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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}“Photojournalists on War,†an oral history of the Iraq war by those who documented it from the front lines, was published this month by the University of Texas Press. The book consists of interviews conducted by Michael Kamber, who covered the war for eight years for The New York Times and is a co-founder of the Bronx Documentary Center.
Among the 39 photojournalists interviewed in the book are Andrea Bruce, Carolyn Cole, Stanley Greene, Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Khalid Mohammed, Eugene Richards, Joao Silva and Peter van Agtamael. Lens presents an excerpt from Mr. Kamber's conversation with Mr. Van Agtamael. A member of Magnum, Mr. Van Agtmael received the 2012 W. Eugene Smith Award. The interview, lightly edited for space and content, took place in July 2010, in Brooklyn.
I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, an affluent suburb. It seems like a disproportionate number of photographers that end up covering war are white boys that grew up in the suburbs.
From childhood on, I was really interested in war, especially World War II. My grandpa had served and he was always telling stories about it; I worshiped him. That's where photography became so empowering because, at a formative age, I saw some really brutal pictures of war and I realized that I didn't have it in me. I didn't want to drop a bomb on someone or shoot someone. There were two books that provoked my interest and I realized, “Oh, this is the path for me.†One was “Requiem,†the book of Vietnam photographs taken by the photographers who died in Vietnam. The other was that Anthony Loyd book, “My War Gone By, I Miss It So.â€
You were obsessed with war [as a child]?
I was building tons of model airplanes. I had tons of toy soldiers. I was seduced by the aesthetics of it. The aesthetics of war are really so seductive to a child. Uniforms provoke a certain feeling. Not to everybody, far from it, but the strength that war represents is a powerful primal force.
They say an unhappy childhood is necessary to be a good artist, but it doesn't seem to really apply in your case.
Obviously these things are selfish on a lot of levels. [War photography] is a powerful way of finding meaning in one's own life - to try to serve oneself by serving others. I am not going to paint a picture of it that “I am a noble photographer coming to document history. My body and mind be damned.†I'm not an artist. I don't have this beautiful sense of depth and geometry and scale, but I can find emotion and capture it. What starker place than war for that?
I am a big believer that photojournalists have done an amazing job. I blame the media largely for not allowing the depth of the perspective to get out. That's partly why photographers feel compelled to make books, to bring it completely on our terms. I felt so detached from my experience versus how it was being represented in newsprint. Everything that mattered to me, all the experiences that profoundly affected me, weren't being shown. They simply weren't. Or some of them were, but they were being published in Europe.
We routinely publish photos of dead Iraqis or dead Africans - we don't really worry about their families. When it comes to American soldiers, the U.S. military has pushed this thing on us that it's a question of privacy. Because they are Americans, maybe we feel we have to accord them a certain amount of respect that we don't accord an Iraqi civilian or an Afghan civilian.
I agree. That comes down to these questions of the titillating and smutty quality of photography and that people are attracted to images of death, not necessarily just to be moved by them but to be intrigued by them. Almost to remind themselves that it's good to be alive and that death is a brutal and awful thing. It's easier to look at, of course, when it's not one of us because it doesn't remind us of ourselves. If I am honest with myself I would say I probably I am more affected by pictures of dead Americans or badly wounded Americans than badly wounded Afghans or badly injured or dead Africans, because I feel that in many ways I am looking at myself and it all comes back to that instinct of self-preservation.
Do you feel P.T.S.D. now or do you know other photographers that have been dealing with that?
I don't know if I really have post-traumatic stress. I was twenty-four when I first went to Iraq. I went in deep in '06 and spent five months on embeds constantly. I was really hard-core about it, not taking any days off, going out on every patrol. I felt like I had something to prove to myself or to others and for a lot of selfish reasons. Frankly, I was into it. I was. I remember stepping out of the wire for the first time on a foot patrol and I was happy.
There's no past and there's no future. It's a good feeling. Except for the fact that, of course, you're courting death in the process. I have a loving and close family and the burden my presence [in Iraq] places on them is huge. I'm not saying abandon war entirely, but [we can cover] war in a safer way: do stories in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul instead of Kandahar and Helmand; or go to Syria or Jordan to do some more stories about refugees; or go to a burn center in Texas.
I don't have any blood on my hands, and as much as I have been troubled by these experiences, I can also get through them. I am going to carry them with me but I am not gonna be destroyed by them, I hope.
For me, the thing I struggle with is that [covering war] has messed up certain aspects of my life, but not insurmountably. Mostly it's made me a better person; it's made me more empathetic; it's made my ideas and my ideals more clear-cut. It's made me extremely confident in my own skin. All those things when projected have made me successful in a lot of ways. It was always my dream to join Magnum and it was on the strength of my war photography that I joined Magnum.
Do you feel like you used the Iraq War for some personal gain? Or do you feel that there is nothing to feel guilty about? You're making the world a better place?
I think it's kind of that combination between selfish and selfless intentions - different factors are stronger at different points. I still believe in the power of photography and journalism despite the fact that it's corrupted in certain elements and doesn't go far enough in others. That doesn't mean that it isn't also this essential and beautiful thing. Did I set down in Iraq with a lot of ambition? To the point of hubris? Absolutely. I am not ashamed to admit it. It goes without saying almost. To represent myself or for anyone to represent themselves any differently would be a pack of lies.
I do resent the mythmaking created by the genre because it's unnecessary and distracts from our stated ideals as a collective group of people who share similar ideals in truth telling. The more honest you can be to yourself, the more honest you can be with your work.
What is the difference between the Hollywood images and stories that we grow up with and the war that you experience? Where is the divergence between what we grow up on and what you saw?
Sadly the divergence is in experience. That's what also makes more important our role, because a lot of these soldiers come back and they don't have any kind of voice to express what happened. We can do that, and pretty damned often they will let us in to tell that story. You get distanced so much from the actual implications of these events that you're shocked when you actually see them for what they are.
I see these articles periodically - “Where are the iconic images of these wars?†All I conclude every time is that the iconic images aren't being published. I think of Balazs [Gardi's] work from the Korengal Valley [Afghanistan] that was such a big part of Tim [Hetherington's] movie, for example, as being so powerful. And Christoph [Bangert's] picture of that decapitated man in the pile of garbage with his arms bound behind his back. Some of Ben Lowy's work from Arab Jabor, that terrible day, and Ashley [Gilbertson's] work from Fallujah - the list is long. Yuri [Kozyrev] has been in the deep, in the thick of it forever. And Franco [Pagetti].
It's not for us to judge what icons there are at this point, because icons are determined by history and the passage of time. Nina Berman - that Marine wedding picture, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the most important. When I think of questions of self-preservation - of my body and my mind and the life I'd like to lead - pictures like that can be reminders [that] you don't have to necessarily go on patrol 873 to find something that validates one's intentions for being there in the first place.
Do you see yourself to some degree as an activist? Or anti-war? Do you see yourself not as the totally neutral objective photographer?
No, I don't see myself as a neutral objective photographer. I try to be a truthful photographer, but that probably shouldn't be confused with objective. At the end of the day, if you're choosing what to frame, you're choosing what to exclude. What objectivity is in that? You try to be truthful to what you're seeing and see it in a nuanced and complex way. At least that's how I try to see things, but I am going to use those things to interpret what my own perspective is going to be.
When I did the book ["2nd Tour, Hope I Don't Die"], I wanted everyone to be the victim in the book: the soldiers, the civilians. There are no John Wayne heroics. It's just stripped down to its depraved and destructive core.
The camera is a relatively new phenomenon. Humanity has gone through vast changes in the 150 years since photography was first used on the battlefield. I would like to think that photography has had some positive influence. I found it very inspiring, [this idea] about photographs somehow ending war in some short-term fashion. [I'm] obviously being hopelessly naïve and ridiculous, but in the long view, I think it's a goal to aspire to - not just photography, but all these different mediums. We co-exist with video, and we co-exist with the written word, and just plain old testimonies from soldiers at the VFW maybe, or at a Memorial Day parade. It's the collective weight of all of these things that at some point provokes change.
Previously, Lens excerpted Dexter Filkins's foreword to “Photojournalists on War.â€
There will be a panel discussion at a book event, featuring Mr. Kamber, Mr. Filkins and several photographers interviewed in “Photojournalists on War,†Wednesday night at 25CPW Gallery.
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