Remember the war?  Sure you do, but have you seen much of it lately?  With the worst threat to the country in the House of Representatives, inattention to the wars in the Middle East might seem understandable, but the casualties continue to mount.  So it is that we need artists who can help us both see anew and reflect on how much remains unseen.

Perhaps this plastic toy soldier will seem merely odd or offensive to some.  For those of us who spent countless hours of our childhood playing with World War II combat figurines, this molded amputee is a shock to the memory system.  I was at once transported back to childhood’s idyll and confronted with the harsh reality of the present.  What seemed harmless becomes patterned denial of the human costs of war, and real damage done today seems already on the way to oblivion.  The miniature scale, cheap industrial material, and obvious naivete of a classic war toy have been reworked artistically to capture how easily people can get used to the suffering of others.  If we imagine these toys being moved around on the carpet, we begin to grasp how war is insinuated into the small spaces and formative experiences of ordinary life–and with that, easily forgotten once preoccupied with the more pressing business of adulthood.

Unless you’ve served in a combat zone, of course.  Then you might have seen and done things that are hard to forget.  Were you designing the toys, the typical idealization might be reversed.  Instead of the usual figures of rifleman, machine gunner, and the like–straight shooters, never wounded, incapable of PTSD–you might think of what happened to the women, or your buddy’s suicide.  And if that isn’t something anyone should dwell on, it does need to be recognized, as these are casualties, too, and not ones that show up so neatly in the government body counts.

Most of the time, however, the heavy “collateral damage” is hidden away behind more reassuring images; images that work like toy soldiers, you might say.  And to get a sense of how common that is, all you have to do is look at these disturbing alternatives.

That’s the idea of this work from Dorothy, a design group not above making people think.  You can read more about the set here.  Fortunately, they are not for sale.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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It is such a simple photograph, and yet strangely evocative.  If you think about it, this photo may be one answer to the question that hangs over the war in Afghanistan.  That question is, what are we seeing, really?

One man handcuffs another.  They are different men: enemies, one shackling the other; one in uniform and combat boots and the other in ordinary clothing and civilian shoes; one blindfolded and the other wearing glasses and looking intently; one a prisoner and the other heavily armed.

And yet they are the same man: each in the same crouch, head forward, hands exposed, the same coiled intensity, neatly spaced as if in formation on the same ground before the same wall.  The gun, a piece of equipment projecting backwards, is balanced by the scarf, now an instrument of detention, in the front.  If they were kids, they could be playing leapfrog.  If they were allies, they could take turns helping one another, covering each other’s back.  But they are enemies–if not before the man was detained, surely so by now.  Or perhaps not completely so, as the attitude of the Marine need not be hostile: just doing his job, right?  One might wonder if there is any symmetry in the political situation to correspond to the parallel poses in this picture.

Here we are seeing double, which may be the only way to see straight on the borderlands of the American empire.  One man has been pulled into a war not of his own making–but which one?  One man has become a prisoner of war–but which one?  One man’s country is being ruined by war, ideology, and corruption–but which one?

The US military occupation of Afghanistan continues with no favorable resolution in sight.  The reportage, such as the story alongside this photograph, has all the marks of another imperial morass.  The mission is succeeding and conditions are improving, but everything being accomplished can only be sustained by continued occupation and enormous expenditures that either ignore or exacerbate the structural problems.

In the midst of all this, to see straight, you may have to see double.  To see not only what is different, but also what is the same; to see not only the costs on one side, but also the costs on the other side; to see not only the future, but also how much it resembles the past; to see not only the successes but also how entire societies can become habituated to failure; to see not only progress but endless war, waste, and loss.

Photograph by Massoud Hossaini/Agence France-Presse–Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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It looks like a traffic accident, doesn’t it?  And it is, if roadside bombing is part of the traffic pattern.  Except this photo isn’t from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lebanon has been largely forgotten, somewhat like the invalid living in the house down the block.  The country may never be healed or whole again, but at least it seemed to have recovered some civic equilibrium, some distance from bombings, mayhem, and ruin.  Perhaps that’s why the driver–an Italian peacekeeper–looks so stunned.  Beyond the shock of the explosion, he seems to be struggling to comprehend what has happened.  Although wearing a military uniform, he sits there as though the victim of a civilian crash.  “Am I alright?  What happened?  Is everyone OK?”  The medical technicians and ambulance fill out the scene (and note that there is another victim in the lower left frame).  Even the wrecked vehicle seems as much like a trashed SUV as damaged military hardware.  Only the Jaws of Life are missing.

But it wasn’t an accident.  Bombings are intentional acts.  The attempted (and perhaps actual) murder apparently is a part of life on this thoroughfare.  Civilian first responders do their job; after all, the military presence of the “peacekeeper” was already part of the urban fabric.   The violence is undertaken to blow up the settled arrangements of civil society, and to replace the daily negotiations of traffic and politics alike with a new order of force and fiat.  Of course, the old order was also grounded in force and fiat, for Lebanon has been a country wracked by armies and inequities for decades.  The point here is not to sort out its political gerrymandering, but rather to note how it is a small example of larger processes by which war becomes woven into the normal operation of society.

The photograph seems to have revealed the exact line between civic order and political violence.  It can been seen as an image of guerrilla attack and military casualties, or as one of the small disasters that punctuate ordinary life on the street.  It is both, of course: an example of civic war: the condition of citizenship being overwhelmed by violence, and of that violence becoming part of the fabric of civilian life.

The ambulance and first responders signal that the emergency here is the “accident”–the specific vehicle and victims–but not the broken country itself.  Yet Lebanon lives in a permanent state of emergency, and though relatively quiet compared to some neighborhoods in the region, the bombing reminds us how it is still kept on the verge of catastrophe.

The vehicle seems to be leaning to our left.  Perhaps the photo has revealed not only an invisible line but also a tipping point–the moment when the country could again fall from being a relatively civil society into a binge of assassinations, assaults, and invasions.  Or perhaps a new equilibrium is already in place, the steady state of civic war and its new normal of everyday violence.

Photograph by Sharif Karim/Reuters.  For more on the term “civic war,” see Peter Alexander Meyers, Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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Lest we forget, U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to capture Osama bin Laden and to neutralize the safe haven from which Al Qaeda might operate.  It is now ten years later.  Osama bin Laden is dead.  Al Qaeda’s always small presence in Afghanistan remains small, largely unaffected by a war that has cost 1.2 trillion dollars and the lives of more than 4,600 U.S. troops—with casualties on the rise.  And so we might assume that the presidential promise of a substantial troop drawdown in the summer of 2011 would be impending.  But apparently not.

The U.S. currently has 94,000 troops in Afghanistan.  The WSJ reports that the Pentagon is about to propose bringing 5,000 troops home in July and possibly another 5,000 troops by the end of the year.  That would make for a 10.5% reduction in troops, hardly what one might imagine as a significant withdrawal.  But it gets better, with other reports indicating that the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is expected to peak at about 98,000 later in the year as the surge of 30,000 troops promised in January are deployed.  So a 10.5% reduction actually turns out to be a 1% increase.

In this context, the photograph above reminded me of Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”  The song, often taken as a parable for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, tells the story of a platoon Captain in 1941 who marched his men into a Louisiana river—the Big Muddy—which continues to get deeper and deeper until the entire patrol is up to its neck in water.  Despite warnings from the Sergeant that the men will not be able to swim, the Captain responds by noting “All we need is a little determination.”  And the refrain intones, “And the big fool said to push on.”  Eventually the Captain drowns after getting mired in quicksand.  And the narrator concludes:

Now I’m not going to point to any moral—
I’ll leave that for yourself.
Maybe you’re still walking, you’re still talking
You’d like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers, that old feeling comes on,
We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

In the photograph above the soldier walking through a combat outpost in the Kandahar Province is only ankle deep in the flood waters.  And so one would like to think that there is still hope for him—and the 94,000 troops he currently represents.  But then there is this photograph that appeared in the same slideshow and what it shows surely must give us pause to wonder.

It is a group portrait of the 234^th Infantry Division being deployed from Fort Riley, Kansas to Afghanistan on April 15^th.  And apparently there will be more before year’s end.

“And the big fool said to push on ….”

Photo Credit:  Bob Strong/Reuters; Vyaceslav Oseledko/AFT/Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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I have spent countless hours the past few days reading the many remembrances of and testimonials to the work of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington.  I knew neither of them except by their work, but that work touched me deeply, as it has many, many others, worldwide, and for me their loss is both tragic and palpable.  In addition to reading about them I have also been staring at the massive archive of images that they left behind.  There are so many photographs worth lingering over that it does both men a disservice to focus on only one, but the truth is that one image—by Tim Hetherington—has haunted me ever since I first encountered it in the Fall of 2007 and I feel the need to comment on it here in eulogium.

The photograph was taken in Afghanistan while Hetherington was attached to a platoon in the Korengal Valley. It showed up at the time in a number of mainstream photographic slideshows and I believe that it was included in his 2010 book Infidel (although I don’t have a copy handy so I can’t confirm that).  More immediately, it has been included in many of the retrospectives of his work that have appeared in recent days (e.g., see here and here).

The power of the image is borne in some measure by its apparent simplicity as a still life photograph—an aesthetically beautiful rendering of the form of mundane, everyday objects.   But of course, there’s the rub, since for those who live outside of a war zone a bandoleer of grenades is not an everyday object … let alone a mundane one.  The photograph is thus dialectical in the sense that it calls attention to two different worlds, the one where the image accents the irony between form and content as if to call attention to a taboo, and the one where the image functions as something of a totem that lends order and structure—social meaning—to the community for  which it serves as an emblem.

If this was simply a photograph of a bandoleer of grenades it would an unsettling, artistic rendering of the weapons of war.  But what makes this an especially disturbing photograph—operating exactly at the point of  tension between totem and taboo— is that the grenades are not represented as mere instruments of death and destruction, but are in fact personalized so as to identify their usage as tokens in an economy of righteous indignation and vengeance.   “War,” writes Chris Hedges, “is a force that gives us meaning.”  And here, we see that meaning expressed in a totemic ritual by those who are actually asked to do the fighting—the killing and the dying.

Such totemic marking is not uncommon, nor is it unique to the U.S. military, but acknowledging as much serves only to underscore the somewhat primal force that perhaps animates, and in any case unleashes, the blood lust of war. And the markings in this photograph are revealing in this regard.  “9/11”and “NY” are obvious and the most easily understandable as they call attention to the somewhat iconic cause of the war, functioning in their way as “Remember the Alamo” or “Remember the Maine” might have at an earlier time. “4 Taryn” and “4 Doug” are a bit more difficult to decipher, but one might assume that they are friends or comrades whose lives had been lost either on the fateful day of 9/11 or subsequently.  But what is important to note here is how such a dedication of the ordinance shifts the meaning of the war from that of an international geopolitical conflict fought between nations—or between nations and terrorists—to that of a more private, personal motivation.  No longer fighting just for the nation, we fight for Taryn and Doug.  “4 Mom” is the most disquieting of all, for it seems to locate the casus belli outside of specific events (9/11) or the deaths of particular individuals (Taryn and Doug) and situates it in a more fundamental cultural difference between “us” and “them” defined here as familial and generational.

It bears attention as well that one grenade is marked “free,” as if to indicate that it is not yet clear in whose name it will be used, but to imply that it is not just a technology of physical death and material destruction, but that indeed its force is no less symbolic and no less powerful and damaging for being so.  And note too that the slot in the upper right hand corner is empty, the absent grenade a reminder that the photograph is not just a representation of potential power, but the marker of an active force that has already been expended.

In WW II the Office of War Information commissioned a series of documentary films designed ostensibly to answer the question “Why We Fight” as a motivational tool for supporting the war effort.  Here, in a single image, Tim Hetherington seems to have raised the question once again, albeit with a different purpose.  And the answers we divine should surely give us pause.

Tim and Chris, RIP

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It was 150 years ago (April 12, 1861) that the deadliest war in U.S. history commenced, casting in its wake over 625,000 military deaths and an incalculably large number of non-fatal casualties.  And while the nearly five year conflict between northern federalists and southern confederates was not the first war to leave behind an extensive photographic record—that honor goes to the Crimean War and the efforts of Robert Fenton—its photographic record is nevertheless extensive and impressive, particularly given the state of photographic technology at the time.

There is no shortage of photographs that one could point to as emblematic of the so-called “civil war,” portraits and landscapes alike, and as the sesquicentennial celebration unfolds over the next five years we will not doubt see many of them on display, marking the war in general as well as the specific anniversary of particular battles.  And that is as it should be.  Nevertheless, one photograph stands out above them all—at least in my estimation—as a powerful and searing allegory of war itself.  That photograph, seen above, is Timothy O’Sullivan’s “A Harvest of Death.”

The photograph appeared originally in Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the American Civil War, published in 1866.  The image displays the fields of Gettysburg in the aftermath of the three day battle that left nearly 8,000 dead bodies.  Captioned by Gardner, the photograph is accompanied by a legend that identifies the dead bodies as “rebels” who “paid with life the price of their treason.”  That characterization has been contested in recent times and is almost surely incorrect, as there is compelling evidence that many of the dead bodies are actually union soldiers. But whether the men who once occupied those bodies fought for one cause or another is really beside the point, for what the photograph shows are the utter and abject effects of war that truly know no ideological boundaries—no right or wrong, no good or evil.  Indeed, notice how the image is minimalist in the extreme in this regard.  Dead bodies in a field, virtually indistinguishable from one another.  It could be anywhere in the world—and, of course, it has been.  What more is there to know?

But of course, there is more.  In the absence of a pall to cover the bodies it is clear that all suffer alike, and not just those represented in the image, but those who dare to view it as well—both then and now, both up close and at a distance. Shot so that the frontal plane of the photographer/ viewer parallels the frontal plane of the scene itself, the photograph is framed by a frontal angle that not only objectifies the scene by purporting to show all that there is to show, but it also directly involves the viewer in the world being represented. Whether we like it or not, we too are part of this world, pulled in further by the linear perspective of the image that draws our vision from the clear and sharply focused bodies in the foreground to the smaller bodies that seem to extend to the hazy horizon … and beyond.

And there is more still, for the bodies themselves, while lifeless, nevertheless perform for the viewer, miming the grotesqueries of an undignified death. Again in Gardner’s words, they recall “the ancient legends of men torn in pieces by the savage wantonness of fiends.”  Note in particular the soldier closest to the front of the image, his face contorted, his mouth open as in a silent scream that relies upon no ethnic or national language and that will never die out.

Alas, and for all the many things that war may be, there is no denying that it is fundamentally a harvest of death. As we sow, so shall we reap.

Photo Credit: Timothy Sullivan/Alexander Gardner

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Remember Cairo?  It seems so long ago.  What was a leap into the future has already become something retreating into the past.  Back then, however, even the dark times were bright.

This image of the city ablaze with both fire and electric light may have seemed a moment more of crisis than of hope.  The lights are signs of the incredible concentration and vitality of the protests, yet they are surrounded by deep shadows, as if the forces of darkness were gathering their infernal legions ready to engulf and devour those massed together in Tahrir Square.  Today we know better, of course.  If the democratic revolution is to be betrayed–a distinct possibility–that will occur through gradual processes of corporate cronyism and bureaucratic inertia.  In the meantime, however, we can yet marvel at how the city was a vital center of human aspiration and activity.   And how the revolution was an unleashing of social energy and productive power.

One reason that seems so long ago is that the Libyan revolution is much more dispersed, ragged, violent, and wasteful.  Instead of the people massing in the capitol, we see insurgent soldiers walking along desert highways.  Instead of high-tech interconnectivity in the urban core, we see one isolated scene after another from a vast landscape that always appears desolate.  In place of an army that wisely assumed the role of referee between the regime and the people, we have a civil war.  And instead of people going back to work while also throwing themselves into electoral campaigning and other reforms, we have refugees.

These men are waiting in line for food at a camp at the Tunisia-Libyan border.  We see men in a line, not The People.  An empty space at the center, but no public square.  And instead of energy and hope, worry and the heaviness of those who know that their survival depends on vulnerably waiting, waiting, waiting with no assurance that they will ever get what they need.

There are good reasons to be drawn to the spectacle of history in the making, but this much less dramatic image is at least as representative of the political realities of our time.  The line in the photograph seems to stretch endlessly, as well it could: there are roughly 40,000,000 refugees and other displaced persons in the world, most of them the victims of war.  That figures includes everything from those fleeing today to second-generation residents of now permanent “camps,” and so this photo does not tell the full story.  But it shows some of the truth of that story: on a planet with room for all, millions are homeless, and in a world that includes marvelous monuments to human productivity, many human beings are forced to waste much of their lives by standing in line, sitting by tents, and otherwise living in suspended animation not of their own making.

Images of human beings being being forced to do next to nothing may seem to be dull pictures, but they remind us that human beings create both cities and deserts.  It remains to be seen which will outpace the other in the 21st century, or if there is anything like a middle way in a world of increasing inequity and polarization.

Photographs by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images and Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press.

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