Jan 17, 2010
Sep 18, 2007
May 21, 2017
Mar 02, 2008
Mar 07, 2012
Jun 07, 2009

War’s Bricolage

Reuters selected this photograph as its best of the day, and it is indeed striking.  But why?

Syrian rebel fighter in house

The caption said, “A Free Syrian Army fighter takes position inside a room as he points his weapon through a hole in Aleppo’s Saif al-Dawla district March 20, 2013.”  And that is what he is doing: positioning himself.  Hardly a dramatic action, and it is occurring in a still, spare, beige room, hardly a dramatic setting.

The room is no longer being used for its intended purpose, and a prior time of disruption is evident in the disordered decor: curtains down, furnishings strewn about, a hole punched in the wall.  It hardly seems fitted to its new use, however, for that delicate, foofoo lamp will never qualify as military hardware.  Yet “irony” seems too easy a label, as it can’t account for the way the soldier dominates the room.  Something important is happening, but what?

The sense of stasis is one clue: he is being posed for us, so that we can slow down and look carefully.  This is the opposite of an action photo, for the point of his positioning and aiming and firing that enormous weapon is still to come, involving an event that will occur outside the frame.  Instead, the point of the photograph is reflection, as if he has gathered into that space an equal and opposite concentration of energy to balance the impending gunfire.

The next clue is the way that he has repurposed the furniture.  Arranging the chairs and stacking the pillows to create his makeshift pillbox, he has given the room the same degree of thoughtfulness that went into its original decoration.  And he could do it with the same degree of cool concentration, perhaps taking his time to try out different configurations of the pillows, because he already is thoroughly at home in the business of war.

Which gets to the third clue: the natty self-possession in the way he is dressed.  You can expect to see that sweater and coveralls in next year’s fashion shows, and the beret could belong on any craftsman as he was making a cabinet or a musical instrument or a book.  Forget the camouflage, and a whole life could be surmised from his clothing and concentration; he’s even wearing a wedding ring.

Which brings us back to the room: it, too, represented a way of life, but one that now is being destroyed.  And so the deep intelligence of the photo emerges: it is documenting nothing less than how war not only destroys people and things, but also remakes the world in its own image.  This is the genius of war: it captures and rechannels the same skills, energies, and capabilities that otherwise are used to sustain peaceful, civil societies.

Force alone can do a lot of damage and thus can account for much of war’s power, but that still is the least of it.  As Chris Hedges observed, “war is a force that gives us meaning.”  What the photograph above reveals is just how thorough and nuanced that makeover can be, not least because of how it is accomplished by giving ordinary people practical tasks.

Kenneth Burke once observed that war motivates extreme levels of cooperation, albeit on behalf of the worst forms of competition.  (That is irony, and more than that.)  War also can motivate rearranging a living room on behalf of killing.  As the war “progresses,” the fighters can find themselves wholly occupied, engaged, and fulfilled by the work of destruction.  Why not: it rewards their resourcefulness.

This is the challenge that peace has to meet.

Photograph by Giath Taha/Reuters.

 4 Comments

Iraq, Cheney, and the Lessons of History

There are a number of slide shows (including here, here, here, here, and here) commemorating the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.  They will drag you back into that lost decade and tear at your heart.  All the wasted lives and treasure, and for what?  The expressed war aims were all lies, and even the neoconservatives’ real reasons for the war are in tatters: the country is not a stable ally in the region and Israel is not more secure.  But don’t tell it to this guy.

matthews-leno-cheney

Photographs of Dick Cheney are not being featured this week, and that is a serious oversight.  You can see Colin Powell holding up a vial of faux anthrax at the UN, but he was a stooge and visual media played almost no part in the government’s campaign of deception.  Those who like to lay the blame for bad judgment on visual media ought to take a long look at this sorry episode in US history: an unnecessary and stupid war was sold almost entirely with words, thank you, whereas images helped considerably in exposing the truth of the matter–for example, at Abu Ghraib.

But I digress.  Even if there is blame aplenty to spread around, Cheney, more than anyone else, is the reason the US went to war.

And his words are in the news this week, as CBS has aired an interview in which he says–really–that “If I had to do it over again, I’d do it in a minute.”

One might think that this is to be expected, and democracies naturally have highly partisan true believers on all sides.  He gets to speak his mind, and so do we.  Most of us won’t have artfully crafted interviews played on major media outlets, but in principle it’s the same, right?

Even if the playing field were level, the lack of reflection evident in this former high-ranking government official should be seen as very disturbing.  He is modeling not simply a difference of opinion, but a refusal to learn from history.

The remark I quoted is being repeated widely across the media this week, but the trailer for the show includes another statement that I find even more revealing.  The clip begins with the interviewer asking Cheney stock questions: What is your favorite virtue?  What do you appreciate most in your friends?  What is your idea of happiness?  These questions are hardly surprising, and Cheney provides stock answers: “Integrity.”  “Honesty.”  Etc.  And then another standard question is posed: What do you consider your main fault?  Whereas he had answered crisply before, here Cheney puts his head down and ponders the question: “My main fault. . . . Um, well, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults, I guess would be my answer.”

And there you have it.  Perhaps that’s not the mark of a criminal mind, but it sure could help.  If you don’t reflect on your faults, you can’t ever really go wrong.

Cheney need not ever think otherwise, but fortunately a significant majority of Americans now see that the war should never have happened.  That’s not enough, however.  If the nation is to have a conscience, it can’t think like Dick Cheney.   We should look at the photographs again, and consider the many, many mistakes that were made: by the government, by the press, by opinion leaders, and by ordinary citizens. The country was played for a fool, and by someone who would do it again in a minute.  If you don’t believe it, just ask him.

 1 Comment

The Visibility of the Everydayness of War

Allepo Catapult 2

With sequestration staring us in the face and all of the teeth gnashing concerning the possibility that the Department of Defense will be confronted with $500 billion dollars in budget cuts over the next ten years—no small chunk of change, but nevertheless a relatively small part of the overall DOD budget—I was intrigued by the photographs, such as the one above, coming out of Syria that show the primitive and makeshift weaponry employed by the Free Syrian Army.

The slingshot or catapult can be traced to ancient and medieval times, but in the contemporary era it is usually associated with rebel or guerilla warriors (think of all of the images we regularly see of Palestinian youth using slingshots to hurl rocks at Israelis), in large measure because it requires so little in resources to make it work. State sponsored armies have budgets that can be cut, rebels and guerillas … not so much.  And so the later cobble together whatever is available, converting the objects of ordinary life into weapons of war.

It is this last fact that bears some attention.  Elsewhere we have talked about how war has been normalized by being made more or less invisible in the United States, such that the accouterments of warfare have been converted into everyday objects that appear to have no connection to war (think of Jeeps and Humvees, or the way in which camouflage  has become something of a fashion statement, not to mention the AKC-47 assault rifle cast as a hunting rifle), but here we see everyday objects employed to the ends of death and destruction.  This too is an act of normalization, but one that runs in the opposite direction, putting war on display as quotidian, making it visible as a normal part of the everyday experience.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this inversion, but I am reminded of Elaine Scarry’s characterization of torture as “world unmaking,” converting the objects of everyday life into instruments of pain.  Doctors become administrators of pain, refrigerators and filing cabinets become bludgeons, bathtubs becomes miniature torture chambers, etc.  Watching someone creating weapons out of everyday objects for their own use is not exactly the same thing, since there is no clear identification of torturer and tortured; then again it is arguably all the more torturous inasmuch as those producing and using such weapons seem to have little real choice in the matter as they become the active agents in unmaking the world around them.  It is, in its way, the most perfect and efficient form of torture; a perversion of a perversion in which the torturer and the tortured are one in the same person.

I was struck by the broad implications of this thought when looking at the picture below:

Phone Bombs

Once again the photograph is of members of the Free Syrian Army.  And once again the soldiers we see are involved in producing a homemade weapon of war.  Here, however, there is no pretense of primitive weaponry; characterized in the caption as an “anti-aircraft weapon,” it is thoroughly modern, even if it does not display the most sophisticated and up-to-the-minute technology.  Indeed the bright colors of this image suggest a degree of contemporaneity that is muted by the drab shadows and colors of the photograph of the catapult.  But what is most striking is the use of a smart phone to arm and guide the missile.  Here we have an everyday object—and an item that virtually everyone reading this post has in their pocket—that has made it possible to create community across time and space, allowing us, as Ma Bell used to say, “to reach out and touch someone.”  It does that here as well, of course, but only after perverting the normal and ordinary usage of an otherwise salutary and everyday instrument of communication.

The United States is a far distance from Syria in just about everyway that one can imagine, economically, politically, culturally, and so on.  And yet, looking at these images—almost as if through Alice’s looking glass— has to give us pause as we recognize our own pretenses and patterns of  acclimating ourselves to the visual everdayness of a culture of war.

Credits:  Asmaa Wagulh/ Reuters; Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters.  Elaine Scarry’s provocative  discussion of the relationship between torture and war appears in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.  New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

 0 Comments

World Press Photo Contest: Why is the World not Weary of War?

The 2013 World Press Photo Contest Winners have been announced, and the news is not good.  I’m not referring to the quality of the judging or the photographs–far from it–but rather to what they show us about the world today.

BattleToDeath_01

Frankly, the world revealed by these photographs is a shit hole.  All too many of the images depict the ravages of war or of other conditions that are war by another name (gang violence, the brutal subjugation of women, poverty).  And as you can see above, a common denominator to these many sad stories is that a place where people were just trying to live decent lives is being wrecked, with little hope that anything good will come of it.  Or to put it another way, what seemed to be a modern world, or at least a part of the world on the way to full modernization, may in fact be going in the opposite direction.

I think it’s also telling that many of the slide shows featuring the winners–here, here, and here, to mention just a few examples– have selected images that don’t avoid this emphasis but may soften it a bit.  Certainly they haven’t led with the most horrific images, and neither have I.  Few of us really want to look at how awful life can be, and there is a great deal of peace, prosperity, and beauty in the world, and not much we can do about the rest anyway, right?

Right.  Sure.  Whatever you say, boss.  And that’s part of the problem.  In a period of time when in fact most of the world is at peace, in fact far too much of the world is at war.  And while terrible social, cultural, economic, and political degradation is spreading across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere as well, the rest of the world goes about its business, as if business were all that there was to living with others.

That’s why I picked out the image above.  It was not a big winner–second prize, Spot news stories–and it’s certainly not a particularly striking image or one that with sharp emotional intensity.  It’s not even quickly legible, and you have to peer at it to see the lone rebel fighter aiming his grenade launcher in the direction of Syrian forces.  But for the same reason, I think it captures something important about the world being revealed by all of the photos.  A place where people have lived for millennia is being ruined, and with not much more than emptiness and the smoke of another battle on the horizon.  Just as bad, the lone human being in the picture is a puny part of the scene–a bit player, really, as larger historical forces crash together to create continuing upheaval.  Sure, he has the power of action, but even justified revolution turns too easily into just another cycle of violence.  At the end of the day, all we may be left with is a long night.

Of course, there may have been a bias in the contest toward bad news.  That is the nature of news, and so we should not be surprised that the stories told here are harsher than those at, say, National Geographic.  And this comparison reminds us that the quality of photography need not depend on its subject, so perhaps more of the winners could have been taken from the sunny side of the street.  But that would miss the point, which is the reason World Press Photo exists.

There comes a time when the most important thing is not how well the photo was taken, but what it reveals about the world.  In the words of William Carlos Williams, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”  These photos are the poems for our time.

Photograph by Fabio Bucciarelli.  The William’s quote is from his poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”

 1 Comment

Time Lost to Violence in Syria and Texas

One of the basic ideas that I bring to this blog is that a lot can be learned from photographs that are not striking, dramatic, or otherwise visually assertive.  Of course, most of the time I’m still working with high-grade professional images, but the distinction holds all the more for that.

Aleppo rubble

Few photography instructors would advise their students to take a distant, poorly lit shot of people walking aimlessly across a pile of rubble.  But they might need to think otherwise if they were preparing those students for a tour of duty in a war zone.  This is an all-too-typical scene from Aleppo.  The electronics remaining along the roof line suggest this had been a high-tech building, but now it’s been bombed back to the stone age.

Instead of downloading, people are scavenging.  Not for food (not here and not yet at least) but more for something to do.  And that is what the photo reveals: not just destruction, but how much war is about killing time.  Soldiers know all too well how bursts of activity can be separated by long stretches of boredom, but that is nothing compared to what many civilians experience.  War imprisons them–whether in their homes or a refugee camp–while destroying virtually all work, schooling, or play.  As the built environment around them is degraded more and more every week, their opportunity to do anything productive becomes ever more constricted and difficult.  Time looms large as something to be filled–with what?–but in fact that time is being lost.  Lost to them and to the rest of society.  Time that could be used to do so much: to learn, work, entertain, invent, and not least to actually live and not merely survive. . . .

Look at the photo again and consider how you can see what I’m talking about.  Not just the destruction of the building, with all the hardship that will cause, but also how time is actually present in the photograph, expanding to fill the craters and exposed buildings, spreading across the rubble that now blocks any attempt to do anything in that place.  Look at how helpless those in the picture are to beat back the emptiness.  Even the playfulness evident in the figure on the right will soon be exhausted, and more time will be lost to the bewilderment and hopelessness evident in the other boy and the adult to the left.  Their time will be like the space in the photo: there is too much of it, now that it can no longer be productively organized by the buildings and routines of ordinary life.

So you might ask, Is that just one photo, or can we see the same thing elsewhere?  My guess is that you can find the same problem wherever there is persistent violence.  In the US, for example.

Lone Star students

These students at Lone Star College are killing time as their campus is being locked down following a gunfight.  Apparently two guys were carrying, and so we now all are witnesses to an example of NRA-style conflict resolution.  Of course, it didn’t exactly play out the way it was supposed to.  Instead of two rugged individualists settling their differences with frontier justice, someone else was caught in the crossfire and thousands of students and staff at several institutions in the area had their day seriously disrupted.  (Has anyone measured the collateral damage in lost time and productivity from all these shootings?)  But the details here are not the point.

No, the point is that this, too, is an image of war.  The circumstances differ in many ways, of course, and so the definition is being stretched too far, but consider how one effect may be the same in both countries.  Shooting in both Syria and Texas is not only destroying people and property, it also is killing time.  Killing it by making it useless and a burden to be borne rather than a precious resource to be used and enjoyed.

If the NRA had its way, every college and university would be required to allow people to carry concealed weapons on campus.  Welcome to the war zone.

Photographs by Muzaffar Salman/Reuters and Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle.

 0 Comments

Aleppo University and the Banality of Good

I supposed I’m biased: a university professor would be expected to take a university bombing seriously.  Likewise the journalists, who use their university educations every day, and so the 80 people killed in the attack on Aleppo University yesterday might be receiving more than the usual amount of attention.  What is 80 more in a civil war that has claimed 60,000 dead and driven ten times that number into refugee camps?  Civil wars aren’t civil, so why should a university expect to be spared?

APphoto_Mideast Syria

One answer can be taken from this photo of some of the physical damage from the blast.  There is nothing exceptional about the photo–it’s just another entry in the ever expanding archive of rubble world–and there is nothing exceptional about the building.  And that’s the point: what you see is in fact thoroughly ordinary, mundane, routine, to be expected.  Square rooms, identical radiators, standardized fittings and furniture–just another block of rooms designed for low-impact activities such as reading, talking, writing, or sleeping.  It may have been a dorm or perhaps a set of faculty offices, but the purpose in any case was civil.  No one was there for the amenities, but no one had to worry–it seemed–about being killed.

The blast brings to light the building’s routinized design and construction practices.  Instead of asking “Is this your room” or “Is this your office,” viewers are led to ponder the sameness of things: same square spaces, same concrete and metal materials, same bomb, same indiscriminate carnage.  Once the building was up, most of the people using it never had to think about how it was built, where the pipes ran through the walls, or how long some of the maintenance could be deferred.  They had better things to do, and the point of the university was to created a space where those things could be done.  The higher learning benefited from other forms of thoughtlessness, a kind of peace that had been acquired by drawing on many of civilization’s arts, including architecture, engineering, and management.  Because others had been thinking professionally, one could be free to learn those skills and many others, not least the arts that can improve civic association.

Put another way, by providing a not too emotionally charged photo of a damaged building, the photograph asks us to consider how damage extends beyond the personal tragedies of death and maiming to include the structure of society as a whole.  Because the building is placed in the middle distance, our position as viewers is placed in a corresponding spot: neither completely distant from nor intimately involved in the scene, we are invited to understand but left too far away to directly participate.  In short, we are put in a civic relationship with those in the wreckage: they are neither wholly foreign nor familiar, but inhabiting a common social structure that extends from their space into ours.   A structure that, like the building, can be both taken for granted and deliberately damaged.

Hannah Arendt, who cared a great deal about civic life, is known in part for developing the concept of “the banality of evil.”  This somewhat counter-intuitive phrase should not be summarized lightly, but it is fair enough for the moment to say that she was focusing on how evil benefits from a certain form of thoughtlessness.  That was how Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi executioners could sleep at night, by thinking about only their technical responsibilities while accepting unthinkingly the false beliefs and hideous values that made genocide seem normal.  Much has been said for and against Arendt’s argument, both in respect to the particular case and the problem of evil more generally.  I want to add a small emendation that is brought to mind by the photo of a ruined buiilding in Aleppo.

The point is offered by the deep asymmetry in the image between the routinized, taken-for-granted infrastructure and the unexpected but intentional act of destruction.  In this case, thoughtlessness was largely in the service of the good.  Indeed, that’s why the university was so vulnerable.  By not having to think about security, and by having a temporary reprieve from the throat-tightening anxieties of the war, people were able to think–and probably to think as Arendt would have wanted, that is, by questioning and improving the basic assumptions of the society to combat the banality of evil.

A student at the university remarked that,”with all the brutality, no one could imagine [the government] shelling a university.” The LA Times story goes on: “The woman, who crosses multiple rebel and government checkpoints to reach school each day, had been determined to pursue her education despite the violence. But now she is rattled. ‘This is not the way schools are supposed to be,’ she said.”

Not thinking about material infrastructure is not the same as not thinking about violence. but my point stands: a well functioning civil society is one in which you don’t have to worry about civil war.  The university represented the last space where that was possible, and now that has been lost as well.

The thoughtfulness desperately needed in Syria, the Middle East, and everywhere else around the globe requires its own forms of thoughtlessness.  Ignoring ethical ideas leads to the banality of evil, but there is another kind of inattention that one might call the banality of good.  How do we know?  Because in Syria we can see it exposed to view, as it is being destroyed.

Photograph by the Syrian Official News Agency.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

 0 Comments

Small Arts and Great Crimes

This photo was front page above the fold at the New York Times, and for good reason: it’s a work of public art.

syria-articleLarge-v2

Two works, actually: an effigy of Syrian president Assad and the photograph framing it with an apartment building gashed in two by bombing.  The building is in the war zone formerly known as the city of Aleppo.

The effigy might have been made by an artist or by some kids on the street, and the photograph might have been taken by an old pro or a young stringer.  Doesn’t matter.  Both are skillful and work in the same direction, while the photograph relays and adds something to the stuffed figure to bring out its full artistic potential.

And what a statement that is.  Comically askew helmet and uniform on a ruler who takes no risks while having others do his killing for him; photographed face on a dummy’s body for a man who hides behind an authoritarian screen of authority; a hunched, wary, remorseless attitude that allows his society to be torn apart as he turns his back on the suffering. . . . the vernacular artist has eloquently captured this vicious martinet’s lack of flexibility, legitimacy, empathy, and shame.

The photograph adds to the composition by making the connection between the tyrants’ personality and the damage done to the nation.  We can easily imagine that Assad might some day stand over a country in which every building has been razed, only to say, “but I’m still in power.”  And that is what photography is supposed to do: extend the imagination.  Photojournalism in particular is there in part to extend the political imagination, allowing us to see how the future might be already evident in the present.  Evident, for example, in the character of the leader, and in the suffering, knowledge, skill, and resolve of the people.

Art works by allusion as well, in this case to the Chaplinesque figure of the Great Dictator, who was really a little dictator.  And so it is in Syria: the great man is really very small, and 60,000 people are dead because he doesn’t have a larger heart or mind.  But there is another point to be made here as well, which is that this distortion in magnitude is one that is best captured by small arts.  Arts like the effigy and the photograph, for example.

Great leaders, like great moments in history, may require more panoramic media to be adequately represented.  But when a petty despot is leading his people into the slaughter pen, the grand painting or sweeping film won’t do.  Leadership is one thing, criminality another.  Fortunately for modern times, we have the arts we need.

Photograph by Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
The photo accompanied this story at the Times.

 0 Comments

Call For Papers: The Asch Drone Project

The Solomon Asch Center is starting a web project on drones–how they function in the present and what they may become in the future. This project aims to explore the politics of government use of drones for surveillance and interdiction, private and corporate use of drones; privacy and due process issues raised by use of drones, fifth generation warfare using drones, and any issue relating to how the technology used in drones will play out in the future.  The Asch Drone Project seeks contributions from scientists, engineers, social scientists, lawyers, artists, journalists and citizens to provide a multi-faceted online presentation incorporating text essays and visuals relating to drones.  An online gallery will display Afghan folk art, fine art, cartoon, and photographic representations of drones.  The Project is open to all types of interpretations and opinions, and to any length text from a paragraph to a multipage essay.  If you have visuals or links to existing blogs to suggest, or if you are able to write something for the project, please get in touch with Asch Associate Director for Conflict and Visual Culture Initiatives Jonathan Hyman at jhyman@brynmawr.edu and identify your inquiry or submission in the subject  field as such: attention Asch Drone Project.

The Asch Drone Project expects to open on the Asch web site (www.aschcenter.org) no later than 1 January 2013.  If enough good essays are contributed, authors may be invited to participate in a Special Issue of the journal Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict (www.informaworld.com/dac), edited by Asch Co-Director Clark McCauley.

For a decade the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, now located at Bryn Mawr College, has brought together social scientists from many disciplines-history, political science, psychology, linguistics, economics, law, sociology and anthropology — to analyze the underlying causes of conflict, how conflict can be managed constructively to avoid widespread violence, and how to ameliorate the refugee problems that flow from intergroup violence. 

Credit: File Photo

 0 Comments

War Games

At first glance, the photograph is an excruciating example of what Barbie Zelizer refers to as an “about to die” photograph, but a quick read of the caption notes that it is an actor dressed in a Japanese military uniform as he “pretends to kill a man dressed as a plainclothes 8th Route Army soldier.”  The performance is taking place at an Army Culture Park in Wuxiang county, part of China’s Shanxi Province.  I might have treated the image as little more than a curiosity but for the fact that I encountered it on several different slide shows, often accompanied with other photographs, such as the one below, showing adolescents and teenagers role playing Chinese soldiers  in war game simulations at what is described as a “guerilla warfare experiential park.”

One might wonder why the Chinese are promoting a theme park that offers a “guerilla war experience,” but the  question here is, why are we seeing such images and in such profusion?  And why now? And without any extended commentary? China is of course one of America’s premiere competitors for world power, and so there is all manner of curiosity about who they are and what they are doing.  Many of the images that we see of China these days call attention to the ways in which their economic and technological progress stands as a threat to global capitalism or they underscore the Chinese government’s efforts at political oppression and their potential military strength. The photographs of professional actors and children role playing as soldiers—both past and present—at the Army Culture Park operate at the nexus of these concerns as we see a military culture being advanced for what appears to be China’s middle classes through a theme park experience that converts war into play.  While the actors have a serious countenance—as commensurate with their roles—everyone else seems to be having a good time.  And the presumed and potential threat to the western world—both economic and military—could not be more palpable as we watch children who might grow up to be our enemies enjoying the experience (both economically and militarily).

Before we feel too superior in judging the Chinese, however, we need to look more carefully within, for a simple search on “children” and “war games” in the United States brought up a reference to the Virginia War Museum in Newport News, VA, an “incredible, safe, and fun experience for children, 8-12” with  both summer and winter World War II Youth camps (here and here).

And perhaps the question should be, what’s the difference?  Or, of what should we really be afraid?

Photo Credits: Jason Lee/Reuters; Ross Taylor/Virginia Pilot

 2 Comments

What Can’t Be Seen in Afghanistan

I’ll get straight to the point: What can’t be seen in Afghanistan is no reason for being there.  Now let’s consider how “seen” is more than a metaphor.

So, what can be seen?  No one photo–no hundred photos–could answer that question, but let’s look at the image above, which appeared yesterday.  A soldier is receiving emergency care after being wounded by a roadside bomb in Logar Province.  The photo captures key features of US military behavior: the troops are thoroughly provisioned, very well trained, directly engaging the enemy, and disciplined under fire, and they take care of one another.

For all the conservative anxiety about letting African-Americans, then women (yes, they opposed that, too), and now Muslims and GLBT citizens serve in the military, you don’t have to worry about unit cohesion with this company, or any other.  One soldier is tending carefully to one of the leg wounds, while another checks on the soldier himself, and it is easy to imagine (and confirmed by other photos) that the rest of the troop is deployed to make sure that everything gets taken care of, from the man down to the mission.

The uniforms include US flag arm patches, but that identification is well short of the patriotic rhetoric that put them there.  Instead of grand pronouncements, we see dirt and gear.  Instead of lofty projections about democratization, we see only a small swatch of terrain: grass, trees, grass, trees leading into the nondescript background.

Alan Trachtenberg has remarked that the shift from illustration to photography in the 19th century lead to “a loss of clarity about both the overall form of battles and the unfolding war as such and the political meaning of events” (Reading American Photographs, pp. 74-75).  Thus, the realism that rightly displaced idealized illustrations of war came at the cost of a coherent narrative that would justify the fighting.  Thus, it might well be that no photograph can provide a strategic rationale for war–although it certainly could challenge any rationale that substituted illusion for the facts on the ground.

In short, it might be that one could never “see” a reason for being in Afghanistan, and that the medium of photojournalism was biased against supporting any overarching rationale for war.  One might think that war then should be left to military experts and political leaders: that is, to rational assessment of forces, strategic calculations, and the political will to accept those sacrifices that are needed on behalf of raison d’etat.  But what if those reasons really aren’t there in the first place?  What if the original reasons no longer apply, and we are left only with inertia, an unwillingness to accept sunk costs, political face-saving, and other  examples of war’s well-documented ability to corrupt decision-making?

At that point, perhaps the inability to see grand purpose in a photograph could stand for the actual absence of purpose.  And what if the photo also showed what happened when the battlefield no longer served the national interest: that is, how the soldiers rightly focus on the only good intentions left: doing their jobs well and caring for one another.

This older photograph, which just as well could be from any day this year, puts the problem in starker detail.  The soldier is a lot worse off, and the medical response is ramped up as well.  He was lucky enough to get to the Heath Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.  Again, we see key elements of military organization: both high-tech medical support and the caring attentiveness and reassurance of a fellow soldier, all in the service of nation.  But while the flag was small and utilitarian in the first photo, here is is overlarge and distant.  Whether too small or too big, it has been tacked on to what is really happening.  (Note how the flag above hangs awkwardly over the more functional decor below, as useful as a politician’s bluster back home.  There will be another reason it is there, however, as it has to compensate for the really bad news often occurring below.)

Sadly, the flag does not provide a reason to be there.  Afghanistan once harbored terrorists who deserved to be punished, and were.  But it no longer presents any threat to national security, while continued occupation has lead to the Taliban’s resurgence as a key player in local politics.

These photographs of American military sacrifice show much that is good about the US military effort in Afghanistan.  But no matter where you look, it seems, you can’t see a reason for them to be there.

Photographs by Munir Liz Zaman/Getty Images and Patrick Barth/Frontier Africa TV.

 0 Comments