Four Decades of Photographing the Human Condition

September 12, 2012, 5:00 am

By JESSE NEWMAN

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Peter Turnley is an archetypal photojournalist. At last count, he had worked in more than 90 countries, traveling to far-flung corners of the earth to cover many of the most important international news events of the last 30 years. Choose a historic moment and Mr. Turnley was there: from revolutions in Eastern Europe to the collapse of the Soviet Union; the end of apartheid in South Africa and genocide in Rwanda; and both the Persian Gulf and Balkan wars.

A Newsweek photographer for 20 years, Mr. Turnley has had images published on covers of the magazine more than 40 times that have been seen by millions of people. His list of portraiture subjects reads like a “Who's Who” of recent world history, including President Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Yasir Arafat, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Vladimir V. Putin, Princess Diana and Pope John Paul II.

But to hear Mr. Turnley tell it, his illustrious career might never have transpired if not for a bum knee. In 1971, when he was 16, Mr. Turnley tore a ligament in his left knee playing high school football in Fort Wayne, Ind. While recovering in the hospital from surgery, he leafed through a book of Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs that his parents had given him. Soon Mr. Turnley, who was inspired by the images and sidelined for the rest of the football season, began roaming the streets of his hometown - camera in hand - each day after school. Afterward, he disappeared into the darkroom he had bu ilt in his family's basement to develop his film. He emerged with dripping wet black-and-white prints to show his parents and siblings at the dinner table. Many of those prints eventually turned into a book called “McClellan Street” (Indiana University Press, 2007), which Mr. Turnley published with his identical twin, David Turnley, who is also a well-known photojournalist.

Today, some 40 years since his earliest forays into Fort Wayne, a retrospective of Mr. Turnley's work will open at La Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris. Mr. Turnley first went to Paris in 1975, finding work in the studio where Cartier-Bresson's prints were made, and has lived there (at least part time) ever since. The exhibit, titled “The Human Condition,” features photographs from international conflicts and refugee crises in places like the Middle East, Rwanda, Chechnya, Haiti and Kosovo, many of them depicting tragedy and suffering on an epic scale.

Also included in the exhibition ar e images from Mr. Turnley's early years, quieter photographs that portray working-class life in an industrial town in Middle America - a woman staring out the window of a public bus (Slide 12), a young couple caught in the moment before a kiss (Slide 10). Much like Cartier-Bresson himself, Mr. Turnley spent decades wandering - and photographing - the streets of Paris, and the coming exhibit features images from its rooftops and cafes that are indicative of a love affair with his adopted city.

“The exhibition in Paris is a lot about how the world has felt to me over these last 30 or 40 years,” Mr. Turnley said in a telephone interview. “From life's worst and most difficult moments - moments of oppression, injustice, conflict - to moments of great poetry, joy, happiness, beauty, sensuality. These moments represent the preoccupation of my heart, my visual heart.”

Much has changed in photography over the years, Mr. Turnley said. These days, social media Web s ites like Facebook allow photographers to reach thousands of viewers instantaneously, and they are sharing a visual language as never before. The digital revolution has also given photographers more control over their images, Mr. Turnley said. Gone are the days when he shipped raw film to New York for an editor to cull from; he can now edit and publish his images himself. Among the most profound transformations, he said, are the technical ones that allow photographers to shoot in low light without using a tripod. Like Brassai, one of the early pioneers of low-light photography, Mr. Turnley is an avid observer of nightlife in Paris and eager to explore the possibilities of increasingly sensitive digital cameras.

Eleven years ago Tuesday, Mr. Turnley documented New York City after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. He photographed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake; and, most recently, the early days of the Arab Spring when Egyp tian protestors ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

As important as these images are to him, Mr. Turnley said, so too are the photographs he has taken of the more mundane moments in people's daily lives. A great admirer of photographers like Robert Capa and Edward Boubat, Mr. Turnley said he considered himself neither a war correspondent, like the former, nor a “peace correspondent,” as the latter was called. “One might say I am a correspondent of life,” Mr. Turnley said.

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