Twenty-five years of war around the world are on display at a new exhibit in Washington, DC, called the “War Zone”.

It’s a collection of still photographs by Italian photojournalist Enrico Dagnino – powerful images that shine a spotlight on the cruelty of war. Dagnino has covered all the recent conflicts in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. His pictures tell stories which echo the thoughts of other journalists who also were there. And they tell a tale of war and survival.

Born in Italy and based in Paris, photographer Enrico Dagnino has gone to the heart of conflicts around the world: Bosnia, Croatia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Kenya, Somalia. He has been arrested, beaten and threatened many times while covering wars. We reached him in Kenya, before his next assignment in Sudan.

“The moment I take the picture is like I am almost not there. It slowly starts coming later and growing inside you,” he says.

The stories of war are also the stories of survival. One of the most cruel conflicts in recent history was the one in Chechnya in the mid-1990s, which unofficially claimed about 300,000 lives. Many people are still missing, including the husband of journalist Fatima Tlisova. Tlisova herself was arrested seven times, and even poisoned, because of her reporting.

“When you report from the war, you see human flesh everywhere,” she says. “In the winter it is corpses half eaten by dogs on the streets, in the summer it is mostly the smell. It is penetrating your lungs.”

“You do not see those pictures in magazines. You see them maybe once from time to time. The difficulty of taking a photograph is to try to get in one photograph the whole story,” says French photographer Jean Louis Atlan is the owner of the Zone 2.8 gallery, which is hosting the “War Zone” exhibit.

Source: Voice of America