When the tears came, they weren’t always for the dead and the unfathomable depths of suffering. They also flowed for the times in between, for the joy and smiles of the unknowing.

As the acclaimed American war photographer Corinne Dufka sorted through the pictures and negatives for her new book, This Is War: Photographs from a Decade of Conflict, covering more than a decade on frontlines from El Salvador to Bosnia and Liberia, she once again looked into the faces she had perhaps only registered briefly years ago.

“I entered into this zone of memory, of trying to understand what I witnessed. That in and of itself is an interesting process because I wept a lot,” she said. “Some of the pictures that were saddest were of times of hope. One of the saddest pictures is in between the first and second wars in Liberia when people are waiting in line to vote, so earnestly and with so much enthusiasm and optimism. They didn’t know that within two years their country would be involved in another horrific conflict.”

This Is War is thankfully spare on dead bodies. They are there but the focus of the book, as with most of Dufka’s work, is on those responsible for the killing or forced to live with its consequences.

In one picture, Dufka captures a child combatant playing with an abandoned toy as he guards a checkpoint in the middle of the embattled Liberian capital, Monrovia, in 1996. A rural Salvadorian woman stands at her window holding a photo of her husband who was one of three men in her village abducted by the army, and tortured and murdered.

In besieged Sarajevo, Dufka turns her camera on the agony of parting with no certainty as to when, or even if, women and children waving from an evacuation bus will see their families again. In Mostar, a Bosnian Croat soldier nonchalantly holds his gun at his side as hundreds of Muslim men are marched down a mountain track to a prison camp in an abandoned factory.

The book’s cover photo is of a pile of machetes discarded at Rwanda’s border as Hutus fled the country following the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in 1994. A lone child stares at the camera as the adults shuffle past carrying bundles and responsibility for the last great crime against humanity of the 20th century.

Dufka describes her book as a “personal journey to come to terms with these dozen tumultuous years of covering some of the bloodiest and most horrific conflicts of the latter part of the last century in which I saw not only tens of thousands of people who’ve been killed in these outbursts of unspeakable violence but also a dozen or so journalist friends killed”.

Part of that is a reckoning with what she frankly admits is her own dehumanisation. Dufka came to war photography by accident. She was a psychiatric social worker in San Francisco for a decade before heading to El Salvador at the height of its civil war in the mid-1980s, first as a social worker with the Lutheran church and then a human rights investigator tracking the murderous work of the country’s rightwing death squads.

Herbert Anaya, the director of El Salvador’s human rights commission, asked Dufka to set up a photo documentation programme. Two weeks later he was murdered by a death squad. Dufka took the photo of Anaya’s body published in the New York Times the next day. Not long after she went to work for Reuters.

El Salvador’s conflict was rooted in resistance to historic oppression but it had an ideological hue because the guerrillas were Marxist. By the time Dufka arrived in Bosnia in 1992, the old cold war rivalries had given way to ethnic and nationalist conflict that came to define so many of the wars in Europe and Africa in that decade. The scale of human barbarity horrified Dufka but drew her in.

“It’s a theme throughout my life of trying to address dehumanisation that started way back in my family because there was a lot of suffering from blindness, from mental illness, there’s a lot of substance abuse. So I learned to get on with it and then I transferred those skills to my life as a photojournalist,” she said.

In 1997, the International Women’s Media Foundation awarded Dufka its courage in journalism prize. By then she had a reputation among her peers for astonishing bravery in the midst of some of the most brutal conflicts.

In Rwanda, a member of a Hutu death squad put a gun to her head until she talked him down. She captured intense street battles in Monrovia from among the combatants.

Dufka was badly injured when an anti-tank mine exploded under the Reuters armoured car in Bosnia in 1993, turning her camera into shrapnel that smashed into her face. The force of the blast tore the ligaments in her knees and she suffered internal bleeding.

Dufka and her injured colleagues tumbled out of the burning car only to come under Croatian sniper fire before their rescue by British soldiers. Three weeks later she was in Somalia, still walking with a cane.

The role of photographers has come under more scrutiny in recent years, in part because it’s so much easier for anyone to take a picture of individual suffering and have the wider world view it.

“There’s a debate about who should have ownership. Whether, if you’re not from a community or a victim from that population, you have a right to even photograph. There’s a level of sensitivity about showing people in hardship and conflict,” she said.
“War is ugly and war is painful. It’s important that people see the handiwork of those who make and perpetrate and support wars. It’s really a minority of people, usually from political elites, who object.”

Dufka said that only once did someone tell her to stop taking a picture. A man turned on her after a bombing during South Africa’s first free elections in 1994 and kicked her in the face.

“That was the one time. Very often it was the opposite. People welcomed me into their homes, into the hospitals, into their battlefields, into graveyards where burials were taking place,” she said.

Dufka drew satisfaction from the fact that her work and that of other photographers can have real political impact in foreign capitals and influence policies to alleviate suffering if not end conflicts. But she came to understand the price of viewing war through a lens.

“I have to say it’s profoundly dehumanising. You can’t break down every time you see human suffering. You’ve got to keep it together and do your damn job. But that has a price,” she said.

Dufka wasn’t even present at the atrocity that prompted her to give up war photography. She was on a plane flying out of Nairobi in 1998 when al-Qaida blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 224 people, almost all Africans. She was horrified when she realised she was more upset at missing the opportunity to photograph the carnage than she was about the victims.

“I hadn’t given a thought to the Kenyans and I’d been living in the country for six years. I was so profoundly ashamed of myself. I’d become so dehumanised. I didn’t recognise myself, and that’s why I got out,” she said.

But Dufka didn’t give up on conflict, she changed how she worked with it. In 1999, she moved to Sierra Leone to open a field office for Human Rights Watch documenting its civil war and the terrible crimes against civilians including the cutting off of limbs. The switch to taking testimony and then working as a criminal investigator for the UN war crimes court for Sierra Leone felt like more of a contribution. She also had a daughter, which again shifted her perspective on war, and eventually moved back to the US.

“In those years I never gave myself a break. I went from conflict to conflict to conflict. There are some people who become afflicted with post-traumatic stress. That’s just not the way my personality is wired. I only had one post-traumatic stress incident, right after my daughter was born for about a month with intrusive dreams and thoughts. I achieved more balance in my life now,” she said.

As she was sorting the photographs for the book, Dufka was struck by how many places she worked remain in conflict of some form. Ethiopia was at war again. So was Sudan.

“Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Liberia, they’re still grappling with the legacies of conflict. Endemic corruption and some of the world’s worst socioeconomic indicators,” she said. “I would like this book to generate some reflection about conflict, relapse and risk in recidivism.”

So does she see common features in conflicts as far apart as Central America, Europe and central Africa? “One common thread is a conclusion about human behaviour. There’s nothing that people will not do to each other, and there’s nothing they won’t do for each other. I’m not the first one to say that but it is so clear. I have watched profound brutality and cruelty, and then documented later, as a human rights investigator, the most astounding acts of human generosity and courage to help each other,” she said.

“I also learned that fear is stronger than love and the sort of solidarity that binds communities together. You saw that in Rwanda, in Bosnia, where you have communities turn on each other. It’s manipulated, of course. But fear is a huge motivator.”

• This Is War: Photographs from a Decade of Conflict is out now