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Each Memorial Day, New York City celebrates Fleet Week. Navy vessels dock on the Hudson River, fighter jets roar overhead, and sailors disembark for shore leave. "Usually I just shoot them wandering through Times Square," says photojournalist Nina Berman. In 2007, however, Berman went to Orchard Beach, a park in the Bronx, for what was billed as Marine Day.
"Helicopters flew over and landed, and the soldiers came out with a tarp filled with weapons," recalls Berman. "Families gathered, and the Marines painted the kids' faces in camouflage. Little girls and boys were posing with rifles. There was a kind of gangster vibe -- kids saying, 'Hey, this is what they used in Scarface!'"
The pictures Berman made that day -- advanced military weaponry in the happy hands of children painted as warriors -- capture a sense of absurdity and danger that often passes unnoticed in the social fabric of post-9/11 America. They are part of a project she has been working on for the past seven years that has taken her from the streets of New York to the suburbs of Chicago and small towns across the country. What she has documented in her images is a homeland that is anything but secure. Her photos depict the color-coded terror alerts that have become a visual backdrop to everyday life, disaster simulations in which volunteers are made up to look like bombing victims, and air shows in which stealth fighters appear overhead like fancy kites.
You can find the work in a new book, Homeland (Trolley, $49.95). For the past several weeks large prints of the photographs hav been exhibited at the Jen Bekman Gallery in Manhattan, and they will be part of a group show at the Houston Center of Photography in February, as well as a solo show at the Gage Gallery at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Until now, Berman's best-known work was a series of portraits of soldiers wounded in the Iraq War. She began that project shortly after the American military pushed its way to Baghdad in 2003, and before the violent reality of the occupation had become clear to many journalists.
Those portraits -- shot in medium-format, formally composed -- were meant to be seen as evidence of the price of war. Her new work, by contrast, is as visually confounding as the reality they depict. The saturated color and off-kilter framing are disruptive and impressionistic. In the book they are presented without captions, offering viewers visual messages rather than journalistic information.
Here, Berman talks about how why she chose to shoot her latest work as she did, and why she finds the scenes she captured both humorous and haunting.
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