It is generally referred to as the “1,000 Yard Stare,” the blank, “no one is home” expression on the face of a combat veteran who has simply seen and done too much. No longer capable of adapting to the stresses and utter insanity of a troglodyte world of violence, the soldier becomes emotionally detached and disaffected, his humanity apparently leached from his body which remains something of an empty shell. It is arguably as old as war itself, but it was made popular by a Tom Lea painting that appeared in Life magazine during WW II and has become something of a visual trope for the devastating psychological effects of combat ever since (here, here, and here).

I was reminded of the 1,000 Yard Stare this weekend when I came across several photographs in the NYT that accompanied a story which wondered how high a price Americans were willing to pay in order to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. The article itself was characteristically balanced while failing to point out the minimum costs we have already expended since 2001, including 440 billion dollars, as well as 869 U.S. military fatalities. But the pictures themselves seem to tell – or show – a different story, posing the question in a slightly different register.

The first picture was captioned with a simple and somewhat abstract legend, “Tough terrain: Americans on a break from patrolling the Korengal Valley last April.” The look on the soldier’s face is not quite the 1,000 Yard Stare, but one can see that it might not be too far into the future. We might call it the 800 Yard Stare. The photograph is shot from a low angle and with a wide aperture that visually accents his physical separation from the rest of his patrol, a visual harbinger perhaps of an impending, emotional detachment. And notice too that he shows signs of extreme fatigue while remaining tense and alert to the risks of the moment. “On break,” he can nevertheless not relax. The expression on his face makes it clear that he is “on edge.”

That the photograph is identified as having been taken in April might at first seem insignificant, a comment that functions little more perhaps than to mark the image as a file photo that has been hauled out of the archive to depict a somewhat ordinary and regular event. The real significance of that fact only becomes clear when we see the second photograph.

The caption here reads “Grief: Eight days after he died in the patrol depicted at the top of the page, Pfc. Richard Dewter’s patrol held a memorial service for him.” It is not clear if the soldier featured in the top image is Pfc. Deweter or not, but in one sense at least it really doesn’t matter as the caption to the second image directs us to the pronounced, tragic pathos of the first image that now has the quality of an “about to die” photograph. But more than that, the second image repeats—and in repeating regularizes—the affect of the first. Once again we see a soldier somewhat physically detached from his patrol, with them and yet apart from them. Note too that while the expression on his face is not quite yet the 1000 Yard Stare, neither is it the “grief” towards which the caption directs our attention and which is clearly expressed by others in the image. And once again we see a soldier whose body is apparently incapable of responding to the natural demands of the moment as he gazes off into what would seem to be an almost certain future. The visual analogy between the two photographs, invoking another 800 Yard Stare, suggests the inevitable, tragic conclusion: here too is a soldier about to die.

And the question remains. What price are we willing to pay in order to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Photo Credit: Tyler Hicks/NYT

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Newspapers are not designed to be pondered at great length, but once in a while you can be stopped in your tracks, stunned, made to sit down slowly and simply stare.  This photograph was one of those moments.

We may be in a hospital or a morgue or some other institutional building being used for that purpose.  But the scene is both literal and mythic: we also are in the anteroom to the underworld. The finality of death could not be more complete, while the contrast with life is, shall we say, asymmetric.  The world of the living is represented by tacky plastic chairs good only for killing time in the barren room, and by the bureaucratic document tucked under the belt on the shroud.  The hard stone walls and floor, the gray tones, and the simple band of ornamentation all could be used in a mausoleum.  The world of the living, it seems, is already outfitted for death.

A similar relationship holds between the modern equipment and ancient ritual.  The corpse could have been wrapped thousands of years ago, while the metal in the gurney is already deteriorating.  Although a 21st century scene–high volume processing, with his papers in order–modernity appears as no more than futile, ugly mechanization and a coordinate process of documentation.  That documentation includes the photograph itself, and so the viewer is given a place equivalent to the empty chairs in the background.  We become spectators of something that would be macabre but for its also being entirely anonymous and abstract.

Believe it or not, the story was about public opinion polling.  Support for Al Qaeda is on the decline across the Middle East, perhaps because of revulsion over indiscriminate suicide bombings.  This photo of one of the victims from a bombing in Pakistan accompanied the story.  It obviously isn’t news, as the attack was in 2007.  It remains a telling image, however.

Look again at the undercarriage of the gurney.  It is worn as as if from centuries of use.  As if there is never time to do anything but pick up the next body, and the next, and the next.  Apparently it is not enough that everyone has to die: there still has to be the killing needed to feed the maw of inhumanity.

Photograph by Chris Schneider/Denver Post, via the Associated Press.

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Yesterday the MacArthur Foundation announced the selection of the MacArthur Fellows for 2009.  The recipients of this so-called “genius award” included Lynsey Addario, a photojournalist based in Istanbul, Turkey.  Addario’s portfolio includes work from the Middle East, Africa, India, and elsewhere.  I won’t pretend to summarize her work, but she is adept at exposing how seemingly exotic cultures are but habitats where people contend with the burdens of ordinary life, and how individuals can be raised, trapped, and killed within worlds not of their own making.

Some of her photographs capture something else as well: what might be called the weight of history.  This picture or a soldier and woman in Darfur provides a vivid example.  The image is striking for several reasons, including the strong colors against an austere background, the woman’s gesture of self-protection, and her placement within the implicit tryptych of  man, woman, equipment.  She is the center of the photograph, and might be seen as the primary reason for the other two elements of this social whole; at the same time, she provides only a temporary separation between the man and his weapons, and so her vulnerability is all the more telling.

The genius of the the photo, however, comes from the the downward slump of his head and hers.  Then seem pulled down, as if subject not only to the gravity weighing down the equipment but also to some other, terrible, collective pressure.  Like gravity, it can’t be seen, but it is a human rather than a merely physical force.  Perhaps their retail goods of basketball jersey and consumer tote cue our sense that their collective burden is social and psychological and not just the fatigue of nomadic life.  Like the dust in the sky, a crushing fate seems to be gathering, weighing them down, sure to grind them under as help never arrives.

That weight bears down wherever people are abandoned to war, poverty, and other political disasters.  It can beat down like the desert sun or suffocate like a sandstorm, but it is sure to wear away the soul.  Here we see it again, this time in the stooped, tired gait of a policeman in Baghdad.  He appears young but is already aged in his bones, sagging in the joints, made dumb by the stupid routines of ritualized predation and continuing wastage.  He does what he can–looking around, walking his beat, trying to stay alive–but he’s already carrying too much to escape.

The weight of history is so heavy for two reasons.  One is that some people have to carry so much of it.  The other is that it is made up of all the mistakes, unintended consequences, vile decisions, vicious acts, and–above all–all the indifference of everyone else.

Photographs by Lynsey Addario.

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The “Summer Surge” has begun in Afghanistan, though more with a whimper than a bang if we measure it in terms of media attention.  The death toll creeps higher each day, but one has to search hard to find any mention of it.  The stories that do appear on a war that is now eight years old (and counting) tend not to be headline fare in most U.S. news outlets, and those stories that do appear exude something of an everyday, taken-for-granted quality about the whole matter.

While news stories seem lacking, there have nevertheless been a small number of slide shows cropping up at various news outlets (here and here, for example) over the past several weeks.  What marks these slide shows is their almost singular banality as they repeat over and again the same, tired, visual clichés for representing war that we have become accustomed to in recent times: tight close-ups of marines—in many cases young boys trying to appear like hardened veterans—expressing intense and stern determination; images of U.S. troops preparing to do battle or returning from battle or approaching and searching what appear to be empty villages or fighting the boredom of war or playing games with local children; photographs that feature the advanced technology of U.S. warfare, including weaponry, night vision capabilities, and so on.  Rarely and only occasionally do we see some actual fighting—and perhaps for good reasons—but on the whole what we are shown are stock pictures we have seen before and but for the fact that they emphasize a desert locale, there is nothing particularly distinctive about them.  In short, there would appear to be no news here.

And yet, for all that, it would be imprudent to ignore what such visual displays show us and how such “seeing” contributes to normalizing our understanding and attitudes about the war.  The photograph above led off a recent slide show of forty seven images at the Denver Post website titled “Marines Pour Into Afghanistan.” One might imagine such a slide show beginning with photographs of marines parachuting from planes or embarking from helicopters, literally “pouring into” the Afghani countryside, but instead of emphasizing the activity of the headline caption we encounter an anonymous and relatively passive soldier.  That the image crops out the face and head of the soldier does more than just accent his anonymity as a cipher for the U.S. military, for the photograph is shot as if literally from his point of view.  Notice how the camera locates the viewer in the physical space of the soldiers’ head and eyes.  We see what he sees—or what we might imagine that he sees if he were to hold his gaze—and thus the photograph coaxes our identification with his very being by suturing our vision with his.

And what he/we see, of course, is the Holy Bible, which sits at the very center of the image.  And more, along with the hand that holds it, it is photographed as if in a portrait, where the face is in sharp focus and all that surrounds it is softened so as to direct and hold our attention on the main object.  One might think of the photograph in this respect as one more cliché of war rhetoric, an aestheticized visualization of the old saw that “there are no atheists in foxholes.”  But of course the conflict in Afghanistan is at least in some measure a religious war, and as such representations of the Holy Bible take on a much larger significance.  Here, it is not just a symbol of  comfort for those in harms way—though it may certainly be that—but poised at the beginning of the slide show as it is, it frames the meaning of all that follows.

But what is that meaning?  We get something of a clue by attending to the brief narrative paragraph that precedes the above image where it quotes the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines as he speaks to his troops as they are about to embark on their military mission: “You’re going to change this world this summer and it starts this morning.”  The name of that mission is “Operation Khanjar, or Strike of the Sword.” Now look at the photograph one more time and notice that the Bible holds the place where one might otherwise imagine a weapon—a rifle, or in an earlier epoch, perhaps a sword—particularly in the hands of a Marine about to occupy  hostile terrain.   Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …

There are other ways to interpret the photograph, to be sure, but the point here is that the photograph needs to be interpreted. And this is all the more so when the images shown by such photographs appear to be all too normal and ordinary, or when they beckon our identification all too seamlessly.

Photo Credit:  Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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By guest correspondent David Campbell

Embedding photojournalists with combat units was one of the military’s greatest victories in the Iraq war. By narrowing the focus in time and space to the unit they were with, the images produced put brave soldiers front and center, with both context and victims out of range. Now, with the Obama administration’s “Af-Pak” strategy being questioned, we are being offered similar visual cues from Afghanistan.

Three soldiers peering into a remote valley, rifles at the ready, the enemy seemingly elusive. High tech weaponry is readied against the elements. This is a war machine looking for a reason, certain a threat is out there but unsure of its form. There’s even a moment of pathos, with the man on the left in his pink boxers and exposed legs lining up with his comrades. Then there is the second photo, shot from behind in the same place, but showing a strongman taking time out for a gym session. One shows a vulnerable body, the other a muscular physique, but in each case the American soldier is the subject of the photograph.

What unites these pictures is their location – the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan. The embedding process is taking photographers and reporters to this location above all others, and photographers have been prominent in the coverage of US operations there. Balazs Gardi and Tim Hetherington travelled there in 2007, John Moore spent time there in November 2008, producing both stills and a multimedia piece, and Adam Dean and Tyler Hicks have filed stories from an April 2009 embed. (See background to the Hicks’ story here.)

Although the visual skills of these practitioners are not in doubt, the stories they have produced are remarkably similar in both content and approach. US forces are the locus of the narrative and combat scenes are repeatedly pictured. The local community is lalrgely unseen, except for when they encounter the Americans, and never heard. They are rendered as part of an inhospitable environment in which civilians are hard to distinguish from ‘the enemy’.

The effect of concentrating on one location and one side has been to badly limit our understanding of the strategic dilemma that is Afghanistan. The photographers might want to do otherwise but the embedding process is designed to produce this constraint. Its success can be judged by the way these stories effectively structure the visibility of the war in a way that foregrounds American military interests.

How we judge the photographers’ responsibility here is difficult. Logistically, being embedded is the only feasible way to cover some frontline locations. Without it we might not see anything. But the consequence of embedding is the production of a visual landscape that too easily fits with the idea that more troops or heavier fighting could lead to victory. This political effect was part of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s critique of Tim Hetherington’s 2007 World Press Photo-winning image of an American soldier in the Korengal. (Hetherington responded with a statement about photojournalism’s continuing political significance, which I have considered here).

Picturing the Af-Pak war comprehensively and in context is a major photographic challenge. It cannot be easily disentangled from the politics of the war. We are stuck with the consequences of the Bush-Blair military intervention, but there is no simple military solution in Afghanistan that will guarantee security. Yet, as much as it might be wished, withdrawing international forces from Afghanistan is unlikely to be helpful in the short-term.

In this context, photography has its work cut out for it. The stories most effective at addressing the broader issues to date have been multimedia presentations (see John D McHugh’s series Six Months in Afghanistan, especially the film “Combat Post”), and more work of this kind is urgently needed if the human and political dimensions of the struggle for security in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be better understood.

Photograph by David Guttenfelder/Associated Press.

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The scene above has a familiar aura about it: It could be a photograph of a drug bust somewhere in Mexico or Colombia, or it could be a rescue scene from an episode of a TV show like 24 or The Unit.  But it is none of these things.  Rather, it is a photograph of a group of Explorers in California “portraying Border Patrol agents rushing into a room filled with fake poison gas” and “aiming their weapons at a man before realizing he was a wounded hostage.”

Explorers is a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that is currently run under the auspices of a program called “Learning for Life.”  According to the Learning for Life website, the primary goal of the program is “career exploration … designed to help young people make intelligent decisions regarding their future.”  Explorer posts in the U.S. boast over 145,000 youth members, 35,000 of whom  participate in the specific program dedicated to careers in “law enforcement,” which, among other things, works to train youth (age 14-21) in how to “to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence.”  In short, it is something of a paramilitary version of the Jr. ROTC programs that populate many of our high schools and which functionally reduce citizenship and patriotism to the model of military life—a rigidly hierarchical world in which independent thinking is not only frowned upon, but severely disciplined. Military and paramilitary organizations are vital and necessary arms of government, to be sure, and we would be poorer as a nation without their presence or the many dedicated individuals who serve in them.  That said, one has to wonder if such militaristic “Learning for Life” programs offer the most effective model for animating critical thinking and a productive civic life amongst our most impressionable citizens.

But there is an something more to be said.  We have written regularly here at NCN about what we call the “normalization of war,” a collection of cultural practices which naturalize and reinforce a war culture that in turn animates a pernicious cycle of violence (e.g., here, here, and here).  I was reminded of this process of normalization by the picture above, which was embedded in a NYT slide show that included a number of photographs of Explorers “playing at” hunting down suicide bombers, hijackers, snipers, and illegal immigrants with toy guns  Setting aside the fact that the vast majority of  “illegal immigrants” are otherwise law abiding citizens—and in any case, certainly not terrorists—the larger point to make is that collectively the photographs teeter back and forth between an implicit and certain playfulness and dead seriousness.

This ironic tension is a palpable reminder of the fine line between the attitudes of play and serious business, and how the former can seem innocent (and in some contexts even ambiguously endearing, as in this image that recently appeared in the Washington Post and was the topic of discussion over at the Bag), even as it coaches (and too easily converts into) more solemn and severe behaviors.  Notice how the same toy guns that seem harmless in the top photograph appear threateningly dangerous in the bottom image.  Put differently, these photographs visualize the very logic that underwrites the production of a war culture: making warlike behavior seem harmless—and indeed fun—even as it gestures toward a putative, if not ominously mistaken, larger purpose. Learning for life, indeed.

Photo Credits:  Todd Krainin/NYT  Crossposted at The Bag.

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Yesterday GQ broke the latest story about the alternate universe known as the Bush administration. It seems that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld didn’t think that getting the latest intelligence on the war in Iraq was good enough for the president.  So the Secretary tricked up the daily top-secret reports on the invasion with photographs of US military personnel or weaponry–and captioned the photos with Biblical quotes selected to strike the proper note of self-righteous moral superiority. (You can see the photographs in the GQ slide show here.)  To take one example, imagine a battle tank bathed in the red rays of the setting sun, along with the injunction from Ephesians 6:13 to “put on the full armor of God.” In Rumsfeld’s Bible, it seems, “armor” is not a metaphor. And for the daily briefing in the Bush war room, neither was “crusade.”

And a trillion dollars and roughly 100,000 civilian deaths later, we have images like this.

The scene has shifted to Pakistan, where oil tankers that were to supply the US military are burning following an attack. I like to think of Rumsfeld out of work and spending his days captioning photographs by the hundreds, pouring through his shiny Bible–not worn from years of use–for quotes to spin the images. But he no longer has to persuade a born-again president, and the current president probably knows that the US government is not supposed to be fighting religious wars.

So, what’s left?  How about a game: Can you caption this image? With a Biblical quote, of course. How about “he has poured out his fury like fire” (Lamentations 2:4)? Or perhaps “I will let loose my anger upon you; I will judge you according to your ways, I will punish you for all your abominations” (Ezekiel 7:3)?

Obviously, one of the problems with using the Bible is that it can be, well, a two-edged sword (Proverbs 5:4). (The Biblical phrase only meant sharp, but the Bible does cut both ways.) For all the flaws in Rumsfeld’s political judgment, his scriptural references raise several important issues regarding use of the Bible. For one, there may be no better source for finding sacred sanction for war. The seamless fusion of God’s righteousness with secular conquest and a willingness to sacrifice others in God’s name may be a serious problem within the Abrahamic religions. Closer to home, the use of the Bible often reflects serious errors in application–whether in understanding the point of the passage being quoted, or in the assumptions made about one’s claim on God’s favor. Most important, the Biblical God never wants to stay with war, or to glorify war.

The Biblical God wants justice, mercy, and peace. And so we can end with another game. I’ll supply the quotation, and you supply a photograph. Here’s the text:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness; and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah, 6: 8).

Photograph by Adil Kahn/Reuters. All translations are New Revised Standard Version.

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Violence in Iraq is slowly rising again as US troops are being moved to Afghanistan, but many of the photographs being published continue the narrative of successful pacification that has been keeping the war off the front page for months. Against that backdrop, this photo struck me as all too evocative of the continuing violence in the Middle East.

The New York Times caption read, “A blood-stained bed at the hospital in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad after two suicide bombings on Friday.” The fine-grained detail in the caption–right down to “the Kadhimiya district,” should you want to put another pin on the map–contrasts with the refusal of intelligibility in the image itself. We see only an ugly smear, not the precise details of injury or death. Only the bloody aftermath, not even the event itself. Whatever drama played out in this ER, it’s over. Only the stain remains.

Perhaps because it looks like an inkblot from a Rorshach test, the drying blood invites the viewer to make sense of what is there. But what is there doesn’t make sense. Instead of meaning, narrative, purpose, or resolution, we are confronted with the inchoate. Instead of a body, only the bloody trace; instead of presence, absence; instead of the peace and repose of clean sheets and healing, only more of war’s bloodletting, waste, and loss.

Of course, even meaninglessness is a form of meaning, and stains invite further reflection. Sin is understood metaphorically as a stain in some cultures and one rather pertinent religious tradition, as Shakespeare knew when writing Macbeth. It is easy to imagine how the war in Iraq has stained America, and how the stain of war will persist there long after it has been forgotten by people elsewhere. Such thoughts are a legitimate use of imagery, as is true of the deeply metaphoric nature of language itself. But they also can carry one too far into the realm of thought and so of abstraction. It is more fitting sometimes to simply stare at the image and let it enter your soul–as a stain, a bloody stain.

Photograph by Christoph Bangert/New York Times.

American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are reported at icasualities.org. Civilian deaths in Iraq are reported at Iraq Body Count. Civilian deaths in Afghanistan are reported here.

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Representation in any public art today has to include using old forms to capture what is distinctive about our time. Eventually new forms emerge, and we should ask what might become the artistic conventions of a “catastophile” society in which disaster and violence are fatal attractions and spectacular sources of energy. One image that might be on the cusp of old and new is this screen shot of a bombing in Sri Lanka:

This image is distinctive in that the television camera is recording the instant that a bomb exploded at a Muslim festival in Akuressa, killing 15 people. Whereas almost all bombing photographs are of the aftermath, here you can see the blast pattern blossoming in a single, beautiful, terrible, moment of real time. For once, the blast is there to be seen–and sovereign, fully realized in itself without any rationale or judgment. If my account is sounding like a Facist aesthetic glorifying violence, that is indeed one lineage that applies, but not the only one.

The photo is not a pure aesthetic of violence precisely because of the tension between the sheer, annihilating force of the blast and the people about to be enveloped by the shock wave radiating toward them. The fire is already roaring down the street toward the backs of their legs, someone’s destruction already evident from the shirt blown into the air in the upper left. Yet there they are, ordinary people dressed in nicely pressed shirts standing as if posed for a group portrait–Say Cheese!–and completely oblivious to the blast. What is in fact one event seems to be two very different events joined together by special effects. The photograph actually captures another distortion: what should be two separate things–the violence of war and a civic festival–are actually smashed together. Spectacular violence usurps the civic spectacle.

The photo from Sri Lanka captures something important because of its stunned suspension of temporal movement. The moment of stopped time–which is part of every photograph–here reveals the moral chasm between violence and civic life. That is not the only way to capture the reality of civil war, however.

This photograph of a burnt hotel room was taken at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. The blast last September killed at least 60 people and injured more than 260. This image could be the opposite of the one above. Instead of the moment of immolation, we see the slow aftermath of loss; instead of people about to be harmed, we see a room abandoned to emptiness; instead of fire, cinders.

What most strikes me is how the picture works as a still life. The plates, glass, cup, and food could have been done by an Old Master. The play of light and shadow, and of sheen and substance, creates that timeless depiction of inevitable decomposition that was the subject of the genre. And so this tableau could be anywhere in the world, a small monument to gracious living that was instead lost to destruction. Seemingly timeless, but perhaps all too representative of our time.

Photographs by Reuters TV and Pedro UgarteAFP-Getty Images. The term “catastrophile” comes from Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 120.

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