By Stephen Wolgast
April 15, 2021 - Nothing beats resilience in a combat photographer, though resourcefulness comes pretty close.
David Gilkey had both of those traits in spades.
Born in Oregon in 1966, Gilkey grew up with his adoptive parents, Alyda and Dick, who worked in education. David’s boyhood dream was driving an 18-wheeler, and he liked to live on the edge.
“He skied fast, skated fast, rode his bike fast, took risks that were foreign to me,” according to his mother.
“When he was a teenager, I remember telling a friend, ‘I don’t think this kid will live beyond 25.’”
But it was his father’s home darkroom that truly caught David’s attention.
He took up photography. After interning at the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, during college, he told his parents they were wasting their money on his education. He withdrew from classes and flew to South Africa, joining a group of established photojournalists covering violence in the townships as a stringer for Knight-Ridder.
From there, Gilkey moved into war photography and, after six years, scored a job with the Detroit Free Press. He covered Iraq but had to stop: As his colleague Quil Lawrence puts it, Gilkey’s “bald head and wrestler’s physique made him look so much like a Special Forces sergeant that it was hazardous for him to do unembedded reporting.”
He next headed for Afghanistan. On assignment for Knight-Ridder, he arrived two weeks after 9/11 and felt at home in the country’s harsh terrain. As the U.S. war on terror grew and ultimately receded, Gilkey made several trips to cover the military and the Afghans trying to live their lives between the armed soldiers of the Taliban and the Western troops.
As the newspaper industry took hit after hit in the first decade of the century, Gilkey moved to National Public Radio in 2007. He probably enjoyed the looks on people’s faces when he told them he was a news photographer for a radio network. Of course, every news service publishes on platforms far from the one it started on in the 21st century.
Working for NPR would lead to his final assignment. On June 5, 2016, at 50 years old, Gilkey and an Afghan photojournalist, Zabihullah Tamanna, died when the Taliban ambushed the convoy of Afghan commandos they were riding with.
His work lives on in “Pictures on the Radio,” a globe-hopping tour de force that shows Gilkey’s skill at making great photographs in hairy situations, in Alaska, after the Haitian earthquake and even in Amish Country, Pennsylvania.
It’s combat work where he shines. In Kandahar Province, he’s an arm’s length from a young American soldier firing an automatic rifle while under attack. Pausing to call out for more ammunition, the soldier turns toward the camera, and Gilkey makes that rare photo of the face of someone under attack.
On the Afghan border with Pakistan, he watches as American troops share tea with Pakistani border guards on the other side of a sagging wire fence. He was so close he could have smelled the leaves in the tea.
Getting close to the action is a photographer’s maxim.
Quil, who met Gilkey in Afghanistan and would become NPR’s beat reporter on veterans, writes in the book that “David used to say his zoom lens was his feet,” and it shows. His photos rarely come from telephoto lenses, and his affable personality was his password with strangers.
Writing in 2014, Gilkey pointed out that, put together, he had spent nearly four years living with American troops. “And on an embed, you really do live with them,” he wrote. “Every aspect of your daily life is the same as it is for the troops you are covering. They dig a hole in the dirt to sleep in: you get in, too. They eat a two-year-old MRE: bon appétit. Maybe the only difference is that as a journalist, you don’t carry a weapon.”
Weapons are constantly at the ready in his photos. An Afghan National Army soldier crouches behind herds of sheep and goats, aiming his rifle past the livestock, looking for an ambush. Less tense are the security forces who examine a fighter’s corpse the day after the Taliban attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
U.S. Army soldiers try to save the life of an Afghan National Army soldier who was shot in his head. He looks into Gilkey’s camera, desperate to live.
It’s an awful lot of mess, and menace, and even carnage. But as Quil, who covered the war in Afghanistan, put it, the worst part about returning home from war is that no one seems to know there’s a war on.
That absence of awareness only makes the job of the media all the more critical. Quil, who served as the editor of the book’s text, quotes Gilkey laying out what could be the photojournalist’s mantra. “It’s not just reporting. It’s not just taking pictures. It’s ‘Do the visuals, do the stories — do they change somebody’s mind enough to take action?’” Gilkey said.
“If we’re doing our part, it gets people to do their part. Hopefully.”
Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.
“Pictures on the Radio”
Photography by David P. Gilkey
Edited by Chip Somodevilla and Ariel Zambelich
Introduction by Quil Lawrence; preface by Aylda Gilkey
Documentary / Global Conflicts / Photojournalism
Hardcover, 9-1/2 x 12-1/4 inches, 192 pages
ISBN: 978-1-57687-951-1, $50 US/ $66 CAN
HOW TO ORDER
Purchase directly from NPR Shop, click here.
