It is said that the eyes are the window of the soul. I hope not, and here’s why:

The boy is looking into a car not long after mercenaries in the employ of the U.S. government had destroyed the two women in the front seat. Every line of the Times story provides evidence of how this criminal war has gone all but completely out of control. I could write for hours about how much is revealed by the incident, where, once again, innocents are slaughtered for supposedly threatening “security” forces that shouldn’t be there in the first place. And then there is the unholy mix of agencies and companies involved: AID, a “quasi-independent agency” of the State Department, hired RTI International, which hired “Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run security firm that has its headquarters in Dubai and is registered in Singapore.” And let us not overlook the language used by the Times, which labeled the mercenaries “contractors” in the print edition and “guards” online, both euphemisms.

But all that I might say pales next to the mute testimony given by this photo. The photographer has used the most common elements of visual composition to focus our attention on something extraordinary. We see the boy’s face in the center of the picture; he is isolated against a soft-toned background as in studio portraiture; successively tighter framings by the border of the photo, the left side window, and the right side window channel our attention to his expression; his face is soft, his eyes are wide open. His acute vulnerability is accentuated by the contrast with the blurry smear of blood on the metal surface in the foreground. Between the left door and the boy lies the interior of the car, now a dark, gory killing pen. He has looked down and seen the stain inside. He looks up, as if for an answer.

The photograph shows us many things, but the achievement is to show seeing–real seeing, when you can’t necessarily filter out or fully comprehend what you see–and to show how we are affected by what comes in through our eyes. This child has seen the traces of horror within that car without benefit of geopolitical framing or any other adult defense mechanism. And he has been harmed.

As with the rest of the composition, nothing new is involved: we see people seeing as they look back at the camera in one snapshot after another. We enjoy reaction shots when the birthday gifts are opened. But that isn’t really seeing, for everyone knows how to react and no damage is likely to be done. And we’re not in a war zone.

This blog has posted several times on the normalization of war in the U.S. We also try to point out how photojournalists are documenting the reverse process, the destruction of the basic requirements for normal life for those trapped in Iraq. Children will always try to see what is happening. There are some things they just shouldn’t have to see.

Photograph by Joao Silva for The New York Times.

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I was struck by this image when I came across it in the NYT this past week. At first I thought it was a scene from Iraq. But then I read the headline, “Paintball Accident Made Him a Widower, and Then A Crusader.” The story, it turns out, is not about the war in Iraq, but the latest version of the child’s game “Capture the Flag” played with guns that shoot paintball pellets at 300 ft/sec. It is, by some accounts, the fastest growing sport in America, and while a few people have actually died while playing it the more common injury seems to be to the eyes. A debate rages over whether paintball is more dangerous than basketball and football or safer than bowling, but all of this diverts attention from the way in which the “sport” contributes directly to the normalization of a war culture and the implications that that has for who and what we are as a people.

Paintball has become something of a growth industry, and as this picture indicates, it is played not just by children but by adults, and not just in the backyard, but in elaborately built sets that appeal to a dual sense of militaristic fantasy and realism. The aesthetics of the Times photograph reinforces the relationship between the fantastic and the real. Notice, for example, that the weaponry and equipment appear to be high-tech, perhaps something out of “Starship Troopers,” while the debris sitting behind the crumbling wall on the right side and the bombed out car in the background lend an air of realism. This could easily be a scene from Baghdad or some other war torn locality. But notice too how the soft focus on the left hand side of the screen and the blurred motion of the individual walking across the front of the visual plane lend a dreamy, surrealistic quality to the image, thus locating it in a fantasy world. So, you don’t have to join the military (or be hired by Blackwater) to “enjoy” the rush and excitement of going to war. You can do it from the luxury and safety of your local paintball park. It is a game played without any of the risks that attend real battles with live ammunition or opponents one feels compelled to kill (not just defeat) and who no doubt feel likewise. And a quick search for paintball guns and assorted paraphernalia make it clear that this is not a sport for the economically underprivileged. If you can’t afford a Humvee (or are not a U.S. Senator with access to military simulators), this might be the next best way to play at being a soldier without actually becoming one.

Photo Credit: Ann Johansson/New York Times

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This past week the Washington Post published a four part series in its “special reports” on “America at War” titled “Left of Boom: The Struggle to Defeat Roadside Bombs.” The series is a super-saturated, multi-mediated cornucopia of maps, graphs, slideshows, videos, and transcripts, including a glossary of terms for the uninitiated (if you don’t know the difference between “Left of Boom” and “Right of Boom” go here). Part II is titled “There Was a Two Year Learning Curve … and a lot people died in those two years.” The past tense here is telling, and a not so subtle reminder of the WP‘s long standing support for administration policy in Iraq. The report includes a slide show narrated by WP photographer Andrea Bruce who, “recounts an encounter with a roadside bomb while embedded in Baquabah, Iraq. The June 2004 attack seriously injured two soldiers who were traveling in an unarmored Humvee.” Before you can get to the slide show, however, you have to click the word “continue” on the screen below:

I clicked. The story is about two Humvees—one armored, one not—attacked by an IED. There were no fatalities. No one lost any limbs. Those in the unarmored vehicle suffered severe head trauma. Some of the images are hard to look at, and the injuries are surely serious, but we have seen far worse from previous wars, as well as the current one, if not always in the mainstream U.S. press, then at least in the foreign press and at readily available websites such as here and here. So why the warning? Why the dark shroud to veil the images? What propriety—what interest—is being protected and preserved?

The answer might be in part a function of how normalized—or plain inconvenient—the war has become, at least for those of us sitting safely and comfortably back in the States. Now longer than any other war the U.S. has participated in (with the exceptions of the Revolutionary War and the Vietnam “police action”), Operation Iraqi Freedom has become something of a fact of life. Sure, it’s a campaign issue in this political season and the “conduct of the war” is identified as the top concern in public opinion polls, but only for 28% of the projected population. In other words, for the vast majority of American people the war has become just another issue, like the economy or health care or immigration. The ordinariness of all of this is accented by the graphic design of the WP website.

“America at War” is part of the “Special Reports” section of the website. It is buried in the left hand column and deep below the hard news; indeed, it sits directly beneath the section labeled “Entertainment News.” If one finds the special reports and clicks on “America at War”—one of several such reports—they get the screen above. On the left side we find a densely packed frame full of textual information, assorted hyperlinks, and a picture of soldiers doing something at night—it is not quite clear what is happening in the picture, but oddly enough the photograph is from the slide show that is veiled by the warning of disturbing images. On the far right, in its own frame, is a space alien advertising cheaper mortgage rates. The choice here is simple: You can read about one of the longest wars fought in the name of the “American People,” as well as the effects of the continuing occupation of a foreign land that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. men and women and countless Iraqis, or you can save a few hundred bucks each month. You can be a citizen and exercise civic responsibility, or you can be a consumer looking out for your own private interests. And should a sense of civic responsibility get the better of you, but you don’t want to be “disturbed” by the “violence and graphic nature” of what you will see, well, hey, just don’t bother clicking on the slide show. Out of sight, out of mind.

The problem, of course, is that those who are living the war in Iraq don’t have quite the same luxury. The photographer, who narrates the veiled slide show, reflects, “One thing that strikes me about this one incident now looking back is how normal it is, how this happens everyday …” For those in Iraq the war is not a slide show that can be erased with a simple click of the mouse, or ignored with a turn of the head, no matter how “disturbing” it might be. It is, rather, an event that “happens everyday.” The tragedy for us at home is that we harbor the illusion that the war is just another issue that we can choose to attend to or not depending upon how it comports with our sense of decorum and propriety—or perhaps our own private interests. Out of sight, out of mind … indeed.

Credit: Andrea Bruce/Washington Post

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In November, 2000, President Clinton traveled to Hanoi and stated in a speech there that “This shared suffering has given our countries a relationship unlike any other.” The statement need not be literally true to be an achievement. To the extent that it became true that day, it was something that reflected not only the war but also the healing and growing together that had ensued in the followed decades. Let us hope that some day the same can be said for the US and Iraq. It surely would take time, but the reason for doing so is already all evident in photojournalism’s coverage of this war.

Two examples brought this thought to mind. One was the post at BAGnewsNotes yesterday about a new book by photographer Andrew Lichtenstein entitled Never Coming Home. Lichtenstein chronicles eight of the funerals occurring across America for those killed in the war. You can see some of these heartrending images in a photo essay at Alternet. One of a father collapsing in grief on someone’s shoulder is undoubtedly a portrait of suffering:

And for every loved one lost here, there are many more destroyed over there. This image from yesterday’s New York Times is one example of how grief knows no boundaries:

The caption of this page 10 story says that “An Iraqi woman wept next to her husband’s body yesterday in Baquba. Violent civilian deaths in Iraq declined last month.” That mixed message is typical of Times coverage of late (some would say, all the time). We can be certain, however, that the statistical decline means little to this woman. What remains to be seen is whether we can make an emotional connection across the barriers of war, geography, and culture.

Unfortunately, while the visual image may be the best means to establish empathy on the scale required, the archive presents its own obstacles to emotional understanding. While the photographs of American grief are now available in an elegiac photo essay and a beautiful book, those of Iraqi parents are not getting quite the same packaging. This photo appeared as a black and white image in the print edition, and then as a thumbnail image online. I was grateful that it was there, but the thumbnail sizing seems almost obscene, as if a deliberate strategy to minimize the depth of her loss. And while the American dead are respectfully interred in closed caskets, her husband’s body is laid out as if on a slab at the city morgue or as a cadaver suitable for an anatomy class. And instead of seeing the father’s face contorted in grief, hers is obscured by a handkerchief. Instead of seeing an individual, we see an anonymous figure draped in the burqa that signals, to the Western gaze, the less than full personhood of those confined within traditional cultures. The only means of communication are her hands. A message may be there, but we see only the gesture of loss, experienced by a social type, the Iraqi woman. That is a long way from sharing suffering.

And yet she does touch me. There is so little left in that room, and the light coming in like a breeze flowing through the window hints at a transfiguration, as if his spirit has already ascended. That may be, but she stands there like a pillar of grief. If only she had a shoulder to cry on. One of ours, perhaps.

Photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein; Ali Mohammed/European Pressphoto Agency.

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