Javier Manzano is a Mexican American cinematographer, producer, and photojournalist focusing on Latin America and the Middle East. An independent filmmaker in over 50 countries, he has earned eight Emmy Awards and two BAFTA nominations. His work has appeared on National Geographic, HBO, and the BBC. His raw and intimate photojournalism has won him a Pulitzer Prize, the Bayeux-Calvados Normandy Award, and two World Press Photo Awards. Most famously, Manzano’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, taken in Aleppo, Syria (2012), captures two Free Syrian Army soldiers in a sniper’s nest as light filters through bullet holes behind them. He was the first freelance photographer to win the award in 17 years.
Portrait of Javier Manzano, Pulitzer Center
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Can you tell me about your upbringing and what drew you to photojournalism?
I was born and raised in a middle-class family in Mexico City. Growing up in Mexico City, I didn’t know many photographers, and certainly not any photojournalists. Education here tends to follow a very linear path. If you can afford to become a doctor, you go into medicine. If you can afford to study law, you become a lawyer. It’s a very traditional set of social expectations so I didn’t explore photojournalism until later in life.
My mother is American. When I was 18, I left for the US. I went to college in the U.S., where I studied economics and international business. After that, I worked for a bank, then returned to Mexico and started work at an ad agency. It was there that I first met other photographers. We were working on commercials, and one project took me to northern Mexico, to the Copper Canyon. It was a social program for building schools in rural areas. The photographer on that project was also a journalist and, after talking to him, I was inspired to take black-and-white photography courses. That’s when I started learning about the old masters—the classic photographers of the early 20th century. Many of them were Eastern European and French.
Robert Capa, of course, was a major influence, and that’s when I started getting into photography. There were also a few documentaries that stuck with me. One was about the ICC case against war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. A photographer from Khabib had taken an image that was used as evidence in the ICC trials. That completely blew my mind—to see how photography could enact real change, could help put war criminals in prison. That’s what every photojournalist aspires to do: to seek justice through their work. Of course, that kind of impact is rare—one in a million—but that’s what everybody aspires to do.
How do you mentally and physically prepare for your work, both before, during, and after being in conflict zones?
In the beginning, it was difficult because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was freelancing on top of already having a full-time job at a few newspapers.
At the time, I was based in Denver and trying to decide whether to return to Mexico. I ended up taking a trip to Ciudad Juárez in mid-2010. Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua, is a border city directly across from El Paso, Texas. At that point, the city was at the peak of the drug war. The Juárez Cartel was being overtaken by the Sinaloa Cartel. It was a war zone.
I had been covering immigration for about four years by then, so I was familiar with the border. But things escalated after 2006 when President Calderón took office. Two years into his presidency, he launched a war on the cartels, and the result was a massive spike in violence, especially in key border crossings like Juárez. It was such a contentious spot. Everybody wants to control it in the illegal trade.
That’s where I was in 2010—covering the conflict for most of the year. And that’s when I saw real violence. I remember the first few times that I was exposed to that. I had trouble sleeping, and I couldn’t unsee some of the things that I saw. It takes a while. You try to seek some of the counsel of the older journalists who have been doing it for longer than you have. They give you some advice, but at the end of the day, it’s just journalists taking care of journalists, and none of that involves professional psychologists or psychiatrists.
Over time you do get desensitized to some of it, but hopefully not completely. The same thing goes for EMTs and ER doctors and surgeons, except they’re actually doing an amazing job with their hands and their knowledge, and we’re just taking pictures, or we’re taking video. The same goes for the activists and the homegrown social movements. That’s the difference. They’re saving lives. We’re just documenting. We just take images, we take video, and we just take from them, and we try to justify in our minds that our information is gonna enact some change. That’s something that has never really sat well with me, as long as I’ve been doing this. You always have all these ethical dilemmas. I don’t think they get any easier, to be honest. And so, of course, it’s hard to grapple with that. I don’t do news that much anymore, and I certainly don’t do photojournalism. I stopped taking photos 10 years ago.
How do you see the role of Latin American journalists in global conflict reporting? Do you think they bring a different perspective compared to their American or European counterparts?
Where we are from, there’s very little to lose. We don’t have the opportunities that other, more developed regions of the world have. So it’s all or nothing. I really admire that from Latin American photojournalists.
There are a few photojournalists from Peru who are good because they go after it. There was one who was hanging out with the Taliban going to Kandahar before Kabul fell. Some of the work he did was phenomenal, and no one in their right mind would have done that except for him. The threshold for risk is probably bigger. I admire their work but unfortunately, I don’t see that many Latin American journalists out there. There are so many barriers to entering this industry because of the lack of opportunities in their home countries from local networks or media organizations; they don’t have the deep pockets that maybe American, British, or European networks have.
What was your experience like in the Middle East? What were some of the biggest challenges you faced?
The entire Middle East is a region where what happens on the ground is completely different from what was being reported. I covered Afghanistan. I lived there from the end of 2010 to 2012. And I always kept going back. At times, we’d get into the country through the mountains, or, whenever some roads opened up. When ISIS took over, we would smuggle ourselves into some of these countries.
Afghanistan has also always been really close to me. I was there when the Taliban came into Kabul.
We’ve all covered this. We’ve all written the words or made the documentaries that recount what’s happened. And you know, nothing really changes in U.S. foreign policy. Every four years, there’s a wild swing from one side to the other, leaving U.S. allies looking at themselves and asking ‘who do we trust now?’ I don’t know what good our work has done over the last 15 years covering the Middle East, if, at the end of the day, Americans only want to vote for less taxes and cheaper gas. American voters have an outsized representation in what happens across the planet because of their votes. That vote is going to affect someone in the West Bank. It’s going to affect someone in Bangladesh. It’s going to affect someone in Iran, Africa, Mexico. I wish that Americans exercised their vote with an equal amount of informed responsibility, which I don’t see, and that’s where we have failed as the media.
How do you think photojournalism shapes public perception and policy?
The real truth is that local journalism is what really enacts change. I remember the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California got a $2 million donation because of some of the stories that we did.
When you’re doing international work, you are rubbing against other country’s interests. A lot of the networks are not going to give you the complete story. Take CNN. You have CNN Domestic, and you have CNN International. It’s as if we were living in completely different galaxies. What’s being offered to a national audience? It’s a very distilled, simplified, sanitized version of what really goes on out in the world. CNN International has reporters who are trying to get to the bottom of things, and the audience is completely different.
Change, positive change, is very hard unless you come across something massive.
What led you to transition from photography to documentary filmmaking?
When I won the Pulitzer, I had already decided to move on to video. I knew that photojournalism would face some real economic pressures in the industry. I didn’t think it was worth exposing myself for the prices that they paid, especially since I was working a lot for wire services, which is very badly paid work. Video was more involved. I’m not gonna say it is an art form because that’s giving it too much credit, but it’s more involved, and you have to crop the story in your mind, visually. So I thought, for me, it was more of a challenge than taking photographs.
Is photojournalism a dying field?
I don’t think it’s dying. There’s gonna be fewer people doing it and I think it’s gonna shift more into local journalists. It’s not necessarily a bad thing
In terms of the future of photojournalism, I worry that, with the pressures of AI, it’s going to suffer. AI recently made some photographs from D-Day, and they are amazing; the level of perfection that AI has achieved in mimicking a photojournalistic image is incredible. The 20th century was the golden age for photojournalism. The 80s, 60s, 70s; Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the Cold War. I just don’t see photojournalists being able to make a living the way they did in the past. I also don’t see ad revenue or the budgets for photojournalists to continue working. And so it’s going to become more of the responsibility of local photojournalists to tell their own stories, whether it’s with a camera or with an iPhone.
We have this arrogance that only Western journalists have the monopoly of truth, and they are the only ones who can look at a situation objectively. That’s really arrogant on our part, and we’ve been doing that for decades, descending on countries that don’t speak our language and believing that we’re better than local journalists. We’re obviously not.
I do see a resurgence in local photojournalists in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. They’re fantastic, and they have amazing eyes. I love to see their work, and I love to see them being recognized. No one can tell a story better than the people from the region. Nobody can talk about themselves better than they can.