Photographer Paul Grabhorn doesn’t simply document the world’s war zones, but brings an activist’s temperament to his work. As he recounts in his new photo collection, he was first motivated by the early-’90s civil war in Somalia. A U.S. government contractor at the time, he pulled some strings for a seat on a military plane bound for Mombasa and began photographing under the auspices of the International Red Cross. If his story began on the Horn of Africa, it continued through Chechnya, Armenia, Cambodia and other places where people have been displaced by war and, increasingly, climate change. Grabhorn has an eye for human faces, capturing hard-pressed people in the moment and without needless effusions of sentimentality. Their expressions speak for themselves.
