© Ulises
Castellanos
Christian Poveda, who was shot
dead in El Salvador last week aged 52, was one of the most talented
photojournalists of his generation. He was also a brave documentary
film-maker, specialising in politically contentious or dangerous
subjects that others wouldn't touch.
Christian was born in Algiers. His grandfathers, one an anarchist,
the other a communist, were exiles from Franco's Spain, and Christian
often said how much he admired them for their political engagement.
After Algerian independence, the family moved again, to France.
Untrained, with a highly developed eye, Christian began to sell
photos at the age of 19, and for the next decade he covered wars
throughout the world, specialising in Latin America. His break
came when he covered the civil war in El Salvador, a country that
he came to love.
Christian
Poveda during an assignment in El Salvador in January. He was
shot dead in its capital, San Salvador, last week Photograph:
Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty
Among the publications for which he worked were Paris Match, Newsweek
and Time magazine. A Poveda image was instantly recognisable for
its stark, formal qualities, but like Robert Capa, on whose life
he modelled his own, Poveda wasn't interested in aestheticism.
He cared about the people whom he photographed, and he did become
involved in their lives, keeping in touch long after the images
appeared in magazines throughout the rich world.
In the 1980s, he began to make documentary films, focusing on
the lives of the banlieue young, boxers and wrestlers. Within
the cliquey, status-minded world of French broadcasting he had
a reputation for being a "dur" – a cantankerous,
unbiddable outsider. But the same executives who bemoaned his
aggressiveness in meetings would concede, often uncomfortably,
that he obtained great material by living with his subjects,
month after month, without regard to constraints of budgets.
He had developed his own style of campaigning film journalism,
by showing what it was to live on the outside.
I met him in 1995, and together we made the television documentary
Journey to the Far Right, on Europe's far-right movements, which
was shown on BBC2 and the French-German network ARTE, and throughout
Europe. I think Christian had misgivings both about working with
a BBC, Oxbridge-educated reporter, and about whether we should
be giving airtime to characters whom he described, with his usual
terseness, as "des merdeux" ("shitbags").
However, we got to like and respect each other.
We were threatened with violence many times as we travelled throughout
Europe, and I have never worked with anyone as persistent and physically
courageous. Christian was thick-set and dark, bull-like, with sad,
eloquent eyes. We developed a distinctive reportorial procedure.
He would stand in front of a racist politician, blocking any exit;
being tall, I could loom over the interviewee. I would ask the
same questions, until our victim either demanded an end to the
interview, or in exasperation spat out his views. Intermittently,
though it was very time-consuming, the method proved to be highly
successful.
Christian taught me that one must never compromise with people
whom one loathes for good reason. But I noticed, too, that members
of the National Front respected Christian, because he never for
a moment pretended not to dislike everything they stood for. His
own expressions of satisfaction were rigorously confined to whether
we had triumphed over the forces of darkness.
If we had failed he was disconsolate, drowning his sorrows in
Bandol, his red wine of choice, also, to Christian's horror,
the National Front's favourite. After the last of our many jousts
with Jean-Marie Le Pen, he was gleeful. "On l'a baisé bel et bien," he
said. ("We really screwed him …") He was pleased
when the film was shown at many festivals throughout the world.
It became one of ARTE's most successful films, and it was used
in journalism schools as an illustration of how to cover racists
without permitting them to evade responsibility for their views.
Christian remained half-detached from the French scene, but he
did manage to make a living, subsidising his films with more
lucrative photo assignments. After separating from his wife Tamsin,
he began to spend more time in El Salvador, which he loved. In
La Vida Loca, which was the result of more than four years' work,
he looked at the lives of teenage gangsters of San Salvador,
focusing on the heavily tattooed Mara 18 gang, filming gang initiations,
dope dealing and smoking, and funerals. Gang members are killed
in the film, and it's clear that few if any of the picturesquely
named children (one of them is called "La Chucky", after the protagonist
of the horror film Child's Play) will ever reach adulthood. "We
must try to understand why a child of 12 or 13 joins a gang, and
gives his life for it," he said. Christian wanted us to
see that for these children, there can be no other outcome. Like
the best of his work, the film is raw, beautiful and involving.
Last week, La Vida Loca was about to be released in France. Christian
had called friends, expressing worries that pirated DVDs were
freely available. He had heard that many in the gangs, as well
as the police force, weren't happy with the film. But he went
filming in Tonacatepeque, a barrio 10 miles outside San Salvador.
On his return, he was ambushed and, seated in his car, shot several
times in the head. A gang member was arrested by the police. "Christian
is just one of the 10 who will die today," a Salvadoran photographer
wrote in the internet newspaper El Faro. "If you look long
enough down the throat of the lion, he will eat you."
• Christian Poveda, photojournalist and documentary film-maker,
born 12 January 1957; died 2 September 2009
Nick
Fraser
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 September 2009 18.47 BST
© Christian
Poveda
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