: the subject is fascinating, the execution is so-so—is here, in case you want to get it on Netflix or something.