Do the portraits from HBO's "Alive Day" documentary compel us to see veterans more clearly, or just to watch HBO?

 Guest Column By Michael Shaw, Ph.D.                                                                   

Given advances in medical technology and the tactical nature of the ongoing conflict in Iraq, American combat troops are now surviving injuries that would once have been fatal -- and attracting the attention of visual documentarians as a result.

Making portraits of the wounded, however, is a delicate matter. Damage is as much, or more, psychic as physical. Innumerable variables are in play regarding dignity, memory, and the reconstruction of post-combat identity. And then there are still other factors in front of those, including the context and purpose of the images themselves.

Over the past year, I have been aware of and spent time studying two sets of portraits of injured American Iraq war vets: Nina Berman's award-winning series Purple Heart: Back From Iraq and a newspaper photo feature titled Wounds of War by South Florida Sun-Sentinel photographer, Anastasia Walsh Infanzon. Because photographer Lori Grinker includes a few injured veterans in her distinguished series, AfterWar, I have been looking at relevant examples there also. (Full disclosure: Nina Berman contributes to my BAGnewsNotes blog.)

© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Then, two weeks ago, I received an email announcing a new documentary series from HBO titled "Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq." The program, which consists of individual interviews conducted by actor James Gandolfini with ten injured Iraq war veterans, premiered Sept. 9. According to the press release, "the documentary about wounded soldiers surveys the physical and emotional cost of war through memories of their 'alive day,' the day they narrowly escaped death in Iraq." Billed as "a multiplatform event," the project also features portraits of the veterans by the well-known photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

Together these wounded veteran series constitute an important new sub-genre of war photography that seems to have sprung from three converging factors: 1) the continued escalation in Iraq, 2) recent leaps in medical technology, including fascination with cyborg-like associations, and 3) the fact that there were previously few, if any, photographic studies dedicated exclusively to portraits of wounded American war veterans.

Although there are notable differences in approach between the Berman, Infanzon and Greenfield-Sanders images -- Berman and Greenfield-Sanders employed color while Infanzon used black-and-white; Berman's images were set in the soldiers' environment while Infanzon and Greenfield-Sanders used a studio with a neutral backdrop -- these distinctions seem less significant than the more personal factors. Specifically, I'm thinking about the psychological complexity of the engagement between veteran and camera, and the degree and depth of engagement between the veteran and himself.

In almost every Greenfield-Sanders shot, for example, the soldiers are positioned to convey that they are angry or aggrieved. They are captured  with arms akimbo; or with arms tightly crossed over their chests; or with prosthetics offered in evidence; or leaning into our space with hands clasped; or presenting us with a (cold) shoulder. It seems that the soldiers in Greenfield-Sanders images were invited (whether actively or tacitly) to identify with their anger and engage with the camera (and hence the audience).

By contrast, the Berman and Infanzon images -- or, say, Lori Grinker's compelling photo of veteran Tim Lee -- register a good deal of disconnection (individual forms of inhibitory pain, perhaps?) between soldier and photographer.

© Nina Berman/Redux Pictures

As Nina Berman writes:

My soldiers almost never look the viewer directly in the eye. They look off or within. They do not connect which is part of the point. They are unapproachable as subjects -- there is a distance that is nearly impossible to overcome -- which is part of the sadness.

These different levels of engagement are also indicative of the separation between "concerned" or documentary photography, which seeks what is unique about its subject and highlights that personal drama, and advertising or commercial photography, which employs its subject's image to urge a sale. Along those lines, one might argue that the Greenfield-Sanders photos are not portraits at all. I say this due to the way, in comparison to the others sets of pictures, these images represent a "reversal of intent."

In the Berman and Infanzon shots, in other words, the subject is the veteran and the point of the picture is to for us to gain a window into his personal experience. In the Greenfield-Sanders photos, on the other hand, the subject is the stare, and the point (or demand) of the shot is to set up a confrontation with the viewer.

It's understandable if that confrontation feels uncomfortable, by the way. That's the point. Whereas the Berman, Infanzon or Grinker images aim to bear witness, the Greenfield-Sanders shots seem aimed to get a rise out of us and/or to coerce us to do something. The question, then, is what are they coercing us to feel or do?

In the best case scenario, those ferocious gazes are a provocation for us to more vigorously consider the soldier's insult and what we are prepared to do about it -- like an advertisement for a patriotic Hollywood film or a recruitment poster.

Given the stereotypical looks and gestures, however, it is difficult to care about them as anything but victims...or to see them as much more than actors. Despite their shared subject matter, these Alive Day images have less in common with Berman or Infanzon's documentary work and more relation with commercial photography.

And to that extent, those soldiers' stares have the same intent as all advertisements: to fix our gaze in front of this particular show.

-- American Photo's newest columnist, Michael Shaw, is a practicing clinical psychologist, but we know him through his popular, politically charged image-analysis blog, BAGnewsNotes.com. With his adept dissection of newswire photos and his Reading the Pictures feature at the Huffington Post, Shaw has cultivated an outspoken voice and a loyal following within the blogosphere. We are excited to bring his insights to our readers in the form of an online feature as well as a guest post on our State of the Art blog.

Comments

[Books Alive]

The hour-long HBO program was made available by IAVA's Executive Director, Paul Rieckhoff. I believe the formal portraits help counteract the "macho" attraction of war which draws young men and women to the military.

Among the documentary work mentioned in your post, I've only seen that of Nina Berman. I feel her stories, while wrenching, don't elicit from her subjects the same documentation (feelings about their wounding) that the interviews on "Alive Day" present.

http://www.hbo.com/aliveday/thefilm/?ntrack_para1=feat_main_image

[Doctor Jay]

Honestly, I wonder if the disengagement is because of the anger that would otherwise be expressed. If you feel angry, but know that it really doesn't have much to do with the people you are with, then you might well look at the distance, or inward.

That said, it would seem that engagement, and anger, might take more than one form. This sort of thing can be caught on video as a rapid switching between modes, can it be caught in a still photograph?

[Esoth]

Without seeing the the HBO show, the Greenfield-Sanders photos stand in the same way that the others' photographers' images do. The cumulative effect from viewing series of photos of US injured military personnel is to accrue such overwhelming sympathy for their suffering, that they begin to seem as innocent victims, almost bystanders. There are others not present, who more aptly fit that description, and whose care does not approach what we are able to give our wounded soldiers.

But the photos do carry that bystander message, in the political sense, in that the soldiers' sacrifice and courage and honor and steadfastness were offered in the service of our country, but were converted to other ends. U.S. Grant wrote in his memoirs, on the defeat of the Confederate Army in the Civil War, "who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." It is not the fault of the wounded, of course, that our leaders are not equal to the gifts so freely offered to them.

The very concept of "Alive Day", the idea of marking the anniversary of injury, as some sort of celebration, euphoric or otherwise, of survival, flashes unpleasantly in the mind. The alternative is not merely death, but that those men and women were not so badly used by the Administration. That they be both alive and whole, not intemperately spent. It is impossible to look at "before" and "after" photos without asking the question of was it worth it?

A viewer may impose on a photo, in roughly similar fashion to the way that the photographer imposes, (Nina Berman refers to them as "My soldiers"). There is a demand in the images, but perhaps that is simply a reaction to a viewer's reflex to look away, or the unmet expectation that a victim would want to be hidden away.

Whether the subject is laying in a hospital bed or engaged in post-recovery recreation, there is that same sense in the images, (if not, hopefully, in their lives), of the centrality of grievous injury and loss. Heroic efforts to recover, to accept without complaint, do not diminish the loss. Every attitude, every facial expression, seems to bisect with loss.

Anger is an appropriate response to the condition these men and women find themselves in, yet you can see the conflict within them, their need to continue to act honorably, to cast their sacrifice in a noble light. Can you document such profound commitment to a cause, without commenting on it? While the images do speak of unbreakable courage and spirit, they also say, "Look what I have given of myself, to all of you. Isn't it horrible?" The magnitude of their sacrifice seems at inverse proportion to the worthiness of the cause. Horrible in fact.