Taylor Kitsch Takes Up Photography

Actor Taylor Kitsch

Actor Taylor Kitsch as conflict photographer and The Bang-Bang Club
member Kevin Carter.

For Taylor Kitsch, work has become a hobby. The actor’s latest film, ‘The Bang Bang Club,’ finds him playing a war photographer covering the end of Apartheid in South Africa. He became so engrossed in the role that he’s now taken up the art of photography himself.

“I definitely got caught up with it all,” the ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ star says in a new interview. “I don’t think I’m that good yet, maybe farther down the road. I still have the camera I used to shoot the photos in the film.”

Kitsch, 30, plays the late Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Kevin Carter, who along with photographers Greg Marinovich (played in the film by Ryan Phillippe), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach), and João Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld) comprised a group of daring conflict photographers most famous for covering South Africa during the end of Apartheid in the early ’90s.

The film gave Kitsch an opportunity to try his own hand at photography. He says, “There’s a scene where a guy is throwing a Molotov cocktail (bomb) at one of the trucks, so I was taking real photos there and I blew those up and have them on my wall at home with the recreation of the cover of the book ‘The Life and Death of Kevin Carter.’ Hopefully we’ll see the photos in an exhibit or I can put a photography book together.”

Taylor Kitsch and Ryan Phillippe in 'The Bang Bang Club'

‘The Bang Bang Club’ could not come out at a more difficult time for photojournalists. Just this week photographer Tim Hetherington, co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary ‘Restrepo’ (a harrowing film about soldiers in Afghanistan that has stuck with me ever since I saw it) was killed in Libya along with Pulitzer Prize-nominated war photographer Chris Hondros. This comes just months after Joao Silva, one of the photographers depicted in Kitsch’s film, lost both of his legs to a land mine in Afghanistan.

Kitsch hopes his new film brings these men into proper recognition and honors their incredibly dangerous yet important work.

“I think it’s a great time for this film. It just makes it that much more relevant. Any attention you can bring to these cats, what they sacrificed, is good. We all take for granted what these guys do out there and what they put out every day,” he says.

“

[Filming] was pretty much a wake-up call for me because we can all be quite selfish sometimes and these guys are risking their lives. The camera is really their gun and their way of making a difference. You never hear about the journalist that rescued someone or did something to prevent something worse from happening… It’s a sacrifice that these photographers are making to expose this.”

Want to hear what it’s like to be a war photographer from someone who’s actually done it? Check out our interview with conflict photographer and self-described “embedded journalist” Teru Kuwayama. Also, be sure to check out ‘The Bang Bang Club’ when it opens in theaters this weekend, and let us know what you think of it.