The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is slowly edging back into US public media, but it’s still easy to miss.  The problem isn’t only that so much attention is being given to the debates about health care (or the lack of it) and financial regulation (or that lack of it) and the continuing problems in each sector (see “lack,” above).  The war coverage itself has a peculiar cast: instead of deployments, patrols, firefights, and other action shots, there have been a stream of images that show wreckage, rubble, and similar scenes of destruction.  Scenes like this:

A man walks slowly along Cairo Street in Baghdad in the aftermath of a bombing.  The bomb obviously was huge, leaving a vast swath of mangled metal and broken lives.  What you don’t see is a field of battle; instead, this is a civilian street, complete with a cobblestone median and an institutional building in the background.  The picture might be said to lend plausible deniability to the idea that there still is a real war going on in Iraq.  The lone figure in the foreground suggests as much.  He is every inch a civilian, and his pensive posture suggests that this is a time for reflection, not action.

The flag is still flying, and officials and soldiers far in the rear will oversee the clean-up, but the large space between them and the lone individual in the front is empty of people, as if the society itself had been vaporized in the blast.  The war is there but not there, while the social, ethnic, religious, and political motivations for the bombings are unintelligible.  A bomb detonates, and a man muses. Apparently, there is nothing for him–or anyone else–to do but to walk on into the unknown future that lies outside the frame.   Like this:

There have been dozens of photographs similar to this one in the past several weeks: photos of US troops standing around or slowly walking through places that are otherwise empty.  Often enough, they are scenes of destruction, but the act is already in the past, something that occurred off camera.  The troops aren’t fighting so much as overseeing an impersonal process of destruction.  And that process seems to involve razing city streets and vehicles more than anything else; again, the people that would normally fill the scene have been ghosted away.

Note the many other similarities with the first photo.  Again, officials hold down the rear of the scene, while a single person walks toward the space to the right of the frame.  His mood is not identical to the man above, but he does seem both turned inward and weighed down, and, again, there is nothing to be done about what has happened.  He is merely going through the motions to “secure the area”: an area already secured by the scythe of the bomb’s blast.

Such photos may reflect that fact that US policy has been in a state of limbo for the past few months, but they also may suggest that the US war effort has become something like a permanent state between war and peace, an intermediate place of suspension and neglect.  Worse, they may suggest that this is acceptable because the US troops are just passing through.  They are there for awhile but not really doing much, and eventually they’ll rotate out and leave the place to its fate as one of the boroughs of rubble world.

And so there is reason to look at the first photograph again, for there may be an important difference between the two after all.  Despite his ability to do much more than walk through the scene, there is little doubt that he lives there.  If that isn’t his street, it’s his city; if not his city, it’s continuous with where he does live.  He thinks, smokes, and walks on, but his future will be in that place.  And to see him there is to see someone who belongs in the photograph, whose presence speaks to something valuable there, and who provides a point of contact for the viewer.  To the extent that we can see him as being in the picture, we are pulled into the frame as well, and asked to witness and reflect on what is there and why.

By contrast, it seems very clear that the soldier is just passing through.  Whatever his presence may provoke, the message is that he really isn’t a part of the scene.  If we walk with him, it’s to appreciate his wish to get through it alive, but not to stay in, understand, and commit to that place.

Each photograph–any photograph–presents the viewer with a choice about how much one might be in the picture.  In both of these two photos, the choice to the US viewer is skewed toward minimal involvement: one figure is a foreign national in his homeland, and the other is a US soldier far from home.  Even so, the first image may also evoke a compassionate response.  With the second image, however, it’s just a matter of time before we can pretend that there is no one there.

Photographs by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP-Getty Images and Reuters (Wall Street Journal).

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On Saturday 15,000 Christmas wreaths were placed on the graves at Arlington Cemetery.  The annual event is an occasion for both press coverage and personal visitations, as with this photograph of a woman hugging the gravestone of her husband who recently had been killed in Afghanistan.

This photo is one of a series of similar shots that together received wide circulation, including the front page of the Sunday New York Times.  Some are close cropped while others show more of the surrounding phalanx of gravestones, but all feature the woman holding on to the lifeless stone.

He was 41 when it happened, a Lt. Colonel on his second deployment to the region (the first had been in Iraq).  He had been training Afghan soldiers until his vehicle hit an IED.  You can read more about him here, but that is not really what the photograph is about.  It’s about her, and her devastating loss, and about having to live with that pain and emptiness.

She wraps her body around the stone, trying to get as close as she can to his memory, his still lingering presence, to what they once had together.  Head bowed in grief, she knows all too well the futility of living flesh finding warmth in the inanimate object, but she holds on anyway.  Who would want to let go?

Her body humanizes the stone, reminding us that there once was a person in place of the block letters of a name, just as her personal act of devotion redeems the rest of the scene, where long rows of bare markers stretch into bone-white desolation.  The stones are but symbols, we realize, of those who were loved and lost, and of how much grief must be locked up in those still living.

Some people believe that such images shouldn’t be shown, but they are.  They carry no direct bias as they can serve arguments both for and against war, and all might agree that they shouldn’t be “politicized,” but it is hard to pretend that Arlington should lie outside of public concern.  Public grieving is an important part of democratic life, and images of individual loss are one of the means by which grief is made intelligible in a liberal society.  Seeing how grief isolates people, leaving them so radically alone, might be an important reminder of how the community needs to help those in need, and to sustain its own bonds of collective support.

That said, photographs marking a relationship between private loss and public life also can prompt questions about the relationship between past, present, and national priorities.  Have we seen this before?  Is the unique moment of individual loss part of a larger pattern?  In spite of sincere ritual observances (such as the laying of the wreaths), are we becoming too accustomed to war and the costs of war?  How well are we caring for the widow and the orphan, and for all citizens?  How much will history have to repeat itself before we notice that, whether in war or peace, the pictures are all the same?

Photographs by Win McNamee/Getty Images and Anthony Suau/Denver Post.  The second photograph was taken on Memorial Day, 1983 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1984.

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Lawrence Olivier once suggested that the key to acting was throwing yourself into your part, no matter that it might be as insignificant as the third spear carrier from the left.  The characters in this scene exemplify that advice.

While the figure on the right stands guard, the figure the left picks up body parts in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan.  Neither action is likely to be decisive in the war spreading across that country, and each seems incidental even within the small scale of this photograph: the tiny pieces of flesh being retrieved appear to be no bigger than a fingernail, while the soldier is armed and ready in a street that is once again stabilized, even static, and almost empty.  Yet they are playing their parts with complete concentration, as if the play really mattered.

This play does matter, of course, and yet the war there and in Afghanistan is haunted by the sense that a deadly serious game also is being played merely for show.  The full panoply of state action appears, albeit too late to save those who were attacked, and on behalf of the restoration of a normalcy that was already a facade.  Everything in the scene is meticulously modern: sharp uniforms, aluminum signage, yellow plastic crime scene tape (in English), even the flowers in the traffic median and the clear plastic gloves for the body-part detail.  And yet none of these investments in civic order could keep someone from detonating a bomb among innocent people.

Thus, the image is troubling because of how it captures several deep tensions within state responses to insurgencies across the globe: tensions between attentiveness and incapacity, between restoring civic order and refusing to change, between collecting the dead and ignoring the demands of the living.

Because they have played their silent roles so well, these two minor players allow the scene to speak.  The photograph depicts another instance of the normalization of violence in the 21st century.  Nor can that violence be attributed wholly to the absent suicide bomber, for every part of the mise en scene declares that such violent acts are not a primitive residue, but have become fully integrated into a ritualized modernism.  Unfortunately, it seems that too often the modern state is committed only to maintaining whatever imbalances feed its own display of power.  If so, then any show of strength really is a sham.

Photograph by Adrees Latif/Reuters.

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Much of the time, photographs provide the ideal pretext for those who would deny the obvious.  The gambit goes like this: someone, often a photographer with intimate knowledge of the setting, takes a photograph that  is circulated by the press and then used as evidence in political argument.  At that point, the defender of the policy being questioned responds by focusing exclusively on the photograph’s evidentiary problems: the image shows only a single event; things might have looked very different a moment before or after; expressions can’t be trusted; much is not being shown; given these problems, the use of the photo is proof of bias.  Such objections rightly carry weight as each is true of photography in general and can provide a reasonable basis for skepticism.  The problem is that they also are used to deflect deliberation about serious problems, including environmental damage, economic and social decline, and tragic mistakes in foreign policy.   Worse yet, these seemingly reasonable caveats can bring one to overlook the facts when they are staring you in the face.

This recent photograph from Afghanistan is a good example of how images can simultaneously both reveal the truth and provide fodder for its denial.  The caption at The Big Picture said, “Afghan National policemen look on as U.S. soldier Cpl. Joseph Dement, right, from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division helps train the police on how to apprehend a gunman at an outpost in the Pech Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar province Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009.”  The text is chock full of facts, and so we are cued to see the scene as evidence, but of what?

One obvious answer is that Americans are training Afghan security forces, and that the training reflects the same precision and intensity found in our own superbly prepared troops.  But note the verb: the policemen “look on.”  And so they do; they look on rather than study intently as if they were committed to the same mission as the US forces, or as if they really expected to be in a situation where they would enage in close combat rather than melt away.

In fact, the photograph is a troubling picture of contradictory extremes that can’t work together and aren’t likely to prevail on their own.  On the one hand, there is the American who is entirely focused on the technical precision of the military operation, and oblivious to the complex social scene in which he is embedded.  On the other hand, the Afghan policemen represent a social field of diverse personalities and attitudes, not one of which is likely to lead to a well-organized counter-insurgency.  It’s as if the photo was from a casting call for two very different B movies: one with American action figures and the other an Afghan sitcom on the order of Hogan’s Heros.

Thus, some can see the photo as revealing a fundamental problem in the American war in Afghanistan–indeed, a problem those of us of a certain age have seen in another war in a place called Vietnam, when we were subject to many years of denial of the obvious at all levels.  But you don’t have to take that analogy to see the problem now.  For example, Comment #79 at the Big Picture slide show says that this photo “shows pretty well the situation in Afghanistan. The Americans will fail because they can’t stay forever and the moment they leave everything will collapse.”

On the other side, of course, photographs depicting momentary facial expressions are tailor made for those who will seize on the single image to deny the broader picture.  Well, there are very few situations where anyone should be persuaded by a single image, and this isn’t one of them.  But it also is not a situation where political dissent should be disregarded because it turns to images to provide evidence (a term that comes from the Latin word for seeing).  When the “hearts and minds” of the people are a crucial factor in the mission, then photographs of ordinary people caught in accidental moments of time can reveal important truths.

“A young Afghan boy gives the thumbs down to a passing NATO French Foreign Legion convoy near Surobi some 50 kms east of Kabul, Afghanistan,Monday, Nov. 9, 2009” (The Big Picture).

Photographs by David Guttenfelder and Jerome Delay for the Associated Press.

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