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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph by Joao Silva for The New York Times.

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

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

Photo Credit: Ann Johansson/New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Andrea Bruce/Washington Post

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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I have been troubled by this photograph since it appeared recently:

The photograph was taken December 20, 2006, during the final stages of a training march in southern Israel. It was circulated the week of September 17, 2007 to accompany stories about a commission report recommending that Israel’s military should allow women into front-line combat positions, including special forces.

This topic is a minefield, and I doubt I can say anything without offending some readers. The question of policy activates commitments to gender equality and the defense of Israel, as well as criticism of Israel’s security strategy and of militarism more generally. Equally important, each of these issues carries arguments about who has more or less authority to speak at all on the matter.

I have typically progressive positions on these issues, but I doubt that alone explains why I was stopped short by the photograph. I don’t just see the image alone, but two others that lie beneath it like a palimpsest. It draws its rhetorical power from one of these images, while the other raises a horrific specter that should be stated in the hope of critical reflection.

The first image to which the photo alludes is the typical shot of military troops, often special forces, deploying in full combat gear including the camouflage face paint applied for battle. We see these images in newspaper photographs, recruiting ads (Army Rangers, Navy Seals), movies and movie posters, and video games. In like manner, the woman in the front of the frame and the tall woman in the middle both are streaked with the black paint. That, along with the canteen and the caption push the viewer to see the women as combat troops in the making: trained, tough, and ready to go. If you look at the second and third women, they almost already have the thousand yard stare.

And maybe that’s what reminded me of the second image that lies latent within the photo: the image of Jewish women standing in line in a concentration camp. There actually are a number of such images; you can see one set here at the Yad Vashem web site. Look again at the photo above. Maybe you see only the gear and strong women. I see that and I also see Jewish women standing in a line, captives of the national security state.

What makes judgment so difficult in this case is that both images can be true at the same time. Israeli women are and will be everything one could ask of a special forces commando. And these women could be killed because of self-destructive state policies that are the issue not only of concerns about security but also of militarism and paranoia.

I have to add that all this is still far better than anything Hamas would do. Israel is not the reason the IDF needs women on the front lines. Israel is not where we need to worry about women being confined and denied basic civil and human rights. And as my friends who are hawks love to remind me, Israel is a vibrant democracy. This last point is exactly why I have to say what I saw in the photograph. There is reason to speak because Israel is a democracy and therefore open to public opinion, not to mention the financial, military, and political support that is provided by the US government and thus the legitimate concern of every US citizen. Perhaps I’m mad to be haunted by the image, but I believe that at times Israel, like the US, like many powerful states historically, can be dangerous to others and to its own people. Should the women in the photograph have to die in the defense of Israel, I see no basis for criticism of the report’s policy recommendation. But that defense may not be necessary, or, most important, may be more likely to occur precisely because of state policies that rely too much on military superiority and the normalization of war. Perhaps the question of Israel’s defense has nothing to do with my reaction to a photograph. It may be, however, that a photo shows more than we would like to admit about how people can become enslaved by force, even when it is of their own making.

Photograph by Oded Balilty/Associated Press.

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I don’t like to belabor a point, but as long as a few Republican senators stonewall any serious attempt to withdraw from the war in Iraq, the press and the rest of us will have to keep up the drumbeat for change. So we have yet another set of images from Iraq, these in conjunction with a special series in the Chicago Tribune that followed a troop of soldiers Inside the Surge. The photo essay shows the troops in camp, on the move, playing with kids in the street, and the like. The usual stuff of embedded coverage. And as happens often enough, they catch something of the other side of the myth of GIs handing out candy bars. Like this:

 

The caption reads, “The sister and nephew of a suspected insurgent cry during a nighttime raid of a house by soldiers in Bonecrusher Troop.” Hey, someone might say, it could all be an act. Ok, it could, although we are told later in the story that the suspect was released. And even if mom is acting, or perhaps trying to be reasonable, look closely at the boy. He is terrified. Hunching down into himself, close to crumpling, his face a mask of fear and shame and pain; he will not forget this night.

I’m also struck by several other elements in the photo. One is the standard of living. These are not the wretched poor of the “Arab street.” It is much more likely that they are middle class, exactly the people who were least likely to object to the changes promised by the Bush administration. Their usual preoccupation of the evening probably would be not building bombs but rather keeping the boy at his homework. I also notice that the room is so clean and spare. The emptiness of the room might be an indirect sign of the boredom and general social deprivation that is the common experience of so many civilians trapped in the war zone. In order to avoid the danger of life outside, they are confined to a few rooms and left with each other and the TV, if the power is on.

And then there is the gun in the right foreground. (That gun has appeared more than once in American photojournalism, as John noted here.) Sure, it’s pointed down, but were it to be raised boy and mother would be right in the immediate line of fire. No wonder the boy is afraid. Cordoned by soldiers on each side, mother and child beseech one who turns his back to them while the other holds them under the gun.

And they are not the only soldiers in the house. Here is another photo:

The caption reads, “Staff Sgt. Stephen Yacapin of Bonecrusher Troop’s 3rd Platoon searches a bedroom for weapons or other evidence of insurgent activity during a raid in Baghdad.” Like the mythical WMDs, he will not find weapons here either. We can see what does turn up, including a purple comforter, a hairbrush and comb, hair gels or something of that sort, snapshots of family or friends, a magazine or folder in English, a purse–not exactly the raw materials of a terrorist cell. We also can see that he’s tearing the room apart. Maybe he’s going to put everything back in place, but it is going to be hard to stack the drawers again and put square corners on the bedsheets while outfitted like a storm trooper from Star Wars. I do not question his need to be outfitted for combat, but what is the Bonecrusher Troop doing in anyone’s bedroom?

And from the look of it, it could be anyone’s bedroom. I’ll bet I could get everything there from Target. Putting that room back together may not be hard to do, and the mess may be be a great harm, but surely they will feel that this raid was a violation of their intimate space, for that is what has happened.

These photos are not the whole story, nor are they any more true literally that those that show soldiers being friendly. But they should remind us that the Iraqi citizens’ experience of the US occupation is deeply personal. Pundits who pretend to ponder the great question of Why They Hate Us need look no farther then these images. This is not about the clash of civilizations, the supposed oxymoron of Islamic democracy, or any other Big Idea. This is about being terrified in one’s own home.

You would think Americans could empathize: Recall these words from the Declaration of Independence:

He [the King of Great Britain] has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us . . .

Of course, many Americans do understand, in part because they have seen photographs like these. The general public is not the problem.

Photographs by Kuni Takahesi for the Chicago Tribune.

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The lemonade stand. It is as American as apple pie, a time-honored tradition deeply rooted in the American dream and its Horatio Alger ethos. All it takes is an old soapbox or small table; some lemons, sugar, and ice; a few paper cups; a hand scrawled sign and, of course, some good old American initiative. For many children it is their first encounter with the spirit of capitalism, and hey, even if there isn’t much monetary profit at .10¢ or even .25¢ a cup, there is the social capital gained by cooperating with friends and neighbors, and learning how to encounter the marketplace, both of which may be far more important civic lessons.

A safe and open marketplace is essential to a vital democratic public culture. What better way, one might then imagine, to demonstrate the success of our military surge in Iraq than to show a safe marketplace operating in the Al-Anbar Province, one of the most volatile and dangerous places in all of Iraq. And more, what better way to show that safety than with “a young Iraqi boy selling lemonade in the town of Ramadi …”

Prior to the surge, Al-Anbar Province had been the “hub of [the] Sunni insurgency.” But apparently not anymore, as over 6,000 U.S. troops walk the streets, along with a growing Iraqi police force and tribes of “provincial volunteers.” That the police force is beleaguered and the volunteers bear a striking resemblance to vigilante groups doesn’t seem to matter, for here in Ramadi, seventy miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, safety and commerce seem to rule as the marketplace is open for commerce and, as the caption tells us, a young boy sells lemonade. At least according to the caption, one might imagine themselves on a street corner in middle America.

Upon a second glance, however, it is not clear that all is well. The eye is drawn initially to the boy who we might expect to see smiling for the camera or making a sales pitch to a potential customer. But there is none of that. The tentative and concerned look on his face and the gestural attitude of his body suggest that he is far from at ease with the situation. And with good reason, for the soldier and his weapon pose an ominous presence as they simultaneously frame and obscure the scene—perhaps a metaphor for U.S. military presence in Iraq writ large. Indeed, one has to wonder how truly safe things can be if something on the order of international martial law is needed to insure the everyday routines of domestic commercial life.

The contrast between the two images points in some measure to the problem of the project of exporting liberal democracy. A liberal democratic public culture relies upon the sense of trust that is generated by the kind of social capital we see being invested in the photograph of the two young girls at the top (or in any of the hundreds of pictures that you will encounter if you google “lemonade stand”). Such images are tinged with nostalgia and too easily romanticize our bourgeois and middle class sensibilities, and we need to be very careful about being too proud of ourselves in this regard, but the sense of trust and cooperation that they depict is necessary to such a politics. It is not the only thing, of course—the opportunity for free and open dissent come to mind as no less important—but it is essential. And it is hardly the cultural or civic attitude that is generated by a massive and sustained foreign military presence or roving tribes of provincial volunteers. To accent the point, one need only visualize the scene of the two girls at the top—innocent, pure, and white—with the soldier and his weapon framing and overshadowing the scene. It is virtually unimaginable.

Photo Credits: Central Ohio Center For Education, Richard Mills/The Times

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Hummer owners are proud owners; why else would you own one? It’s easy to single them out for criticism: the vehicles obstruct other drivers, waste fuel, and punish the environment while signaling dominance. That’s unfair in one sense, however, for such wretched excess is true of many SUVs and other vehicles as well. (If you do want to slam a Hummer, you might enjoy going here or here.) And some Hummer owners really do know how to have fun behind the wheel. This shot from the photo gallery at GMHummer.com says “Took me three hours to clean this!!!”

Was worth every minute, we can assume, and there are worse ways to get dirty. As the new Jeep SUV ad campaign says, “Have Fun Out There.” So what’s the problem?

I want to suggest that Hummers are one small–ok, not so small–part of a larger problem, which is the domestication of war. The more that the equipment of war is packaged for retail consumption, from fatigues to Hummers, the easier it is to think that war is not much different that tearing around the desert for an afternoon. The Hummer is exhibit A because it is a civilian version of the military Humvee (technically a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) which got its boost in the domestic market following the first Gulf war. Since then, SUVs have militarized the streets–industry research discovered early on that a primary motive for buying them was to purchase a sense of security. As a result, it becomes easier to assume not only that our streets are dangerous, but that other dangerous streets are not much different from ours. The process can work in the other direction as well: when we see soldiers in Iraq drinking bottled water while staring into laptops, it can seem that they’re at school or work like anyone else.

The terrible lie beneath this superficial continuity was brought home to me when I saw this photograph in the Sunday New York Times Magazine:

This Humvee had driven over an I.E.D. (improvised explosive device). As it was carrying a colonel who survived the blast, it probably was pretty well armored. Even so, a fair amount of luck was involved: the bomb wasn’t too big, the blast caught the back of the vehicle, and no one was riding there at the time. This is just another day in Iraq–the story reports that every time this unit leaves their base they have “contact” with the enemy. In the real war, the road really is a very dangerous place. And it’s going to take more than three hours to clean his one up.

New York Times photograph by Benjamin Lowy.

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This photo from the Chicago Tribune inadvertently says a lot about what’s wrong with the “Stand up/Stand down” strategy (dare we say myth) in Iraq.

It is in many ways a bad photo: an ordinary street scene made to look off-kilter from the oddly tilted camera; the focus is divided to both left and the right, which allows the eye to wander aimlessly through the distant, featureless background; not much is happening. This seems to be an amateur snapshot of a nonevent.

One reason it made it into the Chicago paper is suggested by the caption: “On patrol. Army Sgt. Ezequiel Mora of DeKalb patrols a police checkpoint Sunday in Baghdad.” Ok, he’s a local boy. And sure enough, the picture looks posed. Foot up, body turned toward the viewer, gun fully displayed, looking intently beyond the lens–this is what he might be told to do in a portrait studio. And now the context makes more sense: as in a studio, there should be nothing happening, and the actual street scene is merely a backdrop like a fake row of books. Unlike some of the more realistic photographs of soldiers caked with dirt, sweat, and fear as they inch along a wall while under fire, this guy is a perfectly uniformed action figure. Like GI Joe, his mission is to look the part.

If he were the only guy in the picture, that might be the end of it. But look at the other guy. He is one of the cops at the police checkpoint. And what a cop. In contrast to the heavily armored hoplite in front of him, this guy is wearing the thin cotton/polyester shirt you’d see on the street in Maybury. He’s also lightly armed. Most important, he really looks like a small town cop: hand on the back of the neck–got a crick there, maybe–puzzling about some exceedingly local dilemma. He’s built not for action but for talking, cajoling, compromising, and moving things along, all the while not quite up to the job and better suited for it for that. We’re looking at Barney Fife in Baghdad.

The comic contrast between the two figures might be the end of it, except that the rest of the caption places the photograph within a strategic context: “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said U.S. commanders must work harder to avoid civilian casualties.” So, those patrolling the checkpoints have been a little rough, and now the choice is between two bad options: ineffectual police work such that U.S. troops have to patrol the police checkpoints (shouldn’t the police be able to do that, so that the troops could be used elsewhere?) and the use of excessive force by those troops.

The photograph goes further still: it shows us, first, that the relationship between the police and the troops is backwards, and, second, that the whole operation has gone tilt. In a modern civil society, citizens should encounter not military troops but the police. The troops should be way in the background as the major part of the state’s monopoly on force and used only for extraordinary threats such as invasions and natural disasters. Equally important, most of the time police should be a lot like the cop in the photograph: not paramilitary swat teams but ordinary guys who know the people in the neighborhood and are there to solve small problems. In Iraq, however, it looks like nothing can be done to scale. Citizens encounter troops who can’t help but be dangerous, while the troops are more likely to be trigger happy because they have the problem of having the none-too-reliable Iraqi police covering their backs. And I don’t see Andy Griffith anywhere in the picture.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty, August 26, 2007.

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