War turns the world inside out, and war imagery is particularly attentive to showing the inner seams and hidden structures of the world.
Bodies are seen with clothing shredded or gone, and worse, with blood and viscera exposed. Bombs shear off the sides of buildings, and all the miscellaneous and mundane stuff of life spills out. Ironing boards, dishes, CDs and lampshades are strewn in the street. We've seen these objects thousands of times, and live with them with such familiarity that they have lost all visual interest. But in severing them from their usual place -- inside -- war makes the ordinary unaccountably strange.
Images from Beirut, where the destruction has turned some
southern neighborhoods into piles of rubble, show the uncanny exposures of war.
Reinforcing bars normally hidden in concrete are seen twisting like reeds in the
rubble. Rebar stands out in images from Haifa, too, especially in a powerful
shot (below) by Baz Ratner of the Associated Press, in which a man with bleeding
legs is holding onto a piece of bent metal shaped like a shepherd's crook. The
shepherd's crook, the field of metal reeds -- it's a small trope of war imagery
that suggests there is some perverse pastoral lurking underneath the hulking
forms of urban life.
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It's the tumble of everyday things into the street, however, that gives these
images their power.
In a photograph (above ) by The Washington Post's Michael
Robinson-Chavez, taken in Beirut's Bir al-Abed district, a single red plastic
laundry basket is seen in the foreground. Everything else is gray, dust still
clouds the air, and a lone man picks his way through the forest of destruction.
The touch of red at the near edge of the scene, with the background receding
into a dull haze of neutral tones, is reminiscent of the long tradition, in
painting, of using small dabs of color to guide the eye and suggest the
proximity of objects in the foreground. Giovanni Bellini accomplishes much the
same effect in his "Saint Jerome Reading," (below ) on display as part of the
National Gallery's Venetian show, by placing red book clasps in the near range
of the image. Constable and Corot were brilliant at these little touches, as
well -- small dabs of bright hues that break through the surface haze.
The red laundry basket isn't there for artistic purposes, and it is perhaps missing the whole point of the photograph -- the barbaric destruction of war -- to notice how well, in fact, this detail functions artistically. But this is all part of the game that people who photograph war must play. War, as a subject, is infinitely repetitive. There is war everywhere, in Iraq, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Africa. And everywhere there is war, there is destruction and the turning inside-out of life.
Photographers fight against the pure monotony of war, and although the red laundry basket is an artistic nicety of this image, it is also the reason we keep looking at it. The goal isn't art, but to use art to make us look.
Thirty-five years ago, the critic George Steiner gave a series of lectures about the state of culture, at a time when the Second World War was still a bitterly fresh memory, when half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain and there was napalm being spread in Vietnam.
"We must keep vital in ourselves a sense of scandal so overwhelming that it affects every significant aspect of our position in history and society," he wrote. "We have, as Emily Dickinson would have said, to keep the soul terribly surprised."
Three and a half decades of war later, it gets harder to keep the soul shocked. But every crumpled toaster, every battered refrigerator and every red laundry basket helps. All the stray objects in these images once belonged to someone. The crumpled stove was once used to cook someone's meal. The shoes were once worn by someone's child. The water tank in the street once supplied someone's bath or kitchen. Now they're out in public, with a strange object status that only war produces: They are private things made public and anonymous at the same time. The "someone" that gave their meaning is gone, perhaps dead or living as a refugee.
So many images of war are meant to make war seem
personal. Last Friday, the Daily News ran a picture of a U.S. Marine holding a
crying baby during the evacuation from Beirut. Early that week, The Post ran an
image of a French child, looking wide-eyed into the camera amid a sea of
clamoring adults, all awaiting escape from the war zone. It feels, alas, like a
kind of inflation. Sobbing adults have lost their punch. Let's run with the
kids. Anything to personalize the destruction and mayhem.
The strength of Robinson-Chavez's Beirut devastation image is its refusal to personalize. In some ways, it does the opposite. Meaningless possessions remain, the people who once owned them are faceless and missing. The photographer resists the usual logic of war photography: War dehumanizes, erases distinctions, objectifies its victims, therefore I will give suffering a face, make it feel real, make it seem human. Rather, he says, war dehumanizes -- and that's what I need to show.
People who make images of war oscillate between these two logics, trying any way they can to short-circuit what Steiner called "the numb prodigality of our acquaintance with horror." One particular power of the images of depersonalized rubble and errant domestic objects is that they allow us to think about war abstractly, without having to engage with the question of whose war is it, and who is right in this conflict. The less any image attaches to a particular person, or face, or nationality, the more it functions as an image of War itself.
Centuries ago, when war was often just another sport for kings, it was common, in drama and opera, to personify war, as the Roman goddess Bellona, or as Mars. War would stand before the court, and make his or her case in poetic terms for why one should go to war: glory, conquest, immortal fame. A few world wars, and the general spread of wartime suffering to every stratum of society, have chased those abstract personifications of war off the stage.
In their place, however, we have the image of General Destruction, which might be taken from any war, anywhere. As soon as you engage with any personalized image of war suffering, you are caught up in the endless cycles of recrimination, blame, censure and pity. The sorrowful child drags politics behind him, demanding to know what you think of who did this to him. The image of General Destruction, however, indicts War itself.
It is anti-intellectual to pretend that war doesn't come without aggressors and villains, and without causes of different moral status. But it's strange how, in the clamor about the rightness of this war or that, the endless selling of war to the voters, the necessity of war, the utility of war, the goals and ends of war, and the price of gas, we forget the obvious: the utter destruction of war. And so we turn the world inside-out once again to see the most mundane but horrifying truth of our sad, shortsighted species.