The current Washington Post/ABC News poll reports that the war in Afghanistan is listed as a priority for the President and the Congress by two percent of the electorate.  Don’t tell that to these guys.

For the record, they are sleeping, not dead.  The photo is gruesome, nonetheless, as it reminds us that there is little difference between a foxhole and a grave.  The long, shallow holes in the earth are too close to the shape and size of a coffin; the soldiers’ bodies are bent as though broken or stiff with rigor mortis, and they are wrapped in sheets that look all too much like shrouds.  The bare face and feet of the figure in the center add to the sense of vulnerability the suffuses the scene, while the covering over the face of the one on the left implies death’s finality.

In this context, one of the blessings of sleep is that you can wake up; another is that before awakening you can forget about where you are.  These Marines were in their holes because they could be attacked at any time.  The deserve some escape from that reality, and sleep is the best they can do in that regard.  The American public probably wants to forget about Afghanistan, too.  There doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about the situation at the moment, and God knows we have plenty of problems at home, right?

Sleep is one thing, denial another.  The willful forgetting of the fighting in Afghanistan may be understandable, but it is not excusable.  The press has largely retreated into feel-good stories about the war, and that, too, can be explained.  (I had to reach back half a year to pull this photo up.) This normalization of war should be resisted, however, as it only abets collective denial of the suffering that is war’s eternal harvest.

Like the soldiers in the photograph, everyone needs to sleep, and denial may be universal as well.  But these Marines were not left unguarded as they sleep, and, likewise, they should not be dropped to the bottom of the list of national concerns.  Because as they are forgotten, the truth of the photo will be completely exposed: the difference between a foxhole and a grave–and between a sleeping Marine and a dead one–is only a matter of time.

Photograph by David Guttenfelder/Associated Press.

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The current war in Afghanistan began in October, 2001.  In U.S. history only the Revolutionary War and the War in Vietnam have occupied longer periods of time. For most of us this has been a quintessentially modern war fought at a distance:  we have “lived through” the war, but not “in it.”*  Temporally present, the war remains geographically distant, and as time has passed we have become increasingly inured to both, habituated to the war’s everydayness—an ordinariness made manifest by the capacity of realist photography to construct us, here at home, thousands of miles from the violence and suffering, as passive and objective spectators.  Recently, however, realist photography has given way to an artistic impressionism that seeks to open the war to a different affect.

Notice how the caption in the NYT features the conventional expectations of professional journalism, reporting exactly what we are seeing in all of its mundanity, while telling us almost nothing at all, the meaningful significance of the image elided by the abstract invocation of time and distance:  “US Marines and Afghan National Army soldiers carried out an operation in the Garmair District of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday.”  And, of course, it is the representation of time and distance that animates this image.  Were this an ordinary photograph of a patrol shot in middle distance, adhering to the realist conventions for focus and exposure, it is likely that we would not take a second glance at it.  We would see it, but we would not look at it.

But, of course, it is not an ordinary image.  Shot from a long view (almost, but not quite a panorama), mindful of the effects of linear perspective, and cast in muted, hazy light, the focus dreamy-soft to the point of distraction, the photograph has all of the qualities of an impressionistic water color. And as it animates an impressionist aesthetic, notice that it complicates the relationship between the scene and the viewer.  One can no longer look at the representation as an objective, mechanically reproduced image that provides all that one needs to know.  It is impossible to distinguish between US Marines and Afghan Nationals, time is elongated into an abstract and almost imperceptible future, and in the process, what is palpably distant becomes ever closer as the viewer is now encouraged (or dared) to look over the edge of the frame with a certain degree of awe and foreboding (perhaps invoking something like the sublime affect of Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog).

War tests the limits of  human communication: it cannot be experienced in its totality, and thus it can never known—let alone communicated in any complete way—by one individual to another; it mobilizes appeals for solidarity while separating people from home and community; and so on.  And all of this is made more problematic as we become habituated to these inherent dilemmas, made all the more “comfortable” with a war at a distance that we see but never really comprehend.  Photographs like the one above aestheticize war, to be sure, but in doing so they make it increasingly difficult to look and not see, to experience the distance between here and there at a distance.

Photo Credit:  Kevin Frayer/AP

*This quotation, as well as the inspiration for the post come from Mary Favret’s very important War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Warfare (Princeton UP, 2010).

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Of all the photographs in the slide shows reviewing the last decade, this surely was one of the more perfect images.

A British soldier is reflected in a pool of oil near Basra, Iraq.  Because the individual soldier’s face is lost in shadow while his body is fused visually with the oil, the image seems made for allegorical reading.  It was all about the oil, right?  (If only that were true, for then the costs of extraction might have been considerably lower.)  Political meaning certainly is embedded in the photograph, but there is much more there as well.

Most important, I think, is the sheer beauty and artistic quality of the image.  The deep blue, which you can’t help but see as both sea and sky, and the brilliant crystals of sand that could be both islands and clouds, and then the terrible complication of the soldier emerging out of the blue liquid like an apparition, like some petrochemical genie awaiting a command. . . .  The sense of the photograph is that these elements have coalesced for more than any instrumental reason: no, they reflect a much deeper and more powerful hold on the imagination.

Audiences in the US have been lining up throughout the holiday break to see the film Avatar, in which an indigenous people living close to nature defeat high-tech, mechanized, military contractors serving an extraction industry that will stop at nothing to maximize profits.  Again, the allegory is all too obvious, and the fact that the beautiful people are blue doesn’t hurt either.  For all the New Age styling of the Noble Savage myth, the film presents war as unquestionably the means by which both individuals and peoples achieve dignity and security.  In the movie, as in other images such as the one above, war proves capable of aligning itself not only with rational self-interest, prudent adaptation, or any other virtue, but also with beauty and all it can represent.  As Chris Hedges noted, war is a force that gives us meaning, and it will stop at nothing to do so.

The photograph above is an image of a reflection.  “Avatar” refers to an incarnation of a Hindu god, a personification of a concept, principle, or attitude, or a virtual representation of a person.  The soldier in the photograph can channel each sense of the term–particularly if you run the logic in the other order, as it actually does run from person to war to the deification of war as a force fused with the power of nature.

War, beauty, and photography are all forces that give life meaning.  They are not the same force, however, and one challenge at this moment in the 21st century is to see how war is capable of capturing other dimensions of human experience that could be used to stop it.

Photograph by Dan Chung/Guardian, from Pictures of the Decade at Guardian.co.uk.

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The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is slowly edging back into US public media, but it’s still easy to miss.  The problem isn’t only that so much attention is being given to the debates about health care (or the lack of it) and financial regulation (or that lack of it) and the continuing problems in each sector (see “lack,” above).  The war coverage itself has a peculiar cast: instead of deployments, patrols, firefights, and other action shots, there have been a stream of images that show wreckage, rubble, and similar scenes of destruction.  Scenes like this:

A man walks slowly along Cairo Street in Baghdad in the aftermath of a bombing.  The bomb obviously was huge, leaving a vast swath of mangled metal and broken lives.  What you don’t see is a field of battle; instead, this is a civilian street, complete with a cobblestone median and an institutional building in the background.  The picture might be said to lend plausible deniability to the idea that there still is a real war going on in Iraq.  The lone figure in the foreground suggests as much.  He is every inch a civilian, and his pensive posture suggests that this is a time for reflection, not action.

The flag is still flying, and officials and soldiers far in the rear will oversee the clean-up, but the large space between them and the lone individual in the front is empty of people, as if the society itself had been vaporized in the blast.  The war is there but not there, while the social, ethnic, religious, and political motivations for the bombings are unintelligible.  A bomb detonates, and a man muses. Apparently, there is nothing for him–or anyone else–to do but to walk on into the unknown future that lies outside the frame.   Like this:

There have been dozens of photographs similar to this one in the past several weeks: photos of US troops standing around or slowly walking through places that are otherwise empty.  Often enough, they are scenes of destruction, but the act is already in the past, something that occurred off camera.  The troops aren’t fighting so much as overseeing an impersonal process of destruction.  And that process seems to involve razing city streets and vehicles more than anything else; again, the people that would normally fill the scene have been ghosted away.

Note the many other similarities with the first photo.  Again, officials hold down the rear of the scene, while a single person walks toward the space to the right of the frame.  His mood is not identical to the man above, but he does seem both turned inward and weighed down, and, again, there is nothing to be done about what has happened.  He is merely going through the motions to “secure the area”: an area already secured by the scythe of the bomb’s blast.

Such photos may reflect that fact that US policy has been in a state of limbo for the past few months, but they also may suggest that the US war effort has become something like a permanent state between war and peace, an intermediate place of suspension and neglect.  Worse, they may suggest that this is acceptable because the US troops are just passing through.  They are there for awhile but not really doing much, and eventually they’ll rotate out and leave the place to its fate as one of the boroughs of rubble world.

And so there is reason to look at the first photograph again, for there may be an important difference between the two after all.  Despite his ability to do much more than walk through the scene, there is little doubt that he lives there.  If that isn’t his street, it’s his city; if not his city, it’s continuous with where he does live.  He thinks, smokes, and walks on, but his future will be in that place.  And to see him there is to see someone who belongs in the photograph, whose presence speaks to something valuable there, and who provides a point of contact for the viewer.  To the extent that we can see him as being in the picture, we are pulled into the frame as well, and asked to witness and reflect on what is there and why.

By contrast, it seems very clear that the soldier is just passing through.  Whatever his presence may provoke, the message is that he really isn’t a part of the scene.  If we walk with him, it’s to appreciate his wish to get through it alive, but not to stay in, understand, and commit to that place.

Each photograph–any photograph–presents the viewer with a choice about how much one might be in the picture.  In both of these two photos, the choice to the US viewer is skewed toward minimal involvement: one figure is a foreign national in his homeland, and the other is a US soldier far from home.  Even so, the first image may also evoke a compassionate response.  With the second image, however, it’s just a matter of time before we can pretend that there is no one there.

Photographs by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP-Getty Images and Reuters (Wall Street Journal).

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On Saturday 15,000 Christmas wreaths were placed on the graves at Arlington Cemetery.  The annual event is an occasion for both press coverage and personal visitations, as with this photograph of a woman hugging the gravestone of her husband who recently had been killed in Afghanistan.

This photo is one of a series of similar shots that together received wide circulation, including the front page of the Sunday New York Times.  Some are close cropped while others show more of the surrounding phalanx of gravestones, but all feature the woman holding on to the lifeless stone.

He was 41 when it happened, a Lt. Colonel on his second deployment to the region (the first had been in Iraq).  He had been training Afghan soldiers until his vehicle hit an IED.  You can read more about him here, but that is not really what the photograph is about.  It’s about her, and her devastating loss, and about having to live with that pain and emptiness.

She wraps her body around the stone, trying to get as close as she can to his memory, his still lingering presence, to what they once had together.  Head bowed in grief, she knows all too well the futility of living flesh finding warmth in the inanimate object, but she holds on anyway.  Who would want to let go?

Her body humanizes the stone, reminding us that there once was a person in place of the block letters of a name, just as her personal act of devotion redeems the rest of the scene, where long rows of bare markers stretch into bone-white desolation.  The stones are but symbols, we realize, of those who were loved and lost, and of how much grief must be locked up in those still living.

Some people believe that such images shouldn’t be shown, but they are.  They carry no direct bias as they can serve arguments both for and against war, and all might agree that they shouldn’t be “politicized,” but it is hard to pretend that Arlington should lie outside of public concern.  Public grieving is an important part of democratic life, and images of individual loss are one of the means by which grief is made intelligible in a liberal society.  Seeing how grief isolates people, leaving them so radically alone, might be an important reminder of how the community needs to help those in need, and to sustain its own bonds of collective support.

That said, photographs marking a relationship between private loss and public life also can prompt questions about the relationship between past, present, and national priorities.  Have we seen this before?  Is the unique moment of individual loss part of a larger pattern?  In spite of sincere ritual observances (such as the laying of the wreaths), are we becoming too accustomed to war and the costs of war?  How well are we caring for the widow and the orphan, and for all citizens?  How much will history have to repeat itself before we notice that, whether in war or peace, the pictures are all the same?

Photographs by Win McNamee/Getty Images and Anthony Suau/Denver Post.  The second photograph was taken on Memorial Day, 1983 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1984.

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Lawrence Olivier once suggested that the key to acting was throwing yourself into your part, no matter that it might be as insignificant as the third spear carrier from the left.  The characters in this scene exemplify that advice.

While the figure on the right stands guard, the figure the left picks up body parts in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan.  Neither action is likely to be decisive in the war spreading across that country, and each seems incidental even within the small scale of this photograph: the tiny pieces of flesh being retrieved appear to be no bigger than a fingernail, while the soldier is armed and ready in a street that is once again stabilized, even static, and almost empty.  Yet they are playing their parts with complete concentration, as if the play really mattered.

This play does matter, of course, and yet the war there and in Afghanistan is haunted by the sense that a deadly serious game also is being played merely for show.  The full panoply of state action appears, albeit too late to save those who were attacked, and on behalf of the restoration of a normalcy that was already a facade.  Everything in the scene is meticulously modern: sharp uniforms, aluminum signage, yellow plastic crime scene tape (in English), even the flowers in the traffic median and the clear plastic gloves for the body-part detail.  And yet none of these investments in civic order could keep someone from detonating a bomb among innocent people.

Thus, the image is troubling because of how it captures several deep tensions within state responses to insurgencies across the globe: tensions between attentiveness and incapacity, between restoring civic order and refusing to change, between collecting the dead and ignoring the demands of the living.

Because they have played their silent roles so well, these two minor players allow the scene to speak.  The photograph depicts another instance of the normalization of violence in the 21st century.  Nor can that violence be attributed wholly to the absent suicide bomber, for every part of the mise en scene declares that such violent acts are not a primitive residue, but have become fully integrated into a ritualized modernism.  Unfortunately, it seems that too often the modern state is committed only to maintaining whatever imbalances feed its own display of power.  If so, then any show of strength really is a sham.

Photograph by Adrees Latif/Reuters.

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Much of the time, photographs provide the ideal pretext for those who would deny the obvious.  The gambit goes like this: someone, often a photographer with intimate knowledge of the setting, takes a photograph that  is circulated by the press and then used as evidence in political argument.  At that point, the defender of the policy being questioned responds by focusing exclusively on the photograph’s evidentiary problems: the image shows only a single event; things might have looked very different a moment before or after; expressions can’t be trusted; much is not being shown; given these problems, the use of the photo is proof of bias.  Such objections rightly carry weight as each is true of photography in general and can provide a reasonable basis for skepticism.  The problem is that they also are used to deflect deliberation about serious problems, including environmental damage, economic and social decline, and tragic mistakes in foreign policy.   Worse yet, these seemingly reasonable caveats can bring one to overlook the facts when they are staring you in the face.

This recent photograph from Afghanistan is a good example of how images can simultaneously both reveal the truth and provide fodder for its denial.  The caption at The Big Picture said, “Afghan National policemen look on as U.S. soldier Cpl. Joseph Dement, right, from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division helps train the police on how to apprehend a gunman at an outpost in the Pech Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar province Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009.”  The text is chock full of facts, and so we are cued to see the scene as evidence, but of what?

One obvious answer is that Americans are training Afghan security forces, and that the training reflects the same precision and intensity found in our own superbly prepared troops.  But note the verb: the policemen “look on.”  And so they do; they look on rather than study intently as if they were committed to the same mission as the US forces, or as if they really expected to be in a situation where they would enage in close combat rather than melt away.

In fact, the photograph is a troubling picture of contradictory extremes that can’t work together and aren’t likely to prevail on their own.  On the one hand, there is the American who is entirely focused on the technical precision of the military operation, and oblivious to the complex social scene in which he is embedded.  On the other hand, the Afghan policemen represent a social field of diverse personalities and attitudes, not one of which is likely to lead to a well-organized counter-insurgency.  It’s as if the photo was from a casting call for two very different B movies: one with American action figures and the other an Afghan sitcom on the order of Hogan’s Heros.

Thus, some can see the photo as revealing a fundamental problem in the American war in Afghanistan–indeed, a problem those of us of a certain age have seen in another war in a place called Vietnam, when we were subject to many years of denial of the obvious at all levels.  But you don’t have to take that analogy to see the problem now.  For example, Comment #79 at the Big Picture slide show says that this photo “shows pretty well the situation in Afghanistan. The Americans will fail because they can’t stay forever and the moment they leave everything will collapse.”

On the other side, of course, photographs depicting momentary facial expressions are tailor made for those who will seize on the single image to deny the broader picture.  Well, there are very few situations where anyone should be persuaded by a single image, and this isn’t one of them.  But it also is not a situation where political dissent should be disregarded because it turns to images to provide evidence (a term that comes from the Latin word for seeing).  When the “hearts and minds” of the people are a crucial factor in the mission, then photographs of ordinary people caught in accidental moments of time can reveal important truths.

“A young Afghan boy gives the thumbs down to a passing NATO French Foreign Legion convoy near Surobi some 50 kms east of Kabul, Afghanistan,Monday, Nov. 9, 2009” (The Big Picture).

Photographs by David Guttenfelder and Jerome Delay for the Associated Press.

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