viz.

I never imagined my childhood play would be a harbinger of real-life disaster. Before I discovered Nintendo, I amused myself with various toys, and countless hours were devoted to “playing war” with what I referred to as my “army guys”those small, forest green, plastic soldiers forever frozen in distinct battle poses.  Others may have had more elaborate sets, but my collection of army men (there were no female plastic soldiers), consisted of only a handful of poses.  As I remember I had: radioman, grenadier, crawler, crouching machine gunner, standing shooter, and lookout, similar to the first  group pictured below:

Image by I remember JFK

 I would intricately arrange opposing armies on battlefield carefully peering at my men, delicately positioning each figure, pointing weapons, and constructing groupings, before finally opening fire.  Perhaps because each army guy had dozens and dozens of identical types, I never thought of my casualties as individuals.  This held true both in my monologues in the heat of the battle, “that grenade-thrower just took out my last machine gunner” and after all the soldiers had fallen.

After happening upon images of a new series of army men, my eyes have been opened to a dark side of this game and my position as indifferent war master, casually killing of and tossing about my soldiers, typecasts, not individual warriors (unlike my GI Joe collection).  I can’t help but find myself haunted by Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” with its biting accusations

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

After destroying my opposing armies, post-war I’d briefly examine the aftermath of the battle, a disarray of fallen soldiers that I’d quickly pile together, throw in my toy bucket, and forget about until some future battle.  A creative reworking of these familiar army men by UK-based Dorothy collective prohibits any such forgetting, and it forces us to linger post-battle—what happens to our veterans after “the fast bullets fly.”  This collection was inspired a report published in July of 2009 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, a two-part exposé  “Casualties of War” (part1, part 2), that details soldiers from single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs who, after returning from Iraq, spin out of control, engaging in rampant domestic abuse, rape, suicide, shootings, drug abuse, drunk driving, and assault at alarming rates.

Dorothy repositions the tiny army men in new poses, in so doing, repositions the “toys” as, arguably, masterworks of visual art, and certainly as poignant and massively effective productions of social commentary.

Perhaps the most striking new figure is of a veteran amputee:

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

Originally created in 2003 by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, "1945-1998" maps all 2053 nuclear explosions during that period.

Image credit: Chan Lowe, The Lowe Down

The above cartoon, republished yesterday on the artist’s blog, makes a very effective argument against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The use of flag-draped coffins, signifying shared tragedy, suggests that dying for one’s country has little to do with sexual orientation and that is rather the work that an individual does—in this case, sacrificing his/her life for the United States—that matters.  In this kind of public sacrifice, the image suggests, everything individual is erased. However, this message seems more complicated when considered in relation to one of Tim Turner's earlier posts and the wider cache of meanings that these coffins suggest.

Image credit: Nebojsa Seric Shoba

"Battle of Waterloo. Belgium. 1815"

Lens, The New York Times 

Over the past two weeks, Lens, the photography and photojournalism blog component of the New York Times, has featured two different photographic collections concerned with memory, trauma, and war.  Nebojsa Seric Shoba's "Battlefields" is comprised of images of former battle sites.  Shoba returned to photograph the places where the Battle of Brooklyn (1776) or the Battle of Waterloo (1815) were fought.  Rather than return to earlier places, Maciek Nabrdalik took portraits of Holocaust survivors, focusing closely on the faces of his subjects as they are lit against a stark black background.  Both sets of images press the viewer to consider the possibilities and failures inherent in any attempt to make memory visible.

Image Credit: Simon Norfolk

"Gold Beach" from The Normandy Beaches: We Are Making a New World

Last week I had wanted to post about Veterans Day and the intersections between war, photography, and memory but Emily's consideration of the images of Fort Hood sent me thinking about the representation of recent tragedies.  Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer who creates images of places in the aftermath of war and genocide.  His images of the beaches at Normandy are haunting photographs that visually echo earlier works such as Robert Capa's images of landings on D-Day and yet evoke absence and suggest extreme temporal distance from the earlier atrocities by depicting ethereal empty landscapes.

Screen capture of www.nbcdfw.com

Emily's post this past week considers the ways in which many of the images of the shooting at Fort Hood reflect a "conflicted understanding of this event as both a military and a domestic tragedy."  Her insightful comments sent me searching through much of the photojournalism that surrounds this recent tragedy and I found that many of the collections of slide shows contain at least one, if not several, photographs of the media documenting the aftermath of the event.  Some of these photographs show the media set against the setting sun while others focus on a key speaker surrounded and almost swallowed by a sea of cameras and microphones.  While it is no surprise that, with the onslaught of the 24-hour news cycle and the need for news, the media likes to focus on the impact of the media, I wonder whether we might see these images of image-making as more than just meta?

 Image Credit: The Guardian

As the memorial service for the victims of the Fort Hood shooting begins, I want to spend some time considering the visual representations of this event in the media.  Photographs representing the shooting seem to mirror our conflicted understanding of this event as both a military and a domestic tragedy.  In the absence of more information about the shooter and his motives, this ambiguity marks the photographs that appear online and in print.  Some photographs evoke Columbine, Virginia Tech or 9/11 by focusing on groups of mourners and the buildings where the shooting took place.  In so doing, these images emphasize the effects of violence on a place and a community.  However, other photographs more closely resemble traditional war photography in which the soldier is represented through metonymic devices such as a uniform or a gun. 

Image Credit: Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

H/T: The New York Times

Noel’s comments this past week about the circulation of iconic images of violence and the role of affect in our reception of these images left me wondering about contemporary photojournalism and its treatment of war.  In their text and blog, No Caption Needed, John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman have written extensively about the way iconic images, such as the photograph of General Loan executing a suspected member of the Viet Cong, circulate in public culture but what should we make of images that are less well known or that focus on the more mundane aspects of war?

This morning I received an automatic update message from Imaging Notes, a remote sensing (satellite imaging) trade magazine.  The lead-off story was about one of the alleged nuclear material refining facilities in Iran. 

The image, and the annotations provided by a private company, are eerily similar to those Colin Powell used in his February, 2003 speech to the UN when he argued on behalf of the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Iraq.  I point all of this out not to question the interpretation of the Iranian image, but simply to point out that as lay-people and citizens, we do not have the means to engage with the arguments presented in such images, but must take or refuse their content based with only our trust or mistrust in the party providing the image to guide us. 

Image Credit: Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds

This past week my students and I were considering the representation of the Vietnam war in network news coverage and in documentary films such as Peter Davis' Hearts and Minds (1974).  Several of the images we considered depict bodies in pain or men, women, and children dead or dying.  As we discussed the appeals to the emotions of the viewer at work in these images, the conversation gradually turned to the ethics of the photographers and filmmakers but I left the classroom wondering about the ethics of teaching these images.