Bruno Barbey is a French documentary photographer, born 1941. He photographed many wars throughout his career as a documentary war photographer. Barbey has published many books over the years, about 23 published. He has also created some short films throughout his career, including contributions for a BBC production called Assignment in Morocco. 

Website: http://www.brunobarbey.com
Photographic portfolio: http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53Z82A

Barbey has made a huge body of working in documentary photography. He often tends to go into the environment and asks the chosen subjects to look directly into the camera. It seems that he doesn’t tell them what to do or positions them differently to how they actually were. I think that his work is really good but none of it really stands out to me and I don’t really think that they effect me that much. I see these images but don’t really feel anything towards them, I am indifferent towards them. I feel that the images are necessary in the aspect of documentary photography and that they do document soon to be historical events but I just don’t really feel anything. None of the images are very hard hitting, they’re great images though. To me his work is more about the community and individuals living in the countries where these wars are going on. I feel like his work is aimed at communities within these places to show the effects that are going on in these wars rather than documenting the same war photographs that many war documentary photographers have. I like the idea of this and think that the images are effective and good but I am just not particularly interested in them all that much, there isn’t one image that really stands out for me as truly brilliant and amazing.

I decided to go for this image as this one, for me, is the most natural and behind the scenes. This is an image of soldiers relaxing possibly getting ready in anticipation ready for battle or an after battle reward with a cigarette. I think that Barbey asked to make this image and the soldiers didn’t know how to react and so just smiled and carried on about their business. I do like this image as it shows more soldiers in the background as they sit, looking as if they are possibly preparing something. I like that this image is in black and white too, this was most likely taken on a film camera as that is what Barbey used, especially because of the time that this image would have been created [before the digital age]. I think making war images black and white really takes the spectator back to the time that it all happened and remembering it as a memory, which  black and white is often associated with in film etc. I think that this is one of Barbey’s better and more interesting photographs as it stood out for me among all of the rest of his images.