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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}As the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war’s start approaches, Lens highlights “Photojournalists at War,†an oral history of the conflict as recounted by those who documented it from the front lines. The book, ublished this month by the University of Texas Press, was written by Michael Kamber, who covered the war for eight years for The New York Times.
Among the 39 photojournalists in the book are Andrea Bruce, Carolyn Cole, Stanley Greene, Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Yuri Kozyrev, Khalid Mohammed and Joao Silva.
The following essay is from Dexter Filkins’s introduction. Mr. Filkins covered the Iraq war extensively as a correspondent for The New York Times and was based in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker.
At the heart of photojournalism lies a confounding paradox: The people most attuned to the events unfolding before them, the most caref! ul observers, the men and woman endowed with the most searching and sensitive eyes, are ordinarily silent. This is the life of the photographer: he or she stands amid the most extraordinary human events, takes pictures and sends them on, and says or writes not a thing. In war, this paradox, already groaning, becomes acute. A car bombing, a street demonstration, a mother cradling her dying son. The drama that unfurls before the photographer’s lens is often epic in scope, human in scale. And still â€" nothing. In war, the photographer is the silent witness.
It’s not just a matter of having another set of eyes on this or that event. To miss the photographers’ perspective â€" to hear what they have to say â€" is to be deprived of a wholly different sensibility. Almost necessarily, the writer or historian will bring to a situation a linear or analytical approach: Who is this What is happening And why The photographer may ask the same questions, but the best of them â€" like those gathered in this boo â€" will bring something else to the field, something more oblique, more artistic, but less easily understood: a lightning-fast and deeply sensitive ability to perceive the human predicament in a single moment and capture it forever. The photographer has a different way of knowing.
This volume is an attempt to give voice to those silent witnesses of one of the great conflicts of our time. The war in Iraq was not an ordinary war, if there can ever be such a thing. At the beginning, it was a grand and epic affair, an invasion by the world’s mightiest power of an arid and tormented country ruled by the one of the world’s indisputably evil men. That was only the beginning; the invasion, it turned out, was the easy part. Almost immediately, it became clear that the Iraq the Americans had invaded was a fractured, traumatized land held together with the steel frame of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. When the Americans broke that steel frame, the country came apart in their hands. And so the inva! sion beca! me an occupation, which became an insurgency, which became a civil war. And finally came the apocalypse, a full-blown sectarian bloodbath that brought Iraq, and the entire region, to the brink of an abyss.
The war in Iraq was never a static contest between easily identifiable foes, each with his own uniform and flag. It was a constantly shifting battle of ever-mutating enemies. Every day was different â€" yesterday the distant past, tomorrow a tunnel of darkness. Over here, a barefoot recruit of the Mahdi army, the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, guards the entrance to his ravaged slum. Over there, a hard-eyed killer from Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia lifts his camera to record a mass murder. Over yonder still, a nervous, sweating young man from Jordan, his body wrapped in a suicide vest, scans the crowd for the right place to die. Iraq in those years was a bloody kaleidoscope: turning, twisting, rearranging itself like so many pieces of broken glass.
The photographers who got the measure of this war face challenges unknown to any who chronicled conflicts before them. The war in Iraq was an urban fight with no trenches, no front line. The war could begin â€" and often did begin â€" right outside their front doors. On some mornings, ten explosions could shake the walls of the houses where they lived, all before 9 a.m. The photographers lived and worked in what amounted to a wraparound battlefield, with violence unfolding just up ahead, down the road behind them, in the alleys left and right. The neighborhoods of Baghdad, the war’s great battleground, required intimate knowledge to navigate and survive. Sadr City was the Mahdi army’s stronghold; Adamiyah, Al Qaeda’s; and once the civil war got going, neighborhoods like Saydia â€" Sunni and Shi’ite both â€" became the crossroads of the war’s most fantastic bloodletting.
Joao Silva/The New York Times A militiaman loyal to the Shiite cleric Muktada al-Sadr fired toward United States positions on the western border of Najaf’s old city. Militiamen engaged United States forces with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Najaf, Iraq. Aug. 22, 2004.It was the intimacy of the violence in Iraq that was uniquely horrifying, and so challenging to record. The inhumanity was inventive and always close. Once a suicide bomber walked into a tea shop in Baghdad’s Bataween neighborhood and detonated his payload; for hours afterward, a man’s scalp stuck to the wall, hanging there like a matted, bloody wig. All around lay blasted plastic tables and chairs, and arms and legs severed and flung free. Indeed, the suiciders â€" as the Iraqis called them â€" became the signature weapons of the war. After a bombing, you could almost always find a trace of the bomber, maybe a foot, nearly always a head, and sometimes a han cuffed to a steering wheel; the latter evidence that not all the bombers were wholly enthusiastic about their missions.
For all the violence, there were two things that stood out for photojournalists trying to cover it. The first was that the photographers themselves were targets. If photographers and reporters in wars past had enjoyed some measure of immunity because of their professed status as neutral observers, that veneer of protection had been stripped away. Iraqis generally and insurgents specifically often made no distinction between soldiers and journalists. Anyone trying to record the conflict, whether American or Iraqi, had an astoundingly good chance of being kidnapped, wounded or killed. For a photographer in Iraq, death might come in any number of ways: being caught in a firefight, being stopped by insurgents at an illegal roadblock, or riding in a car that hits a roadside bomb. By the end of the American phase of the war, in 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported th! at 151 jo! urnalists had been killed in Iraq, 41 of them photographers and cameramen â€" more than in any other modern conflict by far. An untold number of others, like Lynsey Addario in these pages, were kidnapped by insurgents. And almost every photographer in this book â€" read the pages for yourself â€" survived a harrowing number of close calls. In Iraq, working near death was the price of doing business.
For photographers, the other striking aspect of the Iraq War was the struggle against official restrictions on their ability to do their work. At the start of the American invasion, there were plenty of concerns about potential censorship, but they were mostly unfounded. Reporters and photographers who embedded with American military units found almost invariably that no one tried to tell them what to write or what to photograph, nor did any officer try to review anyone’s material before it was sent to the home base. Embedding was generally good for photographers and reporters, and good for the American eople. And it was also, it should be said, good for the military, whose extraordinary individual efforts were captured and recorded for all Americans to see.
But as the war went bad, and photographers and reporters came to rely on the embedding program to get to the vast stretches of Iraq where they could no longer go on their own, the military began to clamp down. The heart of the military’s efforts concerned the photographing of dead or wounded soldiers. In the beginning, not unreasonably, military officers wanted the publication of a photo of a dead solider to await the notification of his family. This, like other such restrictions, was not met with protest from photographers.
But as the war ground on, the rules tightened more. In practice, photographing a dead American soldier â€" under any circumstances â€" was out of the question. Any journalist hoping to photograph a wounded soldier needed his permission. It’s not hard to see the absurdity in the wounded-soldier rule: It was di! fficult t! o get a soldier’s permission before he had suffered his injury, and nearly impossible after. What soldier would sign a document giving someone the right to photograph him in the event of, say, his limbs being blown off The result: images of dead and wounded Americans all but disappeared from the news pages in the United States. You will read the frustrations of the photographers in the pages ahead. But whatever the motivations behind the military’s restrictions â€" to spare the families of the fallen some pain, for instance â€" their effect was to cast a sanitized gloss over the war in Iraq, and to help deprive the American people of a fuller knowledge of the realities of the war that their fellow citizens were fighting. In a country whose bedrock principles hold that war can be waged only by consent of the people, such restrictions were troubling indeed.
There is a deeper angst that runs through the pages here: the precipitous drop, over the course of the conflict in Iraq, in the number of photogaphers assigned to cover the war at all. In the beginning of the war, in March 2003, hundreds of photographers came to cover it. By the war’s end, in 2011, there were never more than a half dozen. Part of this decline could be explained by war fatigue; as the conflict wore on, more and more Americans simply tuned out, and editors and publishers responded in kind. Part of the decline, too, was explained by the Pentagon’s growing restrictions on photographing the American military; why spend thousands of dollars to send photographers to Iraq when they are not allowed to shoot anything anyway
But the overarching reason, as any photographer will tell you, is that budgets of newspapers and magazines all over America shrank so fast that all but the biggest institutions decided that photographing the war in Iraq was not something they could any longer afford. Photojournalism is today an embattled profession. When you read the testimonials here and peruse these stunning photographs, you may find yo! urself wo! ndering whether the war in Iraq, for the men and the women with cameras, was the last of its kind.
Rita Leistner An Iraqi suspect in an early-morning roadside attack on a United States convoy was “bagged and tied†by American soldiers. He lay waiting on the lawn of a neighbor’s house while the soldiers discussed their next move. Balad, Iraq. July 16, 2003.The exhibit “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,†featuring work by Tim McLaughlin, Gary Knight and Peter Maass, opens March 14 at Mr. Kamber’s Bronx Documentary Center.
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