War in Iraq: The Coordinates of a Conflict; An exhibition of Photographs by VII. A second opinion

The War in Iraq: Coordinates of Conflict, Photographs by VII, March 12 thru May 30, 2004.

Marianne Fulton writes of photographer Carl Mangly famed photo, a Korean woman carrying her baby and worldly goods flees the fighting around Seoul in the winter attack on the Korean capital in 1951. "Besides showing a refugee, this is about motherhood, about the human race." Despite Roland Barthes' critique of the universalizing tendencies of The Family of Man exhibition based on shared experience, he admits elsewhere that "there could be no photography" without the universal. Photography's ability to generalize human experience, changing the peculiar into the all embracing, can certainly create dramatic war images. Opposed to the humanistic inclusiveness though, the universal is attained through modern warfare's machine-like accuracy in wrecking the human-inhabited landscape. Humanity is dealt with equally in the combat zone--one body lies prone as does any other; gunfire and explosives from either side destroys homes and cities with exactly the same technology. Detailed captions are often necessary to fill in specific identities of persons and places. This will to transform individual stories of suffering into powerful, overarching themes of death and destruction also becomes war photography's greatest philosophical incongruity.

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The War in Iraq: Coordinates of Conflict, an exhibition currently on view at the International Center for Photography, present a series of war images that showcase the hostilities that Americans already know too well through unrelenting news coverage. These photographers have formed agency VII, which includes one of the most well known living war documentary photographers. James Nachtwey, the subject of a recent feature length documentary on war photography (War Photographer by Christian Frei, 2001). The agency hopes to develop alternative means of distributing their photos via the Internet, thus broadening the scope and content of their photos. If these photographers aspire to create a more nuanced image of the war in Iraq, this exhibition tells an equally compelling story about the status of war photography in relation to the news media. This show's catalogue of 200 images, with the generic title War, stands alongside Robert Capa's book of war images taken over half a century ago, and when compared, there are striking similarities in tone and content. War photography was first commissioned by news magazines, including LIFE and LOOK, that featured oversized images of war deemed of great historical importance, and these early modes of representing war have continuity.

The photos Capa shot, and the ones seen now at the ICP, fit into three distinct categories: war politics, active combat and civilian life during wartime. Generals conducting war strategy sessions or arriving at their military posts, presidents performing the affairs of state and military training camps are most common, on par with uniformed soldiers in active combat, followed closely by explosions of various kinds that often create sublime landscapes of orange or blue haze. These reoccurring themes, illustrated in photos such as "A Wounded Northern Alliance Commander Lies Dying After Being Shot by Taliban Forces outside Kabul" (Ron Haviv) and "Charlie Company Pass a Secondary Explosion en Route to Baghdad" (Christopher Morris), narrows the war photographer's subject range to the point of redundancy. These are the scenes that we expect of war, and the story would feel incomplete without them.

The photos that depict civilians grappling with the horrors of war require a different vocabulary, although even these often involve the wartime activities of fleeing, exemplified in a stark black and white image of a line of walking figures, "Refugees Flee the Ongoing Fighting" (Antonin Kratochvil), and mourning the dead. The notable exceptions in this exhibition present some of the more ephemeral situations found within the war-torn landscape. One of the most poignant images found in this exhibition, a white horse gallops wildly across the deserted Iraqi landscape, an unexpected allegory for the possibility of renewal by Christopher Morris. "Afghans Living in Houses Ruined by Decades of Conflict" (Knight) provides a haunting commentary on the technology that has reduced the local population back into the dark ages--the still-inhabited houses look more like tombs and ruins from a distant past. "Children Play with a Discarded Chemical Mask near Basra" (Kratochvil) presents the same desolate landscape, containing only garbage and used tires, tall metal electrical towers and powerlines, reminding us that Iraqis were not watching the news from the safety of their living rooms. These type of nontraditional war photos tell of more complex story than the dozens of combat photos also found in the exhibition.

Likewise, some of the most thought-provoking images in the exhibition involve the re-photographing of photographs. "Men Trade Cards of Indian Movie Stars Illegal During the Reign of the Taliban" (Haviv) introduce the social practices of the newly liberated. Another photograph of images, "Afgan Prisoner's Photographs Lay on a Jail Floor Abandoned by the Taliban" (Boulat) communicates the use of the photograph to identify the enemy. "Women Pose at a Portrait Photographer's Studio" (James Nachtwey) provides a humorous slant to an otherwise somber subject, as the women's identities are obscured for their portrait with thick blue cloth of the Islamic veil. This photo also more broadly comments on the foreign photojournalist's tendency to mask individual identity in favor of portraits of the foreign other based on exotic costumes. In another image by James Nachtwey, Shiites slice themselves with knifes, their clothes drenched in bright red blood, risking stereotypical images of radical Islam. If the war photograph is made compelling by atrocities and eccentricities; the ones that resist these old ploys provide more fruitful social commentary.

War correspondents in the field are said to follow "the blood lines," the trail of combat that leave the dead and injured behind in the wake of battle. Likewise, war photographers also follow these pathways of death. In this sense, war photography probably has most in common with the crime photograph, a document that supplies the evidence about where and when the event happened, but leaves the question of guilt unanswered. Not surprisingly, the nuanced portrait of the corpse seems to comprise a distinct theme within the genre of war photography. Similar to any photo book of war images, Coordinates of Conflict contains photos of the dead in each representative state of passage to the grave. The recently fallen are usually still in uniform or costumed, such as in The Bodies of Executed Taliban on the Frontlines outside Kabul" (Ron Haviv). The bodies are then shown wrapped or presented in open coffins, surrounded by mourners, before finally laid to rest in cemeteries, "A Man Mourns a Family Member Killed in a Looting Incident in Baghdad" (James Nachtwey) shows a man in the cemetery in the holy city of Najaf, the caption explains, where Shiites from around the world wish to be buried. Lastly, and the most gruesome, the mutilated dead, left by the wayside to decompose, or one more notch up on the scale of horror, the family recovering the remains from mass graves. "As President Bush declared an end to fighting, I watched Iraqis dig up Saddam's victims," Boulat writes in one caption. All of these ghastly elements of war are painstakingly documented in the exhibition and in the catalogue. It is notable in these images that it is only the Iraqis that are the pictured injured or dead.

In the combat zone, the heightened emotional element is what makes war photography so gripping to look at. War photos rely on dramatic facial expression, as in "Chulam Sakhi Listens to a Doctor Describe the Chances of Healing" the Foot Damaged in an Accident" (John Stanmeyer). Staff Sergeant Daniel Callahan of the "Wild Bunch" Takes a Break near a Bullet-Scarred Iraqi Police Station Following an Intense Battle (Anderson), his face a tight mask of tension reveals all the grim realities of active combat. A Taliban Fighter Seen Surrendering Through the (mud-smeared) Windshield of a Car (Anderson) wears a beaufiic expression, while the mud splatter takes on the appearance of a floral screen of a religious icon. "An Iraqi Soldier Blown out of his Vehicle by Attacking U.S. Troops Northern Outskirts of Baghdad" (Morris) is partially immersed in water and looks up directly into the camera, his face expresses bewildered helplessness, reminding us that the photographer must either choose to lend a helpful hand or snap the photo.

The photos in the show often have the grainy appearance of a news image, one suspects due to the peculiar conditions of the field, the use of a telephoto lens or the digital camera or the poster-like size of the images, originally intended for books or the internet. This rejection of fine art photography's aesthetic criteria is appropriate to the news-related documentation of war--a war photo cannot be allowed too much beauty. If not beauty, then the war photo must engage some other set of criteria in order to live beyond its immediate news value. Deprived of any narrative depth, war photography at times risks a banality as a result of repetitive themes that lay bare the horror of combat. In Coordinates of Conflict and its catalogue War, some of the missing narration is filled in with reports from the field, filling in context of when and how the photo was taken. "In the twenty years of covering war and conflicts, I could always feel the people being liberated. Here all I could feel was the conqueror: I could see it in the Iraqi faces, I could feel it in their waves, I could feel it in their eyes. This was going to be a difficult war. I found myself having to be a translator, an advisor to a culture I didn't completely understand either," writes Christopher Morris. The critical stance attempted by these photographers is indeed heroic Often traveling with American military battalions with not much access to the local populations, they become passive recorders of the unfolding violence, much like we Americans back home who must watch TV, straining to understand a global conflict represented almost solely through visual images. Their frustration is our frustration.

Sarah Stanley is a writer and artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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