This Is War: A Decade of Conflict: Photographs

＂There are photographs in this book that will stay in the hearts and minds of the people who view them, and who, like Corinne Dufka, will resolve to make it their life’s purpose to do what they can to help stop war.＂ -- Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer, The New Yorker

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.＂

Corinne Dufka grew up in the Utah and California, and attended university in the San Francisco Bay area, earning bachelor and master’s degrees in social work. Dufka worked as a psychiatric social worker in San Francisco before moving to El Salvador in 1986 where she began taking pictures to illustrate the work of the Lutheran Church, for whom she was working. She launched her photojournalism career at age 30 and went on to cover over a dozen armed conflicts in Central America, Bosnia, and Africa. At the top of her game and having been honored with the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, a World Press Photo Award for spot news, the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award, and a Pulitzer finalist citation, she left Reuters, and photojournalism, to join Human Rights Watch as a researcher and advocate. She worked with HRW for over 20 years, most of it whilst based in Africa, during which she documented and exposed war crimes perpetrated by armed groups in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire among others. While at HRW, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship Award for her work. Dufka now resides in Maryland.