Books
Will You Flinch?
Confronting the Images of War

SHOOTING UNDER FIRE:
THE WORLD OF THE WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
BY PETER HOWE
ARTISAN. 224 PP. $35

REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS
BY SUSAN SONTAG
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX 131 PP. $20

REVIEWED BY ANTHONY SWOFFORD

Among the reasons that nations and men wage war, companionship is rarely considered in the press and the politics that presage the warfare and propel the armies. It should be. In World War II the Allies were companions and so, too, the doomed members of the Axis. War companions share political agendas and emotional exigencies. Companions count on their compatriots, companions urge the weak to fight toward the next hill farther, and the strong carry the weak on their shoulders and offer munitions, intelligence, manpower, and money. This goes for heads of state at palace dinners and grunts sitting in fighting holes, sharing stories of home over a meal of reconstituted beef, bartering for smokes and stamps.

So it’s fitting that two books from different cloths — criticism and photography — have become companions to each other and to the reviewer while his country wages war again.

Peter Howe’s Shooting Under Fire is an astounding and torturous collection of combat and conflict photography from ten photographers who have covered the international carnage of the last forty years. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag offers a book-length meditation on the results of offering such images for mass consumption.

Howe offered his photographers ample space to comment on their profession and, most interestingly, on the particulars of individual shots. The captions are often welcome, as when Don McCullin tells the reader that he set up his Tet Offensive composition of the dead North Vietnamese soldier surrounded by his ammunition and personal effects — photos of a daughter or younger sister, what looks to be a letter but could be a patrol order, and the useless contents of his First Aid tin “which would hardly suffice for any bullet wound, let alone one in the head.” Before accessorizing the corpse, McCullin had witnessed two soldiers plundering the body: “They kept laughing at the photographs in his wallet and throwing them on the ground and calling him gook this and gook that and motherfucker . . . .” The rich caption offers us another entry into the photo, a temporal and spatial expansion of the scene surrounding the dead soldier, something that the photo minus the photographer’s commentary wouldn’t give us. We can almost hear our own boots sinking into the jungle mud as we watch McCullin prep his corpse with the dead man’s history. Now, the victims have multiplied — the dead soldier, the girl in the soldier’s photos, as well as the American soldiers who’d lost their humanity months or weeks or minutes before talking trash to the corpse and invading his past. McCullin is a victim, too. He’s obviously tortured over staging the photo, over his photographer’s “intruding on their grief . . . . Don’t think it’s been easy to live with that, because it hasn’t.” The photographer defends this intrusion, and the viewer thanks him for the soft touch, the loving impulse (loving of art and life as well as death) that doctored the otherwise gory death. Perhaps the viewer is a victim, too, because the combat death has been confused with the artistry and the message of the composed photo. What is real? Who has died and how, for what? What does the photographer say that the dead man never will? Do we care? Do we look coldly away?

Philip Jones Griffiths’s short essay “On Being a Photographer” is humble and humane, and it counters the bravado and swagger that we’ve come to expect from war photographers and journalists: “I’d never been enamored of the system of journalism. I never really expected much from it. I take pictures for myself.” His photo “Saigon, 1968” is as absurd as they come: a soldier sitting in a chair, resting his foot on a window sill, providing covering fire through the window, a child’s naked doll beneath his ornate shooting chair. Griffiths writes, “That’s war. It’s unbelievable; it’s just unbelievable.” But this photo helps the viewer understand and believe both the brutality and silliness of war.

Commentary from other photographers makes the reviewer wish Howe had simply allowed the photos to speak without the photographer’s written intrusion or edited out some of the more self-important commentaries. James Nachtwey, writing about one of his September 11, 2001, photos, congratulates himself on what is obvious and contextualized within the horrific photo of a collapsing World Trade Center tower (and part of his job): “As I had so many times before, in so many other places in the world, I was heading into an area from which everyone else was fleeing.” And Laurent Van der Stockt would have us believe that when, in the Arabian desert in 1991, he inadvertently directed (and then followed in his air-conditioned Land Cruiser) French troops toward what turned out to be an Iraqi tank battalion, he caused the ensuing battle. “And there I was on the roof of my car taking pictures of an action between the French and Iraqis that I had provoked.” But had he? Hadn’t nations provoked the action and hadn’t the men around him been engaged in the fighting, the real work of the war? Here Van der Stockt sounds like the stock cowboy photographer, bigger than the story, bigger than the camera, playing his own marching tune against his empty film canisters. We can hear the click of his shutter between the explosions of the tank barrage, but do we care, now that he opened his mouth?

Sontag, discussing a photo of a World War I veteran whose face has been shot away, insists that “there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror.” And she goes on, “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it — say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken — or those who could learn from it.” We might not all be military surgeons, but can’t we all learn? Shame and shock are the precursors to action.
Later Sontag will attack the school of the hyper-real, the simulacra, those who insist that reality has become a game, a spectacle: “To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment . . . . It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.”

Sontag’s catalog of suffering and Howe’s introduction share some of the most enduring photographic images of war ever — the photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the second American flag-raising at Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima in 1945; Eddie Adams’s photo of the execution of a Vietcong suspect by South Vietnam’s chief of police, Nguyen Ngoc Loan; Nick Ut’s photo of the napalmed children fleeing the village of Trang Bang; and Robert Capa’s shot of the Spanish militiaman at the moment the bullet enters the man’s body.

Concerning the Adams moment-of-execution shot, Sontag says, “There can be no suspicion about the authenticity . . . . Nevertheless, it was staged — by General Loan, who had led the prisoner, hands tied behind his back, out to the street where journalists had gathered; he would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it.” Available. There is so much available to us now. The photographer makes himself available to the executioner, and the viewer makes herself available to the photographer. And who is responsible for what happens once the photograph is affixed to the gallery wall or printed in the fine volume of war photography? “The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph.” The viewer determines the meaning. Once the print is made, the photographer is offstage, and the viewer owns the work. And time and politics can change the meaning of the photo, Sontag insists: “The pictures of wretched hollow-eyed GIs that once seemed subversive of militarism and imperialism may seem inspirational. Their revised subject: ordinary American young men doing their unpleasant, ennobling duty.” Thus the photographer’s power is wrested from him as if a thief had ripped off his camera bag. And the fact that the young men are not ordinary is lost, as is the fact that their duty is not ordinary, nor is it especially noble. And only the men who have fought, and the journalists who have honestly narrated their fighting with photos and words, will know this. “To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture,” Sontag writes. Will memories of war thus be co-opted by the whims of a community or political climate? Will the man who once wept over his memories of war one day find them thrilling or even inspirational? Probably.

Narrative is the antidote to such easy reformulations of history and memory: “A narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image,” Sontag writes. The time commitment is different for the image and the narrative. The image is easier to walk away from.

A narrative moment the reviewer can never walk away from is the last few pages of The Magic Mountain, when Hans Castorp joins Germany in battle, no longer at the sanatorium but now in the combat asylum, dirt clods hitting his shin, humans exploding behind him — Hans Castorp disappearing into the abyss. Thomas Mann insists we bid Hans Castorp farewell before we are certain of his fate, “Farewell, Hans.” Combat photographers must bid farewell to their photos in the same way, without ever knowing the picture’s fate.

Howe and Sontag have given us two books that speak across genres. As much as Sontag seems in the end to attempt to minimize the usability and usefulness of combat photography for civil action, her long meditation on suffering and images has done the work that all the best works of criticism do: she’s sent the reader outside of the work — the viewing list that a careful reader will leave her book with is priceless. Howe’s photographers cover the most gruesome and senseless fighting of the twentieth century. The commentary and captioning that he allows his photographers supports Sontag’s assertion that the narrative holds the viewer/reader longer, thus creating a deeper and more lasting effect. Both books insist that the critic and photographer and writer must keep trying to transfer the reality of warfare to the viewer/reader. Sontag says, “Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.” But we can be haunted by our understanding, both imagistic and narrative. And at this point in history, shouldn’t we be?

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Anthony Swofford is the author of Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.