In one of the early posts on this blog I asked, what does peace look like? One answer, I suggested, was that peace appears when you start seeing soldiers as kids rather than as warriors. Let me be clear: I don’t mean that you would see grown men and women as if they were small children, only that you would see that many of the soldiers are still very young. Young adults, perhaps, but young. Like this:

This photograph was taken in Baghdad about a month ago. You can’t predict the future from a photo, but this was the first time that I thought real change for the better might be occurring on the ground. The American has let his guard down so much, the Iraqi is so comfortable in his presence, the photographer is able to capture the moment–all of this bodes well as an indication of a sense of security in ordinary life.

Of course, the soldier still is intruding into someone’s home–something protested in the Declaration of Independence–and both the floor and the view through the doorway suggest that war has turned a nice place into a fixer-upper. More generally, the troop levels, expenses, bases, and everything else being negotiated in the draw-down agreement all portend a protracted and costly transition and then continued military engagement in a client state for decades to come.

But still, what a photograph. The American looks like he should be sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell to ring. The pairing with the civilian boy next to him marks his youth, which is accentuated further by being encased in his military carapace. Obviously, they both should be dressed like the boy on the right; everything else is an unnecessary addition there only to serve the interests of an alien machine far larger than either of them.

The flowers on the wall complete the domestic tableau. Everything fits except the uniform and the gun, which is propped uselessly against his leg, barrel down in the dirt. The boy on the left seems to be thinking about what comes next: that when the break ends he’ll have to pick up his gear and walk out of there. The posture and look of the boy on the right say all that and more. He clearly is waiting for the American to leave. After all, it is his house.

More soldiers and more civilians will die before its over, but maybe, just maybe, scenes like this can become more commonplace and more representative of present and future alike. We’ve seen heroes and victims enough; now it is time to see people as they are. After years of war, that might be what peace looks like.

Photograph by Maya Alleguzzo/Associated Press.

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It’s summertime and the news is breezy. No paper can seem to muster the energy to do more than go through the motions, and who can blame them? The political class is laying low–for good reason–while most of us are either on vacation or looking forward to going there. We all know that not much is going to improve in the short term and a lot could get worse, so why not take a break?

Or better yet, take in a blockbuster cinematic epic of heroic scale, like this:

You didn’t know that a World War II movie was playing in the multiplex, did you? And you were right: good wars are out of fashion at the moment, so I substituted this image of an air tanker dropping fire retardant over one of the 1000 wildfires burning in California earlier this month.

This cinema-quality image could be from a WWII movie. A vulnerable prop plane carries its payload right into the maw of the battle. Great clouds of destruction loom all around but the crew are undaunted; they’ve got a job to do, a war to win. The red chemical streaming from the plane could be streaked with fire or blood, and perhaps they will have to make it home on a wing and a prayer. The plane looks fragile yet dauntless, as if already on its way to becoming a scale model of itself, ready to fly again and again in a child’s imagination.

If such simple scripts are too distant now, the California firefighters still have a role to play:

This image could be from the Vietnam War. The helicopter became the symbol of that tragedy, and once again we see a chopper lowering itself into an inferno. The aircraft is farther away than in the image above, smaller, more likely to disappear in the smoke and crash unseen rather than bank toward the sun or go down in a ball of flame. A craft designed for mobility seems almost mired in time, and instead of heroic action on behalf of a great national effort, this is a picture of being dwarfed by historical forces. But bad war or worse, the crew will do their best to complete their mission.

What I wish for America this July is not that we would get serious and turn our attention back to a world in flames. What I would rather see is a lot more images like this one–that is, images of the government turning its powers for organization and action to attack real problems like fire, floods, depletion of natural resources, bad health care, poor schools, poverty, crime, and more. We spend a billion dollars every three days in Iraq, which would fund a lot of work at home. Firefighters, cops, social workers, construction workers, and many more people take risks for others every day, and they could be doing a lot more good if there were a real national commitment to building a good society, which can only be a society that is good for all.

Jimmy Carter is still excoriated on the right for referring to the moral equivalent of war in a speech on energy policy. In the speech he is quoting a union leader–I can explain that term later to some of our younger readers. The union leader was well read, as he was alluding to William James’ essay by that title. You don’t have to like Carter or buy all of James’ arguments to recognize that we could have all of the good side of war without killing, maiming, or otherwise ruining lives. Call it the aesthetic equivalent of war: let’s get a good story and enjoy the show, one where we don’t have to look away.

Photographs by David McNew/Getty Images.  A slide show of these and other images of firefighting is at The Big Picture.

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Here is one reason why we need to look past the language being used to bury the war in Iraq:

You are looking at the blood of a “gravely wounded soldier at the Ibn Sina Hospital” in the Green Zone. Awful, just awful, isn’t it? And look at the guys on clean-up duty. They are not freaked. Not happy about it, either, but it seems clear that they’ve done this before.

The stuff strewn across the bloody smear is evidence of the frantic pace of the emergency care. The room otherwise remains well equipped. The medical staff will have been superb. We can be confident that that soldier was given every chance he could be given. But they can’t turn back the clock, take him back to the other side of the blast, back to that last minute when he will have been whole. Nor can they stop the next one from arriving. And look at the size of those trash cans.

This photo was taken about a year ago during the surge that now is being defined as a success. By finally following the military advice that it had rejected for years, the administration increase in troop numbers and operations may have helped restore a degree of stability. Many goals remain unmet and reductions in violence often are due to other factors such as ethnic migration, but you can’t argue with success.

OK, but let us never call it an unqualified success, and never forget the cost. Also keep in mind that the word “surge” itself is part of the problem. A surge seems so clean and impersonal. We have power surges and storm surges. I have a surge protector on my computer. Surges come and go, and they seem to be bloodless. But they are not bloodless. Soldiers and civilians were gravely wounded and killed during the surge, just as they were before the surge and as they still are suffering and dying every day.

The good news is that on Friday the Bush administration committed to a “general time horizon” for withdrawal. They also were quick to say that this is not a timetable. Nor is it a fundamental change but rather an “evolution” in policy. (One might ask whether the administration now believes that evolution occurs generally or only within the White House.) Even as the policy changes for the better, the administration is still spinning the language to deny its arrogance and its terrible, terrible mistakes. As before, the entire tragedy is clothed in unreality.

Say what they will, they have blood on their hands.

Photograph by Maya Alleruzzo from the slide show “Scenes from the Surge” at her website.

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This week we are pleased to welcome photographer Aric Mayer as our first guest correspondent at the New and Improved NCN.

“When we see them, we run. Some of us succeed in getting away, and some are caught and taken to be raped–gang-raped. Maybe around 20 men rape one woman. […] These things are normal for us here in Darfur. These things happen all the time. I have seen rapes too. It does not matter who sees them raping the women–they don’t care. They rape girls in front of their mothers and fathers.”

This is the statement of an unnamed victim quoted by prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo this week in a hearing before the International Criminal Court. The prosecutor called for an arrest warrant to be issued for Omar Al Bashir, the president of Sudan, for 10 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Al Bashir’s weapons of genocide in Darfur are listed as rape, hunger, and fear.

The testimony achieves in one concise paragraph what photographs can rarely accomplish. First, the woman describes what she has seen in person, then what she and her community are suffering, and finally she attaches those horrifying images to the systematic raping of women in Darfur as a weapon for destroying the people and the fabric of their communities. It is the third part, the connection of individual experiences and individual crimes to the systematic destruction of society, that photographs do not do well on their own.

Despite the efforts of some of the world’s great photojournalists, the crimes of genocide in Darfur remain largely unseen in the West. The remote location, the political hurdles, and the extreme physical danger make Darfur nearly impossible to visit, much less to depict in photographs. But we can learn from another recent genocide in Rwanda.

The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide was visually graphic. Piles of hacked and/or burnt corpses covered the countryside for months afterwards. Buildings that had been burned down with hundreds of people inside of them stood untouched as the bones bleached in the sun. Even then, photographer Alfredo Jaar recognized that his best efforts to convey such horror were failing to communicate the breadth of the killing. In the end, he showed one photograph, “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita.” This image is an intense and intimate encounter with another human being, the eyes being the windows to the soul.

Gutete Emerita is, in this eternally frozen moment, looking at the remains of the church in which her husband and two sons were hacked to death with machetes by a Hutu death squad right in front of her. Now weeks later she has returned to the scene of their deaths and stands among bodies rotting in the African sun. Suddenly we, the viewers, are confronted not with a visual spectacle of the dead, but with the trauma, pain, and frailties of the living. Gutete’s eyes speak across time and space as a witness to violence and death on a scale that defies visual depiction. Jaar’s photograph brings us to contemplate the human soul in the face of such cruelty and pain. And Gutete’s eyes stand in as a witness of all crimes of genocide.

Currently in Darfur the genocide is being carried out in a very different manner from Rwanda. Rather than a spasm of violence, the genocide is perpetrated by attrition. Rape, hunger, and fear are slowly and steadily killing an entire population of people. That the rapes are frequently performed in public adds to the terrorizing effects of the crimes. In the West, rape tends to be a hidden form of violence, kept out of the public gaze, while in Darfur it is being used in a highly visible systematic way to destroy women, their families, and their communities. Dislocation and the constant threat of violence make it impossible for the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa groups to support themselves in an already difficult environment. Hunger and starvation are inevitable.

The request for an arrest warrant for Al Bashir is an important step towards generating a clearly articulated picture of how the Sudanese government has sustained and perpetrated genocide while the world knows that it is happening. The scarcity of visual evidence of these crimes in the western media should be no excuse for our lack of understanding of the problem. It may perhaps even help the cause. As in Alfredo Jaar’s images from Rwanda, we can bypass the spectacle and get straight to the systematic structures that keep the genocide occurring. Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo’s document presented to the ICC creates a clear picture of how the genocide has been implemented and sustained. You can read a synopsis and download the full text here.

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There has been something strange about the recent coverage of the war in Iraq. Privately I’ve been complaining that the war has all but disappeared from the papers, or that the photos are soft news shots, or that everything has becoming numbingly repetitive. There is some truth to all of that, but not enough. It finally hit me today after a friend suggested that I was giving up too easily. So I looked again and there it was: the US, across the board, is already disengaging and moving on, but as if in a dream, as if none of this is really happening.

To see what I mean, you might look at this photograph:

Iraqi civilians are queued up for food and medical aid in Sadr City. We see, front to back the civilians, an Iraqi soldier, and then an American soldier. The details tell a familiar story not without irony: As the Iraqi military steps up the US can drop back into a supporting role, although the US troops are occupying a school that had to be abandoned, the Iraqi soldier is masked because of sectarian violence, and kids are already armed, albeit with water pistols. But these are distractions from the real truth of the photograph. The American is already well in the background, behind a barrier, peering out as though from a door that he is about to close. He is looking on a scene of his own making, but one that now clearly is separate from where and who he is. The interaction is all on the other side of the barrier. Soon he will step back. After all, he is in the vanishing point of the picture.

Any one photograph can be but a fragment and not representative of a larger pattern. So let’s look at two more. This one is yet another shot of US soldiers searching a family’s home in Iraq. You might contrast it with others which were images of close encounters that could be terrifying and confusing for all concerned (here’s one we’ve posted on before). This picture, by contrast, could be a study in alienation:

The scene has an eerie feel to it as if it were a still from some European film where dream and reality get mixed together. He is preoccupied in the background, she is waiting in the foreground, and they are separated by the long viewing angle as well as a concrete partition, as if they were in separate zones of feeling. She is tense, alert, even colorful; although frightened and wary, this still is her home. He is distant, relaxed, even laconic–just going through the motions. He stands by a door. On close inspection it appears to be a closet, but it does double duty as a portal to the some symbolic other place. He will look around, go through his check list, and then go out the door. Why not? He already is far away from those around him in Iraq.

And besides, he might be redeployed to go on patrol in Afghanistan:

This is supposed to be our new and improved war against terror, but old habits are hard to break. The photograph captures the near-complete separation between the US military and those living under the occupation. The troops are walking in one direction, set on their mission, while the Afghani civilian walks in the other. Once again, the troops are a muted presence in the background while more colorful domestic life goes on as best it can. Purely military rather than political, cultural, or economic engagement means that the US is there but not there. The unreal quality of American empire makes it easy to send the troops abroad, and easy to let it all melt away without really admitting mistakes and counting the cost.

The war in Afghanistan initially was justified and may still be necessary. The war in Iraq was neither. That war began in a condition of collective–though not total–delusion. Perhaps it is too much to expect it to end any other way. One would like to think the US could face up to the tragedy and learn from its mistakes. As these photographs suggest, however, it could be that we haven’t learned a thing and that we will leave Iraq in a haze of denial, perfectly capable of making the same mistakes again.

Photographs by Andrea Bruce/Washington Post, Damir Sagoli/Reuters, and Rafiq Magbool/Associated Press. This post also is going up at BAGnewsNotes today. As always, we’re very pleased to be associated with Michael Shaw’s terrific blog on politics and photojournalism.

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Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory of evolutionary change that accounts for both the overall stability of large populations across time and the process–or periods–of significant change–e.g., in the species, if studying biology, or the social practice, if studying human organization. Generally, species maintain themselves as species by not changing, which happens because most local adaptations are diluted by more comprehensively functional features, but adaptations that develop at the margins of the population, where the species is less likely to match environmental conditions, can acquire selective advantages that subsequently can spread quickly across the population. So why am I telling you this?

The question came to mind of what image of the world is being maintained by photojournalism, and particularly coverage of world politics. Were we to examine the photographic record as if it were a fossil record, would we see a history of punctuated equilibrium? More to the point, when we look at the images in the news, do we see a world of general stability punctuated by moments of rapidly spreading change? Or do we see another model of collective behavior: for example, nearly uniform stability occasionally disturbed but always restored? Or relatively stable civilizations that once in a long while are destroyed or fundamentally transformed by some catastrophic upheaval? Or perhaps a continual improvement regrettably but inevitably accompanied by “creative destruction”? Or, if we do see a stable order that is occasionally subject to rapid change, what is the norm and what is developing in the margins? And might we see these larger patterns across images or inside of individual images?

Let’s look at two photographs to consider how this line of thinking might develop.

This photograph depicts the aftermath of a car bombing in Baghdad. It is one of hundreds of images that I could have grabbed from the last month’s slide shows: images of bombing, rioting, shooting, clubbing, and similar forms of violence. These are images of disruption. For example, we see the mise-en-scene of ordinary life–and the blast. Street with truck, curb with light pole, functional building and people going about their business–and looming up where there should be light and perspective, a dark cloud, miasmic, bearing bad news on an ill wind. But the cloud will disperse, the truck start up again, the people break away to get back to a semblance of routine, right?

One might see the bombing as a minor disruption of an otherwise stable social order, or as something more ominous, like the dark cloud of smoke in the photograph. Generally, the concrete street and steel structures, along with the smoke of the blast, imply that social order is the norm and violence the disruption, but one might not be too sure. Perhaps the frame is tipped one way rather than the other by images such as this one:

This photograph also features an ordinary scene–cultivated fields greening in the springtime–and a dark shape, but one that is not threatening. The balloon’s shadow is but an extension of the sunlight illuminating the balloon and feeding the crops below. Instead of being faced with a loss of control, the elongated shape can stand for the magnified sense of freedom and personal extension that one might feel while floating above the earth. Whether thinking of the special experience of being aloft in a hot air balloon or the collective good in verdant fields stretching to the horizon, life is good.

And so it goes. The newspapers, magazines, and slide shows feature a steady stream of both images. On the one hand, hard news images of continual disruption (whether political or natural disasters), and, on the other hand, soft news images of peace and harmony (both natural and political). It might be that journalism in a democratic society is inclined to present a dystopian world–by contrast to the obligatory good news of an authoritarian press–but that the need to hold on to readers also motivates the signs of reassurance provided by the soft news.

The question remains of which view is correct. Which tendency is more characteristic of the species, and which might be a marginal adaptation? Is civilization the norm, with violence a marginal adaptation, or is violence the general characteristic of the population, punctuated occasionally by selective adaptations toward peace? Look again at the photographs. Which is more indicative of what is breeding at the margins today? is it light technologies and sustainable cultivation that can bring some degree of prosperity and peace across a planet riven by conflict? Or is it anarchy and war that can spread contagiously in a global order built upon the competition for non-renewable resources?

Photographs by Ahmad Al-Rubaya?AFP-Getty Images and Viktkor Veres/AFP-Getty Images.

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If aliens were observing Earth from some observatory elsewhere in the galaxy, they could be forgiven for believing that human societies were continually contending with spontaneous combustion. Shootings, bombings, riots, gang wars, clan wars, border wars, civil wars, invasions, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies–all over the planet “hot spots” keep erupting as if from some molten lava field barely below the surface of civilization. Scenes like this are all too familiar, ritual irruptions of violence.

This is from a couple of days ago when things were heating up again in Beirut. We are looking at the stock scene of street violence in the third world. The burning tire spews its oily smoke amidst the debris of destruction, a young man becomes the figure of revolution, and bystanders mill about in various combinations of self-preservation and collective resistance. Everyone knows the script so well that this photo could be a movie still: male lead front and center, moving confidently between light and fire, while the little people and a smoke machine create atmosphere. Look at his hair–he could be the young De Niro.

Some of the images in the coverage of the recent violence in Beirut do look posed, but the carnage is real. It is important to recognize, however, how our visual knowledge of global violence naturalizes war as it exposes its causes. The image above, for example, reminds us that so much of what is going wrong can be traced back to oil–like the oil used to make that truck tire. The young man’s clothes should remind us that the problem is not a clash of civilizations or one of a lack of modernity–those street fighters look exactly like the guys I see on the subway platform in Chicago. (OK, often they look better. Fitness and fashion seem to be givens over there.) The inversions in the scene–using a tire to stop traffic, setting fire during daylight–suggest that the natural order of things in Beirut is already upside down, a regime of violence and exploitation rather than a well-functioning civil society.

Unfortunately, that path though true enough doesn’t lead anywhere but back into the cycle of violence. The problem is not simply one of removing oppression to let peace bloom. Just as the street scene and its photograph are both now almost ritual performances, actors at every level have become habituated to war. Indeed, the most chilling photograph to come out of the weekend is the one most removed from the effects of the fighting.

The caption read, “After Shiite fighters seized control of parts of west Beirut, a gunman, right, took a break to drink coffee on a street corner.” This is almost disorienting, or it should be. The scene is the epitome of a worker’s coffee break: thermos, a smoke, a joke. This could be an image of civilization at its best: making the impersonal curb into a place of conviviality. And look at his feet: loafers, no socks. See the military vest as a life jacket and he could be waiting for his yacht to be put in the water. What is all too obvious is that these guys are normal human beings who are nonetheless habituated to moving in and out of war on a daily or even hourly basis.

Just like the rest of us.

Photographs by Mohammed Zaatari/Associated Press and Ramzi Haidar/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images.

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