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| © Peter van Agtmael |
| SGT Jason Thompson waits for a nurse to clean his face of blood and grime after he was wounded along with two of his soldiers when an IED hit their vehicle. All three soldiers were returned to duty. Click photo to launch gallery. |
Joerg Colberg: How much interaction did you end up having with Iraqis?
Peter van Agtmael: Not a whole lot. The only meaningful personal contact I had with Iraqis was with the interpreters. They were generally young men, often Kurds (who usually hated the Arabs) or educated opportunists that had been caught up by the idealism of the early days and found it impossible to return to their previous lives after throwing in their lot with the U.S. I didn't meet many who were gung-ho about the U.S. at that point, but the money was good and there really weren't many options for them. Most of them eventually wanted to go to the U.S. but weren't having any luck. That was the way most of our interactions began. As a journalist, they wanted to know if I could help them get to America. Some had been on thousands of combat missions, had received commendations for valor, and yet had repeatedly been rejected for visas.
While working in the ER in Baghdad, one of the translators was murdered. He had been followed home from a checkpoint after leaving work in the Green Zone. The rest of the translators demanded they be given housing in the Green Zone, or they would quit. The staff did their best, but translators around the country were making the same demands as the violence spiraled out of control.
Another Iraqi I got to know was a smiley Colonel named Mohammed, who commanded a battalion of Iraqi troops in Amiriyah, one of Baghdad's worst neighborhoods. He was brave to the point of foolhardy, and fiercely non-sectarian. I witnessed the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq ask for his loyalty in case of civil war, and Mohammed refused, point blank. The next day I raced into the Green Zone with his American advisor when we heard security forces from the Ministry of the Interior were trying to throw his family out of their house and into the streets of Baghdad. That was a virtual death sentence, as he'd already had nine family members murdered because of his prominence. I made a show with my cameras, and claimed to be working for a big American magazine, and the advisor bluffed and threatened, and eventually the forces left. But there were several more crises, and eventually Mohammed was relieved of command and resettled in the U.S. He's one of the lucky ones.
JC: I usually read European and American news sources, and I often note differences in what the same magazine (website) will show on its European and its American pages. Just as an example, in September 2006, a Newsweek cover story titled "Losing Afghanistan" in the U.S. was changed to a cover about Annie Leibowitz -- so there clearly are some selections being made by editors about what and how much the American public actually gets to see. What is you experience with this?
PVA: While there has been a lot of phenomenal and revealing coverage of the war, especially by The New York Times, my main experience with censorship has come from the media, not the military. I will cite a few examples.
A few days after finishing my first tour to Iraq, I picked up a copy of a very well known American magazine at the airport in Holland. I was flipping through it absently when I came upon a brutal picture I had taken of the aftermath of a suicide bombing, run across nearly a full page. I called my parents to tell them the good news and they went out to buy a copy. In the U.S. edition, in place of my picture they found an image of a few helicopters taking off. I was pretty crushed.
A few months later I got an email from a friend in England saying that one of my pictures of a wounded American soldier had run in another major American magazine. I went out to buy a copy and in the U.S. edition was a picture of a soldier running through a darkened room.
In 2007 I won a World Press Photo award for a series of 12 photographs on night raids. I received a lot of publicity, and the pictures were published all over, but to my knowledge there hasn't been a single picture from that series that ran in the U.S. To fund my trips, I did assignments. One was to photograph a USO show, another was to photograph a soldier training for the Boston marathon, and still another was to photograph the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq. They were enjoyable, but in seven months of embedding I only received one assignment to photograph combat operations, and that story was never published.
So while some photographers have had good experiences with the media and publishing, I have to admit I've been incredibly disappointed. I just had my first big spread of Afghanistan work published, and it was in Croatia!
I'm changing tactics these days to focus much more on the Internet, and that has so far been more successful. I recently did a piece with ABCnews.com that was far more revealing than most of the work I'd previously had published. I think it's incredibly important for people to see the true ravages of war, which are usually absent from the U.S. news media.
For me, the worst moments in Iraq and Afghanistan defined me, and as the sole witness to these events with a means to record them, I felt a deep responsibility to disseminate the photos. Photographs can only convey a tiny fraction of what it feels like to be there, but are better than these tragic events getting lost in the anonymity of history. If only the public were given a better opportunity to see for themselves. Things might be very different.
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| © Peter van Agtmael |
| Specialist Jeff Reffner of Altoona, PA is turned on his side by doctors checking for lacerations on his back. Reffner was severely wounded when an IED impacted next to his humvee in Baghdad. Although in extreme pain, Reffner was more concerned about his friend Jeff Forshee who was also wounded in the blast. Reffner was evacuated back to the U.S. and is still recovering from his wounds, while Forshee suffered lighter wounds and was returned to his patrol base to see out the final six months of his deployment. |
JC: In an article titled "We Are The Thought Police" Michael Massing argues that to a large extent the coverage of the war -- and thus our exposure to what is going on -- is shaped not only by what the media show us, but also what we want to (or can bear to) see. "Americans," he writes, "reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war -- have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive." If we are to assume that that's true then maybe things might be very different after all?
PVA: Thank you for pointing me towards that article. Massing definitely has a convincing point, but in order to continue working I can't allow myself to be that cynical. It's true that if you go to your local magazines stand, you can see where our priorities lie. Mostly it seems to be in celebrities, commodities, and ourselves. If we wanted hard, revealing news about the consequences of our nation's decisions, and the state of the world around us, the few news magazines wouldn't be such light reading, and every major newspaper in the country wouldn't be hemorrhaging money.
After my second trip to Iraq I bought a bunch of old copies of Vietnam-era Life and Time magazines from a cranky cigar-smoking old man who has a table of dusty wares set up a few blocks from my grandparents' place in New York City. Maybe I came across an unrepresentative sample of magazines, but there seemed to be many more strong images being published in the Vietnam era. The media played a decisive role in ending an unjust war in Vietnam. It shows the media's limitations that the unpredictable path of history ultimately betrayed that triumph. After all, the very generation that came of age in Vietnam launched the war in Iraq!
So is there a solution? Maybe a start would be to look at recent German history. It seems that at this moment, Germans have renounced any form of aggressive war. But this only came as a result of the devastating death toll of your soldiers, and more importantly your civilians, during the two World Wars. Although I'd like to believe that Americans will learn from these wars, only a tiny percentage of the population is being touched. That makes a lasting legacy difficult to maintain. Compound that by the fact that the ones who bleed for this country rarely end up running it. I went to college at Yale, a traditional feeder into politics, and yet I'm one of just a handful who is intimately familiar with the feeling of going to war. That's a bit of a scary feeling. I worry that my generation will make more mistakes in the name of noble ideals.
JC: After you came back to the U.S. did you stay in touch with the soldiers of the unit you were embedded in? If so, how did they react to your photos?
PVA: I'm in touch with many soldiers I've met in Iraq and Afghanistan, and talk to folks every week. We usually talk about the wars, about the things that we don't want to burden our friends and loved ones with. Often times, it continues to be a "professional" relationship as well, although the line between professional and personal have blurred with my work at home. I continue to follow these stories domestically because I think it's important to relate the abstraction of life in war to the familiarity of home. The pictures that impact people sometimes seem hard to predict, but I think that everyone can relate to the familiar.
I've shown my work to many soldiers. Their judgment is very important to its credibility. Although some people will feel that I have wrongly chosen to exclude certain aspects of my observations, I hope the work is viewed as something authentic and relatable. So far I've gotten mostly positive feedback, although most think that it's a little on the bleak side. One question I'm frequently asked is how I was able to photograph wounded soldiers so closely. When soldiers would come into the ER, they would usually be already doped up with painkillers from the medevac flight. I would ask if I could take their picture. With only one exception, they agreed readily. The exception was embarrassed that he'd nearly torn off his thumb through a careless mistake and didn't want it publicized. Some of them have contacted me months later, updating me on their recovery and saying, "thank you for showing the people what is really going on in the world."
I get really frustrated when I hear excuses about not publishing pictures in the name of protecting the privacy of wounded soldiers. With few exceptions, the folks I've met have wanted others to see what they went through in their name. I think the real problem is that America has a guilty conscience and we don't want to see the pain caused by our folly.
Sometimes I get really depressed about the state of the world, and my inability to affect any sort of tangible change. It's at those times that I try and remember a line from the Vonnegut novel, The Sirens of Titan: "Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years." Maybe my ideals won't amount to much in the short term, but I hope that my pictures can play some role in improving the future.
--Jörg Colberg is founder and editor of the fine-art photography blog Conscientious. He works as a research scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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