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| © Peter van Agtmael |
| A flight medic stationed in Baghdad waits in the ready hut by the flightline for the next mission to evacuate the wounded from the battlefield. The first hour after injury is the most crucial in saving lives, and the medevacs launch towards the scene of violence just minutes after a call comes in. Click photo to launch gallery. |
In our ongoing series recognizing today's top professional photographers, Joerg Colberg speaks with Peter van Agtmael, a 26-year-old graduate of Yale University who has spent the majority of his young career in hotspots like Iraq and Afghanistan. Van Agtmael was named one of "25 under 25 - Up and Coming American Photographers" by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2006 and won a World Press Photo award in 2007 for General News Stories.
Joerg Colberg: Over the past few years, you spent time both in Afghanistan and in Iraq as a photojournalist. The risk of getting killed in these countries seems awfully high. How did you decide to become a photojournalist covering war?
Peter van Agtmael: I was interested in war from a very young age. I loved the shapes of fighter planes and the confidence and strength projected by uniforms. For a time I wanted to be a soldier. But I was also a sensitive child, and had no real conception of what war meant. Several events changed me. The first Gulf War ended when I was ten. I had rigorously followed the buildup to war, spewing statistics to anyone who would listen and laminating pictures of U.S. troops I had cut from The New York Times, and which I carried in my pockets everywhere I went. Sometime after the war, I was in the local library and came across a photo retrospective of the conflict. Inside were the obvious jingoistic icons but there were also images of the road of death leading back to Iraq, the Kenneth Jarecke picture of a horrible burned Iraqi soldier, the David Turnley picture of a wounded soldier weeping next to a body bag containing his buddy. Those pictures shocked me. Until that point my conception of death was the exaggerated, bloodless, noble kind from old war movies.
Around the same time I discovered the book, I was in a summer camp that taught us to shoot. I was a pretty good shot and proudly brought the targets back to show my mom. She was horrified, reminding me of the obvious, that learning to shoot is only useful if you plan on killing something. I don't remember consciously making the connection between her words and the images I had seen, but it wasn't long after that I stopped thinking of joining the Army. But my interest in war continued.
When I was in college I became very idealistic about the idea that images could eventually end war. Pictures had profoundly changed my own views of the world, and I wanted to continue in that tradition. I picked up a camera at age 19 and soon after I felt I'd filled in a huge piece in the puzzle of my existence. When I was a senior, America invaded Iraq, and I knew that eventually I would be going.
After graduation, I won a fellowship to spend a year in China. When I returned, I joined an agency that needed a photographer in South Africa, where I spent a year building up my understanding of how to construct photos from my emotions, as well as confidence in myself. I started getting regular assignments from Time, and spent much of my free time documenting the life of Holy Moyo, an amazing Zimbabwean refugee living in a shantytown south of Johannesburg.
By the end of 2005 I decided I was ready for Iraq. I felt comfortable in difficult circumstances, and major publications seemed willing to print my images. Also, I could no longer bear not to go. I told my agency, my parents (who were horrified, angry, depressed but not really surprised), arranged to embed with the U.S. Army, and a month later I was in Iraq.
JC: And then, once you were in Iraq, how long did it take you to adjust to the war? Were you shocked by the initial experience? And how did your photographic work evolve -- if it did -- while you were in Iraq and Afghanistan?
PVA: The days preceding all my flights into a war are nerve-wracking and lonely. The knowledge that I could easily be killed is a hard burden. If I were living for myself it would be much easier, but my family is very close. My mother lost her younger brother shortly before I was born, and when I was growing up the burden of that loss was a strong presence in the family. I thought I was doing what I was meant to do, but I also felt very selfish. Still, I felt an unexpected calm when I strapped into the plane that would take me to Iraq.
It didn't take long to get to my first embed [assignment] in Mosul. There were no other journalists being processed through [the system], and getting around is surprisingly easy. Helicopters run frequent circuits around the major bases in Iraq and it rarely takes more than a day to get to any point in the country. I went out on my first patrol a few hours after arriving on base. I'll never forget that feeling of stepping out of the vehicle. Despite my fears and a notion of what doubtless lay ahead, I was oddly euphoric. Reality, of course, wouldn't take long to set in. Like everyone else, I now bear the burden of my experiences, and my hubris.
I believe my work has evolved with my understanding, but the deeper I've explored, the more confused I've become. Who was good? Who was bad? What did those words even mean? I really liked the soldiers individually, and I knew they wanted to be noble and just, but they were ultimately invaders, and largely unwelcome. When I looked into the eyes of an insurgent as he was being detained, I didn't think I was looking at a heartless killer. Mostly they were just scared young men. They seemed to be local boys wrenched from their ordinary lives by circumstance, not crazed and ruthless extremists. Not so different from the soldiers, really. I tried to capture those contradictions wherever I could in my pictures.
This understanding took time to develop, and at first I was so shocked by the violence I had no interest in photographing anything else. I'll always remember one particular day shortly after arriving. I had complained to some soldiers about how quiet things were, and they looked at me like I was crazy. They had seen their fill. A few minutes later our vehicle was slammed with an enormous concussion. We'd narrowly avoided being hit by an IED. Then we were shot at and went on a wild running chase through the streets. We were mortared, and then a suicide bomber slammed a patrol a few blocks from us, severely wounding several soldiers. Then another IED, which resulted in civilian casualties. I never complained about a calm day ever again.
After several months of concentrating on war's ravages, I needed a break. I went back to the U.S. for about six weeks and thought about what I'd seen. I looked at my pictures, and the Americans were always these shadowy figures inflicting horror. Despite making friends, I hadn't humanized them in the least. I decided to go back to tell a more nuanced view. I also went back because I absolutely couldn't relate to being back to normality and I was frightened to even try. Pictures of violence are important but ultimately alienating on their own. Very few people can relate to those kinds of moments, and I felt that they needed to be balanced by the compassion, humor, and courage I'd seen. So I set up an embed with the Baghdad ER. What better place to see war's contradictions then to witness humans trying desperately to save the lives of the victims of our folly? Besides pain, the most enduring feeling in that ER was love. Unfortunately, when the two mix there are consequences, and the young medics in the ER took to intense self-medication, resulting eventually in the overdose death of a friend of mine, and the expulsion of several others from the military without any health benefits.
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| © Peter van Agtmael |
| Specialist Lucas Yaminishi holds up the bloody shoe of the victim of a suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq. Nine people were killed and over twenty wounded in the bombing, one of the first of its kind in Mosul. |
JC: One of the recurring themes that I have come across when reading accounts of war is that apart from often having to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), many if not most soldiers refuse to talk about their experiences because their families and friends simply cannot comprehend what they went through. I think for photojournalists who go to war zones, something similar might exist -- you clearly must have seen things that I cannot imagine. After having been exposed to Afghanistan and Iraq, is that something you struggle with? And if yes, how do you deal with it?
PVA: Everyone who sees enough trauma gets PTSD. It takes different forms for different people, but I certainly have it. For me, in me, it has manifested itself fairly traditionally, in bouts of depression, irrational anger, and damaged relationships.
I've been able to work through most of my problems on my own. The lucky thing about being a photographer is that you usually have the photographic evidence of your worst memories. It took me a long time to look at some of my pictures, especially of the Baghdad ER, but I'm making peace with my experiences. It helps hugely that I genuinely believe in the power of photojournalism, even if its effects are completely abstract.
One of my favorite quotes is from the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. When asked in the 1970's what the effects of the French Revolution were, he famous replied that it was still "too soon to tell." Although my cynical side believes that every generation of humanity will repeat the previous generation's mistakes (after all there have been thousands of years of humanistic thinking), I still hold out hope that sometime, somehow, all the pictures and videos and words will force that critical mass of humanity to renounce war. We will all be long dead by then, but I still want to play my part.
It also helps that I never carried a gun, and thus never had to pull the trigger and take someone's life. Most people that kill another person will never fully recover from it. A few months ago I was playing darts with some friends who were recovering from their wounds at Walter Reed. Near the end of the game, one of the guys told us that he'd killed a little girl in Iraq. Her parents were turning over illegal weapons they had stashed in their house, and they had given her a grenade to return, supposing that they would have been shot if they tried to approach the soldiers with it themselves. If I had been able to capture his face when he told us that story, it would have said a lot about war. There are a lot of other memories I wish I had pictures for.
I've tried to be aware of the changes in my life brought on by my experiences, but I don't know what I don't know, and I recently started going to a psychologist that specializes in PTSD. I started thanks to the example of my friend Ashley Gilbertson, an extremely brave photographer who has worked in Iraq since the beginning of the war. He recently released his book Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Army lingo for 'What the Fuck?' without a doubt, the most accurate title about war ever conceived), where he talks candidly about his own experiences with PTSD. If the bravest among us can admit it, why shouldn't I? I hope more journalists do the same; PTSD needs to be roundly de-stigmatized.
JC: One of the new recent developments has been to "embed" journalists with troops. While I can see how this setup provides a lot of protection for the journalists, it also appears to run counter to the practices of journalism itself, where, at least in theory, someone tries to find out what is going on in as objective a manner as possible. Doesn't embedding create a bias? Is what we get to see from, say, Iraq really what's going on there?
PVA: I think that's a question with many answers, and is subject mostly to the integrity of the journalist. I will answer from my own experience. I wanted to see Iraq and Afghanistan through my own eyes, without deadlines or editorial constraints. In many ways I had a built-in bias. I'm an American, and was 24 when I first went to Iraq, the same age as many of the soldiers. When I was embedded, I lived with them, often in the same room. We became friends. Almost all were good people.
But my work is about the contradictions in war. While I focused my camera on the individual soldiers, trying to humanize them for our self-deceptive, hero-worshiping culture, I didn't shy away from the moments of misery and horror that they created. Particularly disturbing were the frequent midnight raids, where the soldiers would burst into the home of a suspected insurgent, yelling and pointing their weapons and dragging the men out of their beds while women and children screamed and wept. I went on dozens of these raids, and the soldiers only captured their intended target a few times.
There was an occasion where I censored myself, which I've always regretted. I was on a patrol in Mosul, and we heard a staccato of shots coming from some blocks away. We raced over to where the shots had come from, and we found a bullet-riddled body lying in the street. A policeman returning home had been murdered in a drive-by shooting. As we arrived on the scene, the family of the policeman burst out of their house, clutching and clawing at one another and shrieking miserably. The patrol I was with was deeply affected by the scene and started pounding on all the neighbor's doors, demanding to know if they'd seen or heard anything. The neighbors were scared witless, and claimed they hadn't heard anything, not even the gunshots. As we were going door-to-door, a few young men began hanging about, giving us venomous looks. A beefy soldier, angry about the murder and the reluctance of the populace to help the investigation (he was in the sixth month of his tour, and no doubt had seen many similar situations) ran to them and grabbed one with each arm and slammed them against a wall. The platoon commander ran up and put his pistol to their heads, demanding to know if he'd participated in the shooting. It was an act of frustration, and I hesitated for a few seconds. When I finally raised my camera, the platoon leader saw me and lowered his gun, and I snapped a picture but it was too late. I had a personal affection for the guy and it clouded my judgment.
But for the most part, the embedding system was pretty amazing. I was never censored by a soldier. Once the executive officer of a battalion I was with tried to prevent me from going on raids, but when I told the company commander who was taking me on patrols he just laughed and completely disregarded the order. When I was embedded in the Baghdad ER, I was shooting 16-hour shifts, seven days a week. I was nodding out constantly, but a medic would always wake me up when helicopters carrying the wounded were inbound, and the staff always made space for me in the very small ER. I was pretty amazed by that.
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