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Category: Haunted |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/arts/design/28nach.html
Jam es Nachtwey - World’s Cruelty and Pain, Seen in an Unblinking Lens
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, NY Times, March 28, 2007
......The series of Iraq pictures, some of which were first published in National Geographic, are called “The Sacrifice.” The title refers to the medics and physicians who treat everyone, including wounded insurgents. The insurgents are given goggles so they can’t see and later seek out to kill the Iraqi translators helping the medics, for which reason Mr. Nachtwey doesn’t photograph translators. He does photograph an Iraqi child mangled in a suicide attack: the boy is screaming beneath his oxygen mask.
The title also refers to American soldiers whose work daily forces them to play Russian roulette with roadside bombs, soldiers regularly sacrificed in the war. Mr. Nachtwey devised a collage of photos (grainy, black-and-white, shot under the fluorescent glare of military trauma centers) suggesting the choreographed chaos in which American doctors tend to failing patients. The last of the pictures, a mordant coda, shows a dead soldier on a gurney under a blanket, a chaplain’s arm reaching into the frame and holding up a dog tag.
…Along with bravery and perseverance, Mr. Nachtwey’s pictorial virtue makes him a model war photographer. He doesn’t mix up his priorities. His goal is to bear witness, because somebody must, and his pictures, devised to infuriate and move people to action, are finally about us, and our concern or lack of it, at least as much they are about him and his obvious talents.
…Finding the most human detail amid chaos, he photographs an unconscious soldier on the operating table at the instant his wedding band is removed from his hand. He photographs Brian Price, an Army sergeant wounded by an improvised explosive device in Ramadi, wincing on a gurney, the camera focused on the name of the soldier’s four-month-old daughter, Ashlynn Jaide, tattooed in script over his heart.
In a separate image a nurse lifts and turns the limp Sergeant Price over. His back has several small holes. The scene is like a Pietà. You read in the nurse’s fallen face the sudden realization that the soldier’s spine has been severed.
And at a military hospital in Germany, Mr. Nachtwey found Pvt. Andrew Bouwma in a coma, watched over by his stunned parents. His mother, Kandi, smiling in her University of Wisconsin sweatshirt, gently caresses his hair. His father, Jim, sunglasses perched on his head, rubs one eye and leans with his other hand on the railing of the bed for support. A chaplain’s hand, extending into the picture, touches Andrew’s shoulder. They’re praying. ... Breathing through a respirator, eyes shut, Private Bouwma looks heartbreakingly young.
Is this how these men would wish to be remembered? Are the pictures an invasion of privacy? That was the Bush administration’s excuse for prohibiting photographs of returning coffins. But then there’s the argument made at the opening of the show at 401 by a ex-marine who lost his right arm in Iraq. … The marine said he thought these pictures should be on billboards in Times Square so that everybody would know what’s really happening over there, and nobody could miss seeing them.
Wouldn’t that be something? Public art of real consequence and quality for a change, bringing home a war that the whole country is conducting but that only the small percentage of families in the volunteer military experience firsthand. There would be no chance to turn the page or flip the channel or skip the exhibition. …Nor would there be any way to avoid the photograph of Derek McGinnis, an amputee from Iraq, on Pismo Beach in California, under a leaden sky, leaning over, his head obscured behind his surfboard, so that man, prosthesis, surfboard and fin make a perfect right angle. It’s an amazing image. He’s a modern-day Discobolus.
That’s a redemptive sight, celebrating a brave soldier who survived the inferno and made the best out of what he had left. We would prefer not to see him, perhaps, but Mr. Nachtwey calls us out in our discomfort and neglect.
The least we should do is not look away.
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