Photographing the horrors of conflict

By Tom Cohen, CNN STORY HIGHLIGHTS "The Bang Bang Club" film debuts in the U.S. this week at the Tribeca film festival
It's based on a book about the humanity of four journalists who chronicle inhumanity
The four photographers covered the bloody political violence as apartheid ended in South Africa
Today, only two are alive, including Joao Silva, who was injured last year in Afghanistan
Editor's note: CNN's Tom Cohen was based in South Africa from 1990 to 1998 for The Associated Press and worked with Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva. He covered many of the events depicted in the book and film. Note, this story contains graphic photos and some profanity.

(CNN) -- More than 20 years later, the image remains both horrifying and riveting.

An attacker slams a machete into the skull of a kneeling man engulfed in flames as a boy runs past in celebration.

"As I focused, I noted that the early sun was right behind the burning man," photographer Greg Marinovich wrote of how he captured the moment to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. "The camera's light meter did not work, and so I twisted the aperture wide open: f5.6 should be right."

That instant of emotional detachment -- setting his aperture as a man gets brutally murdered a few feet away -- is at the heart of the book "The Bang-Bang Club" by Marinovich and Joao Silva on covering South Africa's chaotic township violence in the final years of white rule.

Published in 2000, the book is considered a must-read by many journalists who report on human conflict for a living.

It is a gritty and honest account of how Marinovich, Silva and two other acclaimed photographers -- Ken Oosterbroek and Kevin Carter -- confronted tragedy, risk and their own compassion in recording the fallout of a secret war waged by the last white South African government and its Zulu nationalist allies against Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.

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