Grounds For Heroism

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Formalist Portraits That Capture Everyone From Honor Guards to Grave Diggers

Name a kind of photography, and Brian Lanker has done it, from newspaper photojournalism and sports photography to work for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

He is probably still most famous for his best-selling 1989 book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, which is now in its 14th printing. It was for his skill as a portraitist that Lanker was assigned to the Arlington project. Lanker's job was to depict the range and diversity of people who have a relationship with the cemetery in one way or another.

In his images, Lanker captures everyone from honor guards and cleaning ladies to the fighter pilots who patrol the skies over Washington, D.C. and the men who dig Arlington's graves. Lanker brought rented backdrops and other studio equipment, but he found a basement in one of the Arlington buildings that featured natural light streaming in from an overhead atrium. "The concrete walls had a beautiful texture, so we decided to shoot everything there," he says. For all the portraits, he shot with a Hasselblad equipped with a Leaf digital back and a 120mm lens, mixing the existing light with light from two softboxes. Each image was shot through a template (made by Lanker himself) that was placed just in front of the camera. "I was looking for a kind of period vignette, but one that also represented the symbolism of the tombstones in Arlington," he says.

Lanker says the grave digger portrait was one of the easiest he made. "What you try to do sometimes is just not get in the way of something that is already quite wonderful," he says. "Here, the simplicity of the hands and the shovel came together very quickly." On the other hand, the honor guard presented problems. "In a place where everyone wears a uniform," says Lanker, "it can be hard to frame a person's individuality. You do it through posing and composition."

JAMES BALOG

Making the Emotional Connection Between a Somber Landscape and the People Who Fill it With Grace

James Balog's career has encompassed a range of disciplines, from documentary work on the culture of hunters to conceptual fine-art portraiture of endangered species. His most recent book consisted of portraits of the world's biggest trees.

"That's how I got into the Arlington project," he says. "I was told how beautiful the trees were in the cemetery." Balog at first thought of shooting landscapes at the cemetery, but something happened when he got to Arlington. "You can't just look at Arlington and see trees and marble," he says. "I was struck not so much by the landscape but by the connection between the landscape and the people there. What I felt was the sense of time unfolding in this place. Time dictated the human experience. It dictated the landscape experience."

All those connections are apparent in Balog's panorama of a funeral procession, made from multiple images shot with a Nikon D2X and an 80-200mm lens. The technique forces the viewer's eye to sweep across the landscape, creating a sense of movement and a sense of the movement of time.

He also photographed a series of funerals of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. "At one, the funeral of a marine captain, I saw a member of the honor guard comfort the captain's blond-haired son," recalls Balog. "There is no other way to see this than for what it is: emotionally wrenching. I still can't talk about it without choking up."

DAVID ALAN HARVEY

Going Behind the Scenes With the Men Who Guard the Fallen

A veteran National Geographic photographer, Harvey was assigned to document the soldiers who stand guard at Arlington, but he says he quickly narrowed the scope of his storytelling to one group in particular -- the 20 or so men who stand guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. "You can't image the dedication with which they approach this job," Harvey says. "Many have served in Iraq, and for them this is the highest honor and most important job they can do: watching over their fallen comrades." Harvey himself approached his job the way he does every subject -- by trying to get "inside the story," working as unobtrusively as possible and following Henri Cartier-Bresson's dictum to carry one camera and one lens so that he can focus his attention on the world around him, and not on his equipment. In this case the camera was digital -- a Leica M8, with a 28mm lens, roughly equivalent to the 35mm Harvey uses on his film cameras.

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