“I want to show you the scenes that slap you in the face, and shatter your peace of mind. You can close your eyes, turn away, or hide yourself like fugitives, but you can't stop the truth. No one can.”

Kaveh Golestan - “killed while recording the truth”, (July 8^th, 1950 – April 2^nd, 2003).

The Canadian-South African movie, The Bang Bang Club is based on the real-life story of four photojournalists - three white South Africans and one Portuguese - during the waning days of the Apartheid regime. One of them, Ken Oosterbroek, was killed by SA's then National Peacekeeping Force, nine days before the 1994 general election, and Nelson Mandela's victory. Two won the Pulitzer Prize for photography: Greg Marinovich (Spot News Photography, 1991) for showing the execution of an alleged spy by supporters of the African National Congress, and Kevin Carter (Feature Photography, 1994), for his photograph depicting a vulture stalking a starving child in the famine-stricken Southern Sudan.

In an interview following the announcement of the 1994 prize, Carter was asked whether he did anything to help save the child? He had not. He argued, “I think my picture did more than that.” Two month after receiving the Pulitzer, Kevin Carter committed suicide. In a note he left behind he wrote, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.” In October 2010, João Silva, the Portuguese member of the Bang Bang Club, stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan and lost his legs while trying to photograph a different kind of vulture – a condor.

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In the pre-Photoshop era, photojournalism was regarded as a direct and unadulterated link between happenings and history, and possibly the most virtuous form of advocacy journalism. Then, a picture was worth a thousand words. That was the era when Kaveh Golestan – a Robert Capa Gold Medal awardee (1979), and an honorary member of the Bang Bang Club – lived, worked and perished. Whether they were the women in a brothel, the children in a mental asylum, the laborers in a workshop, the soldiers in a battlefield, or dissident journalists in a closed society, their stories must be reported in pictures and documentaries. And, report he did; and the price he paid.

Most of us now live in a different era, the Orwellian time of pseudo-journalists – embedded and in bed with powers that be – that sell us the mushroom clouds of non-existing WMDs; that celebrate the bombing of defenseless civilians as the firework on the fourth of July; that tell us aggression is libration, murder and mayhem are democracy, and surveillance, sabotage and assassination are legal. It's a time when psychics and wannabes try to convince us that their worst nightmares are for real, objectivity is passé, and realism is unwarranted.

This is also the time when the likes of Oosterbroek, Carter and Golestan are missed the most.