Another earthquake, this one 100 times more powerful than the quake that wrecked Haiti.  More photographs, although probably less than before due to some combination of better infrastructure in Chile and compassion fatigue in the American media.  Comparisons between the two disasters will be made–and sure to include both racist asides and warnings about the Last Days, such are the blessings of free speech.  The question remains whether the second quake provides an opportunity to learn something about disasters.  Nor is this a question about tectonic plates.

I think this photograph from Pelluhue, some 200 miles southwest of Santiago, is at once typical of the current disaster coverage and yet somewhat distinctive.  Typical, in that it documents the nature and extent of the destruction; distinctive, in that the wreckage was done by flooding, a secondary effect of the quake.  If nothing else, the photo can prompt one to recognize that this disaster, and every disaster, has more extensive causes and more extensive effects than those seen at the dramatic center of the event.

The photo’s texture may inflect the story further.  Instead of the arid, concrete, public, urban environment typically featured in the initial coverage, this rural setting was more lush to begin with and now is awash with the soggy debris of private life.  (Yes, those are refrigerators stuck on the strand, and perhaps a buoy for the recreational boating in the area.)  It is clear, also, that the disaster has washed up over the land, through no fault of their own, you might say, and that although human domesticity has been disturbed by nature’s excess, a more serene natural world remains, like the horse in the background, awaiting a return to normal activity and dwelling in relative harmony once things are cleaned up and rebuilt.  If there is a moral to the story, it is that disasters can have a greater reach than one might expect, but the advice remains the same: be better prepared next time, but get back to normal first.  One can almost imagine the scene flowing backwards: the refrigerators moving back into houses, the houses back onto their foundations, the buoy back into the bay, the chairs and buckets back onto the dock, and the flimsy walls of the dockside buildings slapping back together.

Something similar actually will happen, flowing forward, as the aid will come and the investments made and everyone knows what should be the result.  Not every disaster zone is so lucky.

This photograph was taken from a helicopter over “a rubble-strewn battlefield” in Marjah, Afghanistan.  Note how perfectly, although perhaps inadvertently, the “objective” caption captures the destructiveness so painfully evident in the photo.  The three buildings in the picture have effectively ceased to exist, to have ever existed.  They are not even mentioned, save to be designated as part of the rubble.  (They are another addition to Rubble World, a sector with excellent growth prospects in the 21st century.)  As before, the texture of the image speaks powerfully but now with a very different tone: this is sheer desolation, as if the environment had somehow been transformed into war itself, or at least a simulacrum of war suitable for a dark video game.  Only one dot of blue remains as the last hint of another purpose for this place of devastation, and soon, if anything is to be done, it will be bulldozed underground.

If anything is to be done.  This scene has only the barest trace of a past–shattered concrete without any evident purpose–and virtually no sense of a future.  It is a war zone, likely to be leveled for tactical security, and then what?  If the armies move on, they leave nothing.  If they stay, there is no return to whatever was there before.  Likewise, the relationship to other causes and effects remains obscure.  The scene was seemingly the center of a battle, but there is no sense of where the war started, why is it there, or where it is going.  (This elision of a grand narrative can be a feature of all war photography, as Alan Trachtenberg has noted, but we should add that it may say something about war and have more bite with some wars than others.)  War may be more or less destructive than a natural disaster, but only war destroys the future.

There is a political dimension to every natural disaster, but that is not quite my point today.  Wars are political disasters, and were we to see them much as we do natural disasters, it might be much easier to help those after the battle and perhaps even to be better prepared to maintain the peace next time.  But too often the images of political disasters may, in ways large and small, already be reproducing the damning implication that comes from not being defined as having natural causes.  Thus, instead of seeing how calamity has washed over the land through no fault of their own and that there remains only the hard work of rebuilding, the moral of the story is that for those in the wrong place there can be no return to normal life.  Earthquakes are episodic, but war and occupation, it seems, are endless.

Photographs by Roberto Candia and Brennan Linsley for the Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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There’s a fine video criticism of Avatar making the rounds, thanks in part to a boost from the Huffington Post.  The author is Jay Bauman at redlettermedia.com, and he absolutely nails an important point: “The Na’vi were a little too perfect and harmonious for a primitive culture, and the military were a little too simplistic and destructive for an advanced culture.”  He’s certainly right on the first point–and “little too” actually means “way too”–and he is correct on the second as well, once you distinguish between the destructive potential and the actual conduct of the U.S. military in the field, and remember that the distinction is meaningless to those who actually get nailed by modern firepower.

In other words, enough of the time the truth about modern warfare is complicated.  When the U.S. military has been successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is because they are both highly destructive and regularly engaged in careful interactions with ordinary people caught in the war zone.  Thus, the military has two faces.   Here’s one of them:

The caption for this photograph tells us that a Marine turret gunner is inside an armoured vehicle in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan.  OK, he’s a turret gunner, and he also is War incarnate.  The death’s head, his physical bulk poised for action even within an enclosed space, his uniform that seems like some infernal skin, and his effortless ease and conformity with the metal and machines all around him all communicate one thing: this guy is capable of wreaking total violence on anything that gets in his way.

I am not going to say that the photograph is misleading and that actually the gunner is there to hand out candy to kids.  This is one of the true faces of empire, and one that rightly terrifies those who see it.  But there also is another side of military action:

This photo was on the front page of the New York Times yesterday, and so one can easily read it as an attempt to help the U.S. put its best face forward.  It is as accurate and as representative as the one above, however.  Here the Marines are on a sweep through Helmand province, which has lead to this interaction between two individuals, each of whom is taking care to show that he is not as dangerous as he might be.  The photo positions the two men as roughly equals, and while it emphasizes the gulf between them, that space does not appear to be a battle space.  The gulf symbolized by the blank wall could include cultural differences, political objectives, or social trust, but in any case it seems clear that the work to be done has to involve communicating rather than firing the Marine’s weapon.  In fact, it becomes easy to see each of them in civilian terms, as if the one on the right were a local businessman (which he may be) and the one on the left were a small town bureaucrat (which, in a way, he is).

Part of the current struggle regarding the imperial project is between these two alternatives of overwhelming, indiscriminate violence and tactical negotiations that can translate “politics by other means” into politics.  Photojournalism is needed to show us the two faces of war–and not either one alone.  It is up to others, however, to decide whether the balance will tip one way or the other.

Photographs by Brennan Linsley/Associated Press and Tyler Hicks/The New York Times. The Times story is here, along with a slide show of photographs by Tyler Hicks.

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