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.
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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.
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Larry Burrows, Reaching
Out, 1966
Published in LIFE February, 1971, after Burrows was killed in a helicopter crash
in Laos.
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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.
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Screen Capture of Google Image
Search for “War Photography Iraq”
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