Sunday, December 13, 2015

Ways of Seeing War


The earliest photographers talked as if the camera were a copying machine; as if, while people operate cameras, it is the camera that sees…. The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer – a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by camera) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.
   
Susan Sontag, On Photography, (p. 88-89) 
The photograph has historically (and falsely) been conflated with “reality” or, at least, seen as a means to document “true content” (Green-Lewis, 2006). This truth-telling capacity and expectation has made photography a medium of choice for documenting wars and other historical events. But photographs of war, like their less-loaded counterparts (snapshots, family photos, portraits, etc.), remain representations. As with other representations, these images are grounded in the materials and processes in which they were formed. The photographic processes – with their particular aesthetics, possibilities, and limitations – have informed the ways individual wars are percieved and stored in the cultural memory. These photos have become our mediators between world events and our ways of “seeing” those events.

U.S. Civil War photos do not look like Vietnam War photos nor do they look like Gulf War, Iraqi War, or War in Afghanistan photos. The differences in these “looks” influence the way the wars are viewed in their own time and in the ways they are remembered. Kim Beil (2013), in referring to Michael Baxandall’s idea of “the period eye,” discusses how viewers become “practiced in recognizing and interpreting the meaning embedded in representational conventions” and how our judgments and expectations are set by these prevailing conventions and the level of exposure we’ve had to them. While it may be a simple task for North Americans in the 21st-Century to recognize the difference between period photos taken during the Civil War or during the Vietnam Era, it would prove far more difficult to recognize our own “21st-Century period eye.” The tendency is to naturalize the aesthetics of photos and photographic processes from our own era – even as those processes change over a lifetime.  When immersed in the crisp, clear, hyper-realism of digital photography, it is tempting to equate that “better quality” with “how things really look.” But does the world really look this way any more than the U.S. Civil War really looked like the Civil War photos?

Our view of the U.S. Civil War is inextricably bound and formed by the perspectives and materials of the photographers at work during that period. In viewing the images taken by Mathew Brady and his employees and fellow photographers, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, et al., we can see that the photos have a stillness – a staged and dead quality – unlike contemporary photos. Some of the battlefield photos were, in fact, staged as a studio photographer might stage an arrangement of things or people. And many were of the dead – strewn corpses across quiet and otherwise empty battlefields.  This aesthetic of stillness affords a peek into an historical way of seeing the world that Brady shared with his contemporaries and documents the approaches they took.

Brady and the others began as portrait studio photographers and would have been well-versed in a particular way of framing, arranging, and freezing subjects. It only seems reasonable that they would apply their craft to the new battlefield venues. These new venues served as make-shift studios complete with all the necessary ingredients for the collodian wet plate process: large cameras, tripods for maintaining stillness and avoiding blurring, heavy glass plates for negatives, and even portable darkrooms.


The heaviness of the materials, the slowness of the process, and the overall laboriousness comes through when viewing the photos. The photos do not simply document the soldiers and the aftermath of battle, but detail the photographic processes. These processes exert their influence on the 19th-Century eye and produce the unmistakable style we associate with the Civil War. Brady’s view influences the cultural memory of the war and signifies it within his aesthetic sensibility. The stillness of his photography speaks to the aftermath, the loss, and the absence of life. Instead of action, Brady’s photographs document a world of silence.





During the Vietnam War, photographers went into the battlefields with lightweight 35-millimeter cameras strapped around their necks like guns and rolls of film around their waists like ammunition. Their cameras were mobile, easy to use, and gave 36 images before needing a reload. The rolls of film were small enough to fit into the palm of a hand and some were even in color. The rolls could be mailed easily to a news source, a magazine, or an editor. With their small and mobile cameras, Vietnam War photographers were able to record the chaos and action of battle as events unfolded. And because they lived and worked alongside soldiers, many photographers died in the process of fulfilling what they (and others) considered a noble cause. By the mid-1960s, when anti-war sentiment was rising, many of these photographers set out on a mission “to show war’s ‘real’ face” and thus fortify “the outcry against the American presence in Vietnam” (Sontag, 2002). The iconic images that come out of their missions were emblazoned on the covers of LIFE and other magazines and in the minds of ordinary Americans.

Larry Burrows, British photojournalist for LIFE Magazine, was one of the first to photograph the Vietnam War in color. The use of color only added to the sense of realism and horror. Many of Burrows’s photos became iconic as they captured the human drama and suffering in a moment of action. His photographs are near cinematic. His style predicts, if it does not directly influence, films about the Vietnam War and our cultural impression of what that place at that time “really looked like.” Films such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter (both released in 1979) witness how Burrows’s way of seeing (his aesthetic) has impacted our ability to instantly recognize scenes of battle. Burrows’s level of empathy and realism further fomented the anti-war sentiments of the era.

Larry Burrows, Reaching Out, 1966
Published in LIFE February, 1971, after Burrows was killed in a helicopter crash in Laos.



Only starting with the Vietnam War can we be virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were setups. And this is essential to the moral authority of these images. The signature Vietnam War horror photograph, from 1972, taken by Huynh Cong Ut, of children from a village that has just been doused with American napalm running down the highway, shrieking with pain, belongs to the universe of photographs that cannot possibly be posed. The same is true of the well-known pictures from the most widely photographed wars since…. Technically, the possibilities for doctoring or electronically manipulating pictures are greater than ever – almost unlimited. But the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.
Sontag, “Looking at War” (2002)  

While most photographers documenting the Vietnam War considered themselves photojournalists, photojournalism (as it was once defined) is not the norm with contemporary wars (Kratochvil & Persson, 2001). Images are created by professional photographers imbedded with troops, by soldiers themselves, and by novice bystanders alike. Anyone with a phone or a device can be a witnesses to war. LIFE Magazine covers are no more. There are Twitter feeds, news streams, and instantaneous sharing. Images appear from a rapid-fire digital process that requires no processing, needs no film, and no reloading. War photos are as ubiquitous as the multiple conflicts from which they arise. We are as bombarded with an excess of images as we are with a glut of wars. The images, like the wars, are fast-moving, easily consumed, and easily forgotten in their multiplicity. Our comprehension is as overextended as the U.S. is overinvolved. Our compassion has fatigued from the speed of it all – from watching what looks like one big sensational, spectacular CGI War.


Screen Capture of Google Image Search for “War Photography Iraq” 

Bibliography

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Green-Lewis, J. (2006). “’Already the Past’: The Backward glance of Victorian photography.” English Language Notes. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado.
Kratochvil, A. & Persson, M. (Fall, 2001) “Photojournalism and Documentary Photography: They are identical mediums sending different messages.” Nieman Reports. Boston, MA: Nieman Foundation, Harvard.
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