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Argentine-born photojournalist Walter Astrada has specialised in distressing causes that nobody else would cover driven by his desire to make a difference through his photography. Interview by Dave Tacon.
Walter Astrada is no stranger to brutality. Over the last four years the Argentineborn photojournalist has won worldwide recognition for confronting images of violence in its many forms, although he is not specifically a combat photographer.
In fact, his work is often so disturbing he has struggled to find a mainstream audience. When he was awarded a World Press Photo first prize in 2007 for a single shot of Femicide In Guatemala, no publication had yet shown his graphic images of the endemic abuse and murder of women in the Central American nation. Since then, he has won two more World Press Photo Awards for Spot News for his coverage of Kenya’s post-election violence in 2009 and his series Bloodbath In Madagascar in 2010. He was also awarded Photojournalist Of The Year 2009 in by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) in the USA. ProPhoto spoke with Walter Astrada at last year’s Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan, France. He talked about his brushes with death in Madagascar, his life as a wire photographer, his rise to the forefront of his profession and his personal projects.
Caught In The Crossfire
Walter Astrada cuts a rather unassuming figure for someone who shines a light on so many of the darkest aspects of human nature. He is slight of build and quietly spoken. He was in Perpignan to discuss his exhibition, Bloodbath In Madagascar, which later in the year won him his third World Press Photo Awards first prize.
The work documents political violence which claimed the lives of more than 130 in February 2009. The most shocking incident of all was when government forces opened fire on anti-government demonstrators who were marching on the presidential palace in Antananarivo, the capital of the east African island nation.
Astrada, who works as a stringer for Agence France Presse, had left an assignment in the Democratic Republic of Congo to cover the unrest. Yet by the time the killing erupted, he was the only foreign photographer remaining in the country. Others had left to chase new stories, feeling that the worst was over.
The photojournalist was among the crowd in front of the palace just before the first shots rang out.
“When I arrived at the demonstration, I was thinking, ‘Oh, why did they ask me to come here?’ There was nothing going on. Nobody was suspecting that kind of violence…”
Astrada’s pictures are evidence of the deadly force used to quell the demonstrators and show just how uncomfortably close the photojournalist was to the carnage.
“I was lucky not to be killed or wounded. I saw a lot of violence – people shot in the head. At first I ran with the crowd to take cover. Then I stopped and took pictures of what was around me. I was shooting pictures for maybe 30 or 40 seconds. Then I was taking pictures of the people carrying the dead and wounded.”
Less than four minutes after the first barrage of bullets, Astrada once again found himself in the crossfire and continued to photograph, driven by “gut instinct”. He points to his wide-angle picture of a wounded man with his face covered with blood and sprawled on the road as demonstrators flee in the background.
“It’s a big responsibility not only for me, but for any photographer to show what the police or soldiers were doing. They were trying to kill people. They were not responding to any attack. They were just shooting at people who were trying to have their opinion [heard],” he says with a mixture of outrage and disbelief.
The photojournalist hurried to his hotel to edit and file his pictures.
“I was worried that I might be arrested,” he explains. “Even if somebody was going to take my camera from me later, it was very important to try to save what I had.”
Within 40 minutes, he had 20 images on the wire, cut down from the 100 or so frames he’d shot during a 40-second burst and then over a four-minute period. Although he continued to document the bloodshed and its aftermath on the streets, in hospitals and the morgue for another eleven days, it was these initial pictures that made up the majority of his exhibition and the World Press Photo submission. Twenty-eight protesters were killed and 200 wounded in the gunfire. A Nomadic Life
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