“This photo was taken two days after the outbreak of war over South Ossetia in August 2008. On assignment for Newsweek, I arrived August 9, the day after the Russians shelled a row of apartment blocks in the strategic military town of Gori, Georgia. Some buildings were still in flames. Dazed people wandered about, stunned that war had just suddenly erupted close to home. I found the hand here, amongst other body parts. It’s a simple picture, really: a dismembered hand lying in a plot of grass. Now that my photographs from this war have been seen by the public, this is the one photo that people keep coming back to, and perhaps not for the right reasons. Is it the confrontation with the ugly and dark side of life, at war with an aesthetic appreciation of the image? Which leads to a larger question—one that photojournalists face all the time: How does photojournalism reconcile itself to making images of aesthetic interest (beauty) in a document of historical objectivity (tragedy)?”

—Donald Weber

This image is included as part of a group show Georgia: The August War, on exhibit at the VII Photo Agency in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY, through December 31.

Photo Copyright Donald Weber/VII Network

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 12:00 pm ET by Darren Ching and is filed under Documentary, Personal, Photojournalism.