Photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg Presents Work From ‘Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981–1984’
By Karim Farahat
karim.farahat0823@gmail.com
It's been four decades since the violent civil war in El Salvador took center stage and captured world headlines.
Robert Nickelsberg, a former 30-year TIME magazine contract photojournalist who was in El Salvador at the time, re-lived those memories at two recent talks in San Francisco.
The talks included a 19-photo PowerPoint presentation of black and white photographs that documented how U.S. foreign policy fueled a violent 13-year civil war in El Salvador. The photos, alongside a number of essays by renowned journalists, are part of a recently published book entitled "Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981-1984." Many of the images were unpublished for decades.
As a Time photographer, Nickelsberg specialized in political and cultural change in developing countries.
The talks at City College's Mission Center on April 24 and at San Francisco State University on April 28 marked the first book events on the West Coast.
"My photographs highlighted how the U.S. handled a lot of foreign policy and how a lot of the immigration, conflict and unrest we see today along the borders are a direct outcome of the violence in that era," Nickelsberg said.
He added: "It was also important to capture the intensity in their eyes and what was going on in their heads."
When he described a photo of an armored Cadillac on an airfield, Nickelsberg said this "clearly works for me in showing U.S. presence and influence in the region.”
Nickelsberg also said his photos often provided "enough information that the caption writes itself."
Nickelsberg's venture included spending weeks with the FMLN guerrillas near the Salvadoran-Honduran border. It also included spending time with the Salvadoran Army.
The 70 attendees at the Mission Center and the 30 students at the SFSU talk were awed by what they saw and captured a lot of insight about some of the troubled history of El Salvador.
At the Mission Center, Nickelsberg's talk was preceded by a welcoming from City College Journalism Department Chair Juan Gonzales. He then introduced Salvadoran Mission poet Leticia Hernandez, who read a few poems. Photojournalist Lou Dematteis, most famous for his work in Nicaragua, then introduced Nickelsberg.
Nickelsberg shared with the audience that as he got older, he gathered a lot of new information about El Salvador and witnessed other examples of American foreign policy in action that reshaped his perspective on the conflict in the country. He said that "it has given me a more complete understanding of the situation than when I was a young photographer in the field over 40 years ago."
At San Francisco State University, Nickelsberg was introduced by Kim Komenich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist.
After covering Central and South America and the conflicts taking place there in the mid-1980s, Nickelsberg established his base in Asia. Living in New Delhi from 1988 to 1999, Nickelsberg recorded the rise of religious extremism in South Asia. His work has also encompassed Iraq, Kuwait, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia.
Nickelsberg has documented Afghanistan since 1988, when he accompanied a group of mujahideen crossing the border from Pakistan. His 2013 book, A Distant War, published by Prestel, captures his 25 years of work in Afghanistan.
If you were unable to attend either of these events, there will be further opportunities as Nickelsberg plans to return to the West Coast in the fall of 2025 for talks at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and in Southern California.
