The bomb scare in Times Square the other day was a close call, otherwise known as dumb luck.  And despite the embarrassment of the would-be bomber coming from Pakistan rather than Iraq or Afghanistan, one can assume that the scare only helped to continue the American war effort.  Whatever happens in the US, the bombing is sure to continue over there.  Rather than make light of the association between actual terrorism and US military campaigns, it might help to ask if coverage of the two might have more in common than has been noticed.

The New York Times slide show was labeled “Bomb Scare in Times Square,” and the caption for this photo said, “A crew cleaned up at the scene.”  As if: I don’t see either a crew or Times Square, but rather a lone functionary in a back alley scene out of some sci-fi movie.  Body Snatchers II, perhaps.  In fact, the photo is a study in disconnects.  Instead of the spectacle of Times Square, we see stacks of garbage, shipping flats, and other odds and ends.   Instead of workers, there is one figure in an entry-level moon suit, and rather than cleaning up he seems to be merely rearranging the shards of glass with that ridiculously small broom.  In place of terror and mobilization, there is this strangely esoteric ritual.  Rather than war, there is a choreography of forensic sanitation (note his mask, gloves, and slippers).  While some speak of the defense of civilization, this scene is vaguely surreal, and in lieu of the destructiveness of a powerful explosion, there is only broken glass on an empty street.

But there wasn’t a powerful explosion, so what’s the point?  What I want to suggest is that the disruption produced by the non-explosion reveals some of the blindness that now regularly accompanies US attitudes toward war.   The first problem is a failure to recognize the vast difference between the rhetoric of the war on terror and the banal realities of how it actually operates.  Civilization comes down to picking up the garbage, and its defense usually depends more on a well-functioning civil society and basic police work than on the projection of military power across the globe.

A second problem is that we don’t see the either the bomb or the likely retaliation, but only a trace of destructiveness and an innocuous figure of state action.  In this case, the lucky break of non-detonation excuses what is a regular practice of omission.  Despite some outstanding documentation of the effects of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US public an never see more than a a small fraction of the destructiveness caused by American military bombing, and then only from a distance.  (Assessments of total direct and indirect civilian deaths in Afghanistan due to US military action range from 8,768 to 28,360.)   Let me be clear: powerful documentary photographs are published in a few outlets, but not enough and without the full reportage needed to really make a dent in public opinion.

And what documentation of military destructiveness is available is balanced by images such as this one:

This image of a Marine Harrier jet would seem to be the opposite of the one above: a member of the ground crew has just finished fueling the sleek, powerful machine, which stands at ready on a clean runway against a backdrop of efficiently arrayed support buildings.  This is a picture of preparedness, and of the awesome capability of the American military.   There is nothing hapless about it, and we seem on the verge of action, not stuck in the dismal aftermath of having been attacked.  That is the message, of course, and so the one image counters the other: they may have car bombs, but we have this.  They may be able to pull off an attack, but there is no doubt that this machine is built for serious payback.

That said, I also think that the two images are both part of the same pattern of willful obliviousness.  Look again at the second photo: once again, there is only the trace of the bomb’s destructiveness.  (If you look carefully under the wings, you can see some of the weaponry.)  Although now seeing what comes before an attack rather than what remains afterward, the attack itself is not to be seen.  Even the style of the image, with its modernist aesthetic of sheer surfaces, clean lines, empty space, and other design features of modern technology admits of nothing messy, bloody, or deeply hurtful.  There is no sense of how the bomb will disrupt Afghan society–or, for that matter, how the expense of maintaining the jet and all that goes with it is disrupting American society.

The authorities rightly whisked away the SUV that was supposed to detonate in Time Square, and surely this Harrier jet will have flown another mission since the photograph was taken.  In each case the photographer has documented one scene in a global war that is all about bombing and being bombed.  But in these photos, as with so many others, the bomb, one way or another, isn’t there.  About that one might ironically remark, “bombs away”; or, perhaps, “out of sight is out of mind.”

Photographs by the New York Times and Tim Wimborne/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The photograph above shows a news story that doesn’t appear to have been told in the national media, notwithstanding a “sobering,” but little noted Pentagon report last week that indicated an active and growing insurgency and an Afghan government with “limited credibility.”

The line of trucks belong to NATO forces in Afghanistan.  The caption for the story tells two different tales.  On the one hand, it notes that the trucks were attacked and set afire “hours after NATO forces killed several insurgents and captured a Taliban sub-commander.”  On the other hand, it also notes that the trucks were burned “after hundreds of people blocked a main road and set them on fire to protest what they said were civilian deaths in Logar Province.” Whether those who set the trucks on fire were part of the “growing insurgency” or simply local Afghani citizens rising up in protest against unnecessary “citizen deaths” is not clear.  And that, of course, is the problem.

It is wholly possible that both tales  are in some measure true, but even still the point has to be that a war fought in the name of capturing the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan seems slated for failure so long as we continue to kill Afghani citizens in the name of their own freedom and liberation.  The photograph thus functions as an allegory of the frustrations of such an ill-conceived war as perceived from both sides: an intrusive formation of foreign, mobile vehicles stretching as far as the eye can see (to the limits of spatial and temporal infinity) and yet caught in a sea of flames that makes it permanently immobile.  As with the rusted out refuse of previous attempts to colonize Afghanistan, the burned out trucks will no doubt sit in place for many years as visual monuments to the most recent such effort (and failure).

The war in Vietnam was also fought primarily as a battle to capture the “hearts and minds” of a national people presumably at risk of being tyrannized by an oppressive political opposition.   Enacted by turns as a fiasco and a catastrophe, the Vietnam War was by all accounts an abysmal failure.  One might think that we would have learned our lesson—in George Santayana’s terms, “to remember the past” lest we be forced to “repeat it”—but that would seem not to be the case as the current war in Afghanistan, now the longest war in U.S. history, is being fought with little more than the same goal in mind. It should come as little surprise that we seem destined to a similar end.

No wonder that the story this photograph shows has received so little attention.

Photo Credit:  Mohammed Obaid Ormur/AP.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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I don’t know what the average age of the American soldier is, but the typical photograph we have seen in recent times suggests that “he” is in his mid-twenties or later. And what such photographs show us are young men who have completed their training as fighting machines; indeed, many such images show us soldiers who have already seen battle and so, as young as they might be, they appear as veterans and far older than their years.  What such photographs fail to show us—and in the process allow us to forget—is how much going to war robs such men of their youth and innocence … and no doubt much more as well.

When I first came across the photograph above I thought I was looking at a group of adolescents “playing” at being soldiers.  Indeed, the shooter in the middle of the image looks rather like “Ralphie,” the young boy from Jean Shepherd’s classic A Christmas Story who pines for a Red Ryder BB Gun only to have a department store Santa tell him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”  And those around him don’t seem much older as they all look awkwardly out of place in their clean camouflage uniforms and wielding what at first glance appear to be toy versions of automatic weapons.  But of course they aren’t toy weapons, and these apparently prepubescent adolescents are actually recruits in basic training, “prepar[ing] to clear and secure a room.”

The photograph is part of Craig F. Walker’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning, eight part photo-essay “Ian Fisher: American  Soldier,” a report which tracks seventeen year old Ian Fisher (he’s the one on the far right above) from high school through basic training to a tour of duty in Iraq and back home again—a veteran warrior who will carry this experience with him for the rest of his life.  Walker’s photographs are a stark and poignant reminder that those who carry the weight of our military efforts too often (far too often) go off to war as naïve and wide-eyed children—that they only become the adult warriors and heroes we remember in myth and movie after the fact—and those who are fortunate enough to return home will have paid a devastating and incalculable price.

Photo Credit:  Craig F. Walker/Denver Post; The title “The Children’s Crusade” is drawn from the subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade and commented upon in an earlier NCN Post titled “What Peace Looks Like.”

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The Afghan Girl is a photograph deeply etched within the western collective consciousness.  Most probably cannot identify the photographer (Steve McCurry) or the girl’s name (Gula). Perhaps more to the point, I doubt that most who easily recognize the photograph cannot recall the specific circumstances that led to its being taken and featured on the cover of National Geographic, not once but twice:  The first time as the representation of an orphan of Soviet bombings in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s; the second time, seventeen years later, after the once young girl was rediscovered in a refugee camp as a middle-aged woman, the focus being on how her identity was confirmed with “certainty” by state of the art biometric technology which matched the iris patterns in her eyes with the original image.

Marx amended Hegel’s notion that history repeats itself by adding, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But what about the third time?

The above photograph appeared recently in a NYT slide show under the title “An Afghan Voice for American Troops.”  The title does not appear to have been crafted to refer to this specific photograph—referring instead to the first image in the slide show of a female Afghani interpreter working for the US military … perhaps that is who this young girl will become when she grows up—but the presence of the image halfway through the slide show with the title hanging over the photograph makes that a little bit ambiguous.

The resonance between the current photograph and the original Afghan Girl photograph cannot be easily scanted, though differences abide.  Shot here in middle distance rather than close up, the eyes are less pronounced and less haunting, and the effect is to alter slightly—but significantly—the affect of the demand that they issue.  By making the eyes the center of attention in the original photograph the point of identification is with the girl herself—as much a woman as a child—and the depth of her humanity.  By pulling back the camera in the second photograph to show most of the body—as well as the Arabic alphabet primer she appears to be carrying around with her—the locus of identification is shifted from the plight of refugee women to this girl, from the universal to the particular.  No longer a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, we have a child in need; and not just any child, but one rooted in a non-western ideology. And the result is palpable.  The original photograph evokes a clear sense of the depth of human tragedy, but here the structure of feeling inclines more to the conventional sense of pity and compassion one finds in any sort of philanthropic venture designed to help the abject.  While the original McCurry photograph demands that we identify with the tragic affect of the circumstances of Afghan women qua their humanity, this image seems to ask us to donate to the cause.

But what exactly is that cause?  What “voice” does she speak to American troops?  Part of the problem, of course, is that as the war in Afghanistan drags on into its ninth year it is increasingly difficult to remember why exactly we are there (note: it was originally in response to the 9/11 bombings and in an effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden) or what exactly we hope to accomplish.  And in the meantime we have spent nearly 300 billion dollars and counting, suffered over 1,000 U.S. casualties, and inflicted over 12,000 civilian casualties among the Afghanistan population.  The photograph of the new Afghan girl would seem to suggest that we are there to protect her, even though that was never part of the deal in the first place (and since her refugee status is in some part animated by a military occupation its hard to know what positive  effect we’ve actually had here).

It would of course take a great deal of cynicism to imagine some sort of “Wag the Dog” sensibility operative here as a rationale to support our continuing involvement in a war that never seems to end.  But having said that I find myself at a loss to explain the photograph that immediately followed the image above in the NYT slide show in which it was featured:

The caption reads, “A marine gave cereal to a stray puppy at an outpost in northern Marja, Afghanistan.  An Afghan man was detained after being suspected of links to a series of recent roadside bomb attacks against American troops the area.”

The first time as tragedy … the third time as kitsch.

Photo Credits: Muhammed Muheisen/AP; Mauricio Lima/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images

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The caption reads, “Towards the end of a two-day road-clearing mission, a marine got a moment’s rest.”  It is a reminder of war’s numbing brutality, not just as a matter of lives and limbs lost, but in terms of its impact on the human soul.  Bent double, his shoulders slumped, he appears to be exhausted by the sheer weight of his weapon and equipment, if not more so by the stressful weight of his charge to clear a road of bombs on what appears to be a road to nowhere; we might say that he is suspended in a state of rest—somewhere between standing and sitting, or perhaps in a liminal state between life and death — but we surely can’t say that he is resting.   His line of sight is directed downward.  He can see no more than the craggy ground beneath his feet—if he see’s at all.  And where he will go next is not clear as he seems literally to have come to the end of the road.  Perhaps that’s the point.

War takes its toll in many ways, not least by how it deadens the human spirit by thoroughly disrupting the ordinary routines of everyday life like eating a meal or taking a bath, or as in the picture below, getting a restful night’s sleep.

Once again we see a soldier who is utterly exhausted, or as perhaps the photograph implies, “dead to the world.” In Greek mythology Thanatos and Hypnos – the personifications of death and sleep – were twin brothers, hardly distinguishable from one another.  And so it is here.  The scene, with its bricked-in doorway invites comparison with an ancient burial crypt, the sleeping bag calls forth images of modern war’s ubiquitous body bags, and the “bed” itself  bears resonance with a shallow grave. The awkward and rigid tilt of his legs and back implies the state of rigor mortis. His hands seem to be ceremoniously placed upon his breast, as one often finds with a funereal corpse, and the expression on his face is frozen in place.  Only the color in his cheeks resists a totalizing narrative of death.  One might confuse him with any number of images of homeless people slumbering in alleyways or under bridges—and how many of them are recognized for the veterans they are?—but for the conspicuous presence of an automatic weapon within his arm’s reach, a clear sign of his warrior status.  In all likelihood he is only half asleep—once again in a liminal state somewhere between sleep and death—ready to muster at the crack of a rifle.

War kills, and there is nothing new in recognizing that.  What we too often fail to see is that it also produces a “living death” that bears its cost in different but no less tragic terms.

Photo Credit: Tyler Hicks/NYT.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Another earthquake, this one 100 times more powerful than the quake that wrecked Haiti.  More photographs, although probably less than before due to some combination of better infrastructure in Chile and compassion fatigue in the American media.  Comparisons between the two disasters will be made–and sure to include both racist asides and warnings about the Last Days, such are the blessings of free speech.  The question remains whether the second quake provides an opportunity to learn something about disasters.  Nor is this a question about tectonic plates.

I think this photograph from Pelluhue, some 200 miles southwest of Santiago, is at once typical of the current disaster coverage and yet somewhat distinctive.  Typical, in that it documents the nature and extent of the destruction; distinctive, in that the wreckage was done by flooding, a secondary effect of the quake.  If nothing else, the photo can prompt one to recognize that this disaster, and every disaster, has more extensive causes and more extensive effects than those seen at the dramatic center of the event.

The photo’s texture may inflect the story further.  Instead of the arid, concrete, public, urban environment typically featured in the initial coverage, this rural setting was more lush to begin with and now is awash with the soggy debris of private life.  (Yes, those are refrigerators stuck on the strand, and perhaps a buoy for the recreational boating in the area.)  It is clear, also, that the disaster has washed up over the land, through no fault of their own, you might say, and that although human domesticity has been disturbed by nature’s excess, a more serene natural world remains, like the horse in the background, awaiting a return to normal activity and dwelling in relative harmony once things are cleaned up and rebuilt.  If there is a moral to the story, it is that disasters can have a greater reach than one might expect, but the advice remains the same: be better prepared next time, but get back to normal first.  One can almost imagine the scene flowing backwards: the refrigerators moving back into houses, the houses back onto their foundations, the buoy back into the bay, the chairs and buckets back onto the dock, and the flimsy walls of the dockside buildings slapping back together.

Something similar actually will happen, flowing forward, as the aid will come and the investments made and everyone knows what should be the result.  Not every disaster zone is so lucky.

This photograph was taken from a helicopter over “a rubble-strewn battlefield” in Marjah, Afghanistan.  Note how perfectly, although perhaps inadvertently, the “objective” caption captures the destructiveness so painfully evident in the photo.  The three buildings in the picture have effectively ceased to exist, to have ever existed.  They are not even mentioned, save to be designated as part of the rubble.  (They are another addition to Rubble World, a sector with excellent growth prospects in the 21st century.)  As before, the texture of the image speaks powerfully but now with a very different tone: this is sheer desolation, as if the environment had somehow been transformed into war itself, or at least a simulacrum of war suitable for a dark video game.  Only one dot of blue remains as the last hint of another purpose for this place of devastation, and soon, if anything is to be done, it will be bulldozed underground.

If anything is to be done.  This scene has only the barest trace of a past–shattered concrete without any evident purpose–and virtually no sense of a future.  It is a war zone, likely to be leveled for tactical security, and then what?  If the armies move on, they leave nothing.  If they stay, there is no return to whatever was there before.  Likewise, the relationship to other causes and effects remains obscure.  The scene was seemingly the center of a battle, but there is no sense of where the war started, why is it there, or where it is going.  (This elision of a grand narrative can be a feature of all war photography, as Alan Trachtenberg has noted, but we should add that it may say something about war and have more bite with some wars than others.)  War may be more or less destructive than a natural disaster, but only war destroys the future.

There is a political dimension to every natural disaster, but that is not quite my point today.  Wars are political disasters, and were we to see them much as we do natural disasters, it might be much easier to help those after the battle and perhaps even to be better prepared to maintain the peace next time.  But too often the images of political disasters may, in ways large and small, already be reproducing the damning implication that comes from not being defined as having natural causes.  Thus, instead of seeing how calamity has washed over the land through no fault of their own and that there remains only the hard work of rebuilding, the moral of the story is that for those in the wrong place there can be no return to normal life.  Earthquakes are episodic, but war and occupation, it seems, are endless.

Photographs by Roberto Candia and Brennan Linsley for the Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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There’s a fine video criticism of Avatar making the rounds, thanks in part to a boost from the Huffington Post.  The author is Jay Bauman at redlettermedia.com, and he absolutely nails an important point: “The Na’vi were a little too perfect and harmonious for a primitive culture, and the military were a little too simplistic and destructive for an advanced culture.”  He’s certainly right on the first point–and “little too” actually means “way too”–and he is correct on the second as well, once you distinguish between the destructive potential and the actual conduct of the U.S. military in the field, and remember that the distinction is meaningless to those who actually get nailed by modern firepower.

In other words, enough of the time the truth about modern warfare is complicated.  When the U.S. military has been successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is because they are both highly destructive and regularly engaged in careful interactions with ordinary people caught in the war zone.  Thus, the military has two faces.   Here’s one of them:

The caption for this photograph tells us that a Marine turret gunner is inside an armoured vehicle in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan.  OK, he’s a turret gunner, and he also is War incarnate.  The death’s head, his physical bulk poised for action even within an enclosed space, his uniform that seems like some infernal skin, and his effortless ease and conformity with the metal and machines all around him all communicate one thing: this guy is capable of wreaking total violence on anything that gets in his way.

I am not going to say that the photograph is misleading and that actually the gunner is there to hand out candy to kids.  This is one of the true faces of empire, and one that rightly terrifies those who see it.  But there also is another side of military action:

This photo was on the front page of the New York Times yesterday, and so one can easily read it as an attempt to help the U.S. put its best face forward.  It is as accurate and as representative as the one above, however.  Here the Marines are on a sweep through Helmand province, which has lead to this interaction between two individuals, each of whom is taking care to show that he is not as dangerous as he might be.  The photo positions the two men as roughly equals, and while it emphasizes the gulf between them, that space does not appear to be a battle space.  The gulf symbolized by the blank wall could include cultural differences, political objectives, or social trust, but in any case it seems clear that the work to be done has to involve communicating rather than firing the Marine’s weapon.  In fact, it becomes easy to see each of them in civilian terms, as if the one on the right were a local businessman (which he may be) and the one on the left were a small town bureaucrat (which, in a way, he is).

Part of the current struggle regarding the imperial project is between these two alternatives of overwhelming, indiscriminate violence and tactical negotiations that can translate “politics by other means” into politics.  Photojournalism is needed to show us the two faces of war–and not either one alone.  It is up to others, however, to decide whether the balance will tip one way or the other.

Photographs by Brennan Linsley/Associated Press and Tyler Hicks/The New York Times. The Times story is here, along with a slide show of photographs by Tyler Hicks.

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