Tears of a Bang Bang Man

Greg Marinovich, one of only two still alive from the Bang Bang Club of photographers, bares what it was like in those brutal days

I started as a writer and bought a second-hand camera. It was fun doing finger exercises with it. I left South Africa to avoid further military service in those days of conscription. I had already done two years of it and didn’t want to do any more. I went to Botswana on a bicycle that was fully loaded. If it fell, you couldn’t pick it up. I took my cameras there and started doing pseudo anthropological research, ‘pseudo’ because I have no training and was doing it just out of interest.

So I was doing stories on border splitting, ethnic groups and stuff, and slowly got sucked into local politics. I started meeting all these underground operatives, the so-called terrorists, who I should have been fighting if I had stayed to do my military service. I hung out with these guerillas. I became a double agent on their behalf against the South African police intelligence. I started doing photography with intent.

Eventually, my visas ran out. I couldn’t stay any longer. I also ran out of money, so I went back to South Africa. There I started selling freelance stories and pictures under a false name so that the army couldn’t track me again, and I started sub-editing. The politics was changing quite dramatically and quite fast at that time, in the late 80s and early 90s. I started doing stories about social change and apartheid and of ‘bantustans’, these areas where ethnic tribes became official nations, all in South Africa’s imagination. So you have an independent nation of Boputhatswana, independent nation of Venda—they had their own passports, their own parliaments. It was like insanity. And I would cover a lot of stuff in those areas. I started developing my photography and shooting large format and other formats.

And then the ANC was unbanned, and the PAC and other liberation organisations were unbanned, and some political prisoners were being released and there was talk of Mandela being released. And eventually, he was freed in 1990. It was a huge event. In fact, I had an assignment to go and cover it in Cape Town but it clashed with something that I had spent a year getting access to. It was about the ritual of the Rain Queen, an amazing ritual. I decided to do the ritual, and chose not to do Mandela. Who knows what the right decision was. It was interesting photographic stuff, though.

Anyhow, there was a lot of violence happening, violence between the Inkatha, an outfit of Zulu-based nationalists and the government. So it started building up and I was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be a war photographer. But you can’t say you are documenting social change if you don’t cover this as well. So I went to cover all that. The first time I went, I ended up in one of these migrant workers’ hostels where they killed a guy right in front of me, brutally, barbarically. And I photographed the whole of it and also managed to walk out. I processed the pictures, and suddenly Associated Press wanted them and then wanted more, and I didn’t stop working for the next five years every day since then.

It was all happening in these townships around Johannesburg and Durban. Both me and Joao (Silva) would get up at three in the morning and go there. No one else was doing that. And this was how the Bang Bang Club came about. There were four of us photographers: Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek, myself and Joao Silva. There were television and radio people too, but somehow the focus was on the photographers. There were pictures every day from the same people. All the prominent pictures of conflict were ours, really.

The club was actually a notion of a South African magazine that no longer exists. In fact, we were first called the Bang Bang Papparazzi and they included a rightwing guy as part of the group. So we protested. How dare you call us ‘paparazzi’? We never travelled together, the four of us. Only Joao and I or Joao and Kevin would travel together. But the four of us, never.

Not till the day of Ken’s death in 1994 were we in one car together. Weird, isn’t it? It was ten days before the elections, it was in this place called Tokoza township where we had spent a huge amount of time. In the first year here, 10,000 people got killed by hand. We worked there a lot. To keep peace, there was a kind of paramilitary force made up of all different factions and units. They were trained in peace-keeping, but then they were ordered to take out a sniper in a fortified building. They didn’t want to do that. They said, “We haven’t signed up for this.” And they were kicking these guys, “Go go”. We took pictures.

Suddenly, one of the guys who was behind a wall, just popped out and pulled the trigger of his machine gun. I got hit in three places, Ken got hit once, Joao got snicked in the arm. That’s how Ken got killed. An inquest was ordered but the magistrate said no one was to blame. The government was happy that journalists got whacked. Years later, I bumped into one of the guys of that unit in another conflict zone in Yugoslavia and he confessed, “Ya, we shot you.”

Kevin had tried to commit suicide many years before he had even become a photographer. He was a troubled kid, a troubled man, for no apparent reason. But I think he had been diagnosed as bipolar. He should have been on medication. And he took a lot of drugs. Mandrax, mixed with marijuana. Most people would be knocked out if they smoked that. He would get hyper on it. He gassed himself eventually. He did that picture of a starving child being stalked by a vulture, won the Pulitzer for that, and there was always the question ‘What did you do for the kid?’ He didn’t do anything, and really, that was so unlike Kevin. He was such a softie. I guess the questions got too much eventually. Because he couldn’t answer them, not to anybody else, but most of all, to himself. And the drugs spiralled out of control.

My own Pulitzer-winning photograph came in 1990: a man hacking at a burning man with a machete.

A Zulu named Lindsaye Tshabalala was suspected of spying for the Inkatha (Freedom Party, a political outfit), and executed by ANC supporters.  This was without doubt the worst day of my life, the trauma of what it means to be involved in murder remains with me despite some twenty years and a lot of coming to terms with the incident. I neither saved him, nor redeemed myself, though at least I did not act shamefully.

The police wanted the pictures to use as evidence for suing the murderers, but I requested them to not use my pictures. “Don’t do that because then every photographer would become a target in these townships,” I said. I fled the country, and went to England and then to Yugoslavia. After that, I came back as I was missing South Africa, and stopped using my pseudonym and started publishing pictures in my own name. By then, I had won another Pulitzer in 1991 for spot news and life became easier. The police quit coming after me.

Despite the prizes and media attention, I have worked as a freelancer most of my career.  There were medical bills. Usually, there was somebody to pick them up, but not always. It was not a good business model.

I stopped shooting conflict 11 years ago. I was wounded on four different occasions. And I don’t think I cope well with this conflict reporting. I cry all the time. Why should you get over it after seeing the most heart-wrenching things? Not that I am incapacitated or depressive or anything like that, but if I think about it and talk about it, I do get emotional, you know. And that’s the way it should be if you are going to do it with your heart.

Often, I have got involved in violence in the process of shooting it. In fact, when I was shooting that Pulitzer prize winning picture of a Zulu being burnt and hacked to death by an ANC supporter, a BBC team was filming from a distance for their Panorama programme. If you view the footage, you can see me getting involved, trying to stop it. I tried holding the younger protagonist, and speaking to the older guy who was attacking him. I asked, “How do you know he [the Zulu guy] is the enemy?”, and he said “We know.” When I continued arguing, he said, “I know what you are saying, I get what you are saying, but we are going to kill him.” It went on and on like this. At some point, they tried to stab me. I don’t think this thing about journalistic distance makes any sense. I think we are people first and journalists second. You do your journalism, but does that stop you from being a human being? It doesn’t.

I don’t miss that kind of action any more. It’s fierce and weighs heavy on you. You look at someone’s eyes and they’ve lost their child, and you have to take pictures and there is this hatred in their eyes, that anger. And you wonder what you are doing there. It’s tough.

I went back to doing documentary films. I am trying to do books too, looking for publishers. The experience of writing that book Bang Bang Club was so draining. It was three very difficult years, but it was cathartic too. It eventually got published in 2000. Then, I met my wife-to-be and it was final: I couldn’t do conflict any more. The market for photography was getting smaller because of digitisation, or commoditisation, the buying up by big corporates, and then, the recession.

Right now, I am working on several things. I am looking at what happened to those young child soldiers who were fighting in South African townships. How these former heroes have been forgotten by society and by the government that they were trying to get in! They were very alien and secretive. I am shooting a documentary on them.

I have just started an online magazine called Maverick, and I will be submitting three features every week. I am writing a book on my mother’s life; she was married to a serial murderer—a suitcase murderer, who kills people and chops up parts and puts them in suitcases. She never mentioned this and always had a difficult life after that.

I am also working on a story of a woman who helped prisoners on death row; she was poisoned by the security police who were doing chemical and biological testing on the prisoners.

As told to Karabi Basu

Bang Bang ClubGreg Marinovichphotography