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Name a conflict and it’s likely that a photo comes immediately to mind. Maybe it’s WWII and the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. Or Vietnam and a wounded, naked girl running in agony and fear. Or Iraq and Abu Ghraib. When photographer Eddie Adams died, the media ran his photograph of a South Vietnamese colonel executing a Viet Cong prisoner at point blank range. Adams’s photo was one of a few which became iconic of the Vietnam war itself, and emblematizes how the still photograph can have such profound impact on the public mind. In fact, our understanding of conflict has been mediated through photojournalism ever since the Crimean and American Civil Wars. Yet we tend to hear very little from the photographers whose images shape our consciousness of warfare. BEYOND WORDS focuses on the world’s top war photojournalists, and attempts to turn the lens of attention onto them. Many have been wounded. Some have seen colleagues die. All have been scarred by what they do: some become disillusioned, even ashamed of what they do, and leave the profession because they feel it’s pornographic. Yet some remain charged by the excitement of it, and others committed to the idea that where there are no images, there is no sense of history. The sheer spectrum of their reflections points to the fact that the payoffs and pitfalls of journalism itself are nowhere more concentrated and accelerated than in the lives and work of these photographers