Prague - The boy pulls the pin from the grenade. Silence fills the air. He studies the frozen, terrified expressions of the four European reporters who stand no more than 20 feet before him.
Please, please, don't do it, don't do it, they plead to the boy. At 13, he is easily less than half the age of the four men before him, but he literally holds their lives in the palm of his hand. He is a soldier in the Liberian army, and he must be strong.
Smirking, he flicks his wrist towards his Caucasian counterparts, toying with them. He laughs as they tremble with fear. At the last possible second, he hurls the grenade in the opposite direction.
The reporters are still within range of shrapnel from the explosion, but luckily they remain unscathed. At this point, they're just thankful to be alive. One of the grateful individuals is Czech photojournalist Jan Šibik.
"I almost started to pee," he tells me.
That incident, during a trip to Liberia in 2003, reflects the risks Šibik faces while traveling to the remote corners of the world to capture images of people who are suffering, unrepresented, or simply forgotten.
Šibik, 46, has made over 200 trips in nearly 25 years - covering and witnessing first-hand the various calamities that affect people across the globe. A glance at his resume is almost like looking at a summary of every major international conflict and crises of the last quarter century: the genocide in Rwanda; the tsunami in Sri Lanka; the conflict in Palestine; wars in Afghanistan, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, to name a few. In the past year alone he has covered, among others, both the intriguing political situation in Iran and the outbreak of H1N1 in Mexico City.
For a man who has seen horrors most of us can barely imagine, Jan Šibik appears surprisingly content and comfortable - at ease with both himself and the world around him. We are meeting in the offices of Reflex, the Prague-based Czech magazine where Šibik has worked since 1992.
A shock of curly blond hair frames a lean face bearing a reserved expression. Šibik's slight air of standoffishness seems to stem not from arrogance but rather an overstated sense of humility - at one point, he interrupts our interview to ask an English-speaking co-worker to help better express himself, but then proceeds to interrupt her translations with his own grammatically-correct statements. At various points, I'm worried that my subject appears annoyed, but another of his colleagues assures me that this is not the case.
"I think Jan has a problem with social intelligence," Milan Tesar, the Culture Editor at Reflex, tells me. "His image is very rude, very brash, but he has a very good heart. Everything from Jan comes from inside of his person - his spirit - no brain, more heart."
It is this combination of an aversion to social situations and a tendency to lead with his heart that endows Šibik's photographs with their remarkable depth.
He is able, as an observer, to disappear into a given environment and capture a situation with raw, untarnished honesty - nothing is posed, nothing held back. The emotional intimacy of his images is at times especially difficult for the photographer himself to deal with.
"Every time I don't feel comfortable," he says. "But I hope I'm not a hyena, and it's important to have contact with people.
"These trips cost the magazine a lot of money, so I have to be strong because I need to bring the pictures. The pictures are important, because if they are strong, they can have big power."
"Big power" is certainly one way to describe the intensity his pictures possess. Looking upon many of Šibik's photographs - whether it's children performing hard labor in Cambodian landfills, or Kenyan prostitutes suffering from HIV - one is immediately confronted by harsh realities, scenes that seize up every muscle in our bodies with an uncomfortable chill. Rather than face the brutal truths these images provide, however, many people choose instead to turn away - something that frustrates the photographer to no end.
"For many people, it's only important to think about 'I, I, I,'" Šibik remarks. "Many people forget that during communist times, some in other countries helped us. But now, it's time when we must sometimes help others." When I ask Šibik if he's ever tempted to put down the camera and start helping people and saving lives himself, he promptly shakes his head, "No".
"I want to help through photography," he tells me. "I think the professional way of doing something is to try to do the best at what you know. I don't know how to do humanitarian work professionally, but they don't know how to take pictures like me. The best way for me to help is by taking pictures, publish pictures, speak about pictures, and do exhibitions."
This line of thinking has proved extremely effective, with public response to Šibik's photographs often allowing him to contribute other forms of humanitarian aid. In 2000, he started a campaign entitled "Podejte ruce dětem ze Siery Leone" ("Give the Children of Sierra Leone a Hand"), which raised 1.1 million CZK for child victims of war and civil conflict. Then, in 2005, he organized a charity called "Chci ještě žít!" ("I Want to Live!"), raising 900,000 CZK for AIDS victims in Odessa, Ukraine - a city where 1 out of every 10 people is HIV positive.
Throughout his career, Šibik has primarily been a war photographer, but not all of his photos are of horrifying situations. Most notably, in 2004, his photos of Indian Kushti wrestlers took third place in the Sports Action category of the prestigious World Press Photo Contest.
And lately, not all of his photos are taken so far from home."In the past, he thought that in the Czech Republic there aren't interesting topics," Tesar tells me of his colleague. "But he's changed his opinion, because not only war and drama somewhere in Africa is interesting - he's learned to take interesting pictures in the Czech Republic in less spectacular situations."
Though he stays home more often now, Šibik appears determined as ever to raise public awareness and help foster social change in a world where he's seen more than a fair share of misery, cruelty, and suffering. Ultimately, though, he knows that it's not up to him to decide
"I still believe what I do is important, but I'm not naive - it helps, but just a little," he says. "Photography can't change or stop a war - it just shows the bad things, and it depends on you how you will react."
This story was originally published by the Prague Wanderer, a web-zine run by New York University students in Prague, Czech Republic.
Yang-Yi is a junior at New York University majoring in Journalism and History. He is from Oakville, ON, Canada.
