War correspondent? No ... I'm a Peace Artist!
- Chris Hilton
- Apr 13, 2025
- 2 min read
Obvious really, because right from the start it was clear where Carlos Guaritos sympathies lay ...
He wasn't with the ex public schoolboys doing a piece to camera about the fierce fighting that could be heard in the distance ... he chased the bullets down to find a bunch of bored soldiers shooting crocodiles and lizards, not each other.
When he saw the horrors in places like Angola, he chased the line of misery back to the arms fairs where the mechanics of war were coveted and sold to the people with the money. But he didn't go there on press day to photograph the sterlised, coreographed version ... he blagged an MOD Pass for the week and showed what it was 'really' like.
When Carlos photographed Willie Whitelaw's quasi military 'Short Sharp Shock' regime, he
didn't toe the line of the Governor or the Prison Reform Trust ... once Carlos realised that the Guv didn't get in until ten in the morning, he was photographing the things that told the real story.
He photographed CND protests, riots, the 'Made in Dagenham' women.
He photpraphed the people that were driving the world, Thatcher , Kissinger, Tony Benn, Yasser Arafat, Desmond Tutu, the Sandinistas.
But none of that is a surpise when you see where he came from ... he photgraphed the women of Dagenham because he was one of the men of Dagenham ... working the lines on the biggest factory in Europe, back then, a hotbed of dissent. He had that keen eye because he started out in the Simon Guttmann photo agency Report (their archives of the industrial strife of the seventies and eighties is really something to see), home to some of the greats like Robert Capa before he went on to found Magnum ...
Carlos co-founded his own photo agency, Reportage, as well as a photography centre in Nicargua, he came from the stable of committed photography, men and women that wanted to change the world with their images ... he wielded his camera the way Woody Guthrie did his guitar ... it should have had a sticker on it saying 'this machine kills fascists' ...
Up next ...
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