What motivates a person to go into the world's most dangerous and violent places, to share the risks of soldiers in battle or civilians caught in war's destruction, in order to record such sights on film? Photographer James Nachtwey makes it sound simple. Says he: "There is a job to be done--to record the truth. And I have a terrific personal compulsion to do it." In the past three years, that impulse has repeatedly taken Nachtwey into some of the main cockpits of violence: Central America, the Middle East, Northern Ireland. Last year, on assignment for TIME, he spent nearly six months in Central America, mostly in Nicaragua; he was in Lebanon for much of the rest of the year. Since then, he has taken his cameras back to Central America. Last month he was with Nicaraguan contra guerrillas who fought a bloody battle against Sandinista troops to capture a border hamlet. Nachtwey's pictures of that fighting appeared in recent issues of TIME.

Last week Nachtwey accepted the Overseas Press Club's (O.P.C.) Robert Capa Gold Medal for his photography of both combatants and civilians in Nicaragua and Lebanon. The award, named after the famed LIFE photographer who died in 1954 in Indochina, is one of the most prestigious in photojournalism because it is given for overseas reporting "requiring exceptional courage and enterprise."

Nachtwey does not discount the risks he takes. "I've had close calls on "almost every assignment, and was wounded by a land mine in El Salvador in 1982," he says. "After a while, you tend not to think about the danger. But when a first-rate photographer is killed, as Newsweek's John Hoagland was in El Salvador in March, that's when you realize the great degree of risk we all court. Hoagland was no cowboy. Almost none of us is. The Robert Capa medal doesn't reward cowboys. It is given for practicing good journalism where risk is intrinsic."

TIME's Peter Jordan also was presented with a major O.P.C. honor: the Olivier Rebbot Award for best photographic reporting from abroad for his pictures of the bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut last October and his coverage of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's election campaign last spring. Nachtwey and Jordan join a long list of TIME photographers who have won these distinguished Overseas Press Club awards and risked their lives to give TIME readers a level of news photojournalism no other publication can rival.