[Leica] Documentary Photography Book Review

[kitmc at acmefoto.com (Kit McChesney)]

George, thank you for sharing this with us. Thank you very much. 

Kit

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+kitmc=acmefoto.com@leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+kitmc=acmefoto.com@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of George
Lottermoser
Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 11:48 AM
To: Leica Users Group
Subject: [Leica] Documentary Photography Book Review

The following review of a major piece of Documentary Photography seems both
timely and historically important:
----------------------------------------------
Evidence of Things Not Seen

by CHRIS HEDGES

Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Viet Nam
by Philip Jones Griffiths

[from the May 24, 2004 issue of The Nation]

My father and most of my uncles fought in World War II. I grew up in the
shadow of the war. But it was not the romantic war of movies and books,
although this romance infected me as it did all of the other farm kids in my
town. It was the war of the emotionally and physically maimed. My father,
who had been an army sergeant in North Africa, went to seminary after the
war and became a Presbyterian minister. When he spoke about the war you
could almost see him push his rifle away. He loathed the military and
especially the lie that war is about glory and manhood and patriotism. When
our family visited museums he steered us away from the ordered displays of
weapons, the rows of muskets and artillery pieces, which gleamed from behind
cases or roped-off areas.

He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. During a Fourth of July parade
in the farm town where I grew up he turned to me as the paunchy veterans
walked past and said acidly, "Always remember, most of those guys were
fixing the trucks in the rear." He hated the VFW hall where these men went,
mostly to drink. He found their periodic attempts to re-create the
comradeship of war, something that of course could never be re-created,
pathetic and sad. When I was about 12 in 1968 he told me that if I was
drafted for the Vietnam War he would go to prison with me. To this day I
have a vision of sitting in a jail cell with my dad.

But it was my Uncle Maurice I thought most about as I looked through the
images in Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Viet Nam, by the photographer
Philip Jones Griffiths. Uncle Maurice was in the regular Army in 1939 in the
South Pacific and fought there until he was wounded five years later by a
mortar blast. He did not return home with my father's resilience, although
he shared my father's anger and feeling of betrayal. His life was destroyed
by the war. He refused to accept his medals, including his Purple Heart.

Maurice would sit around the stove in my grandmother's home and shake as he
struggled to ward off the periodic bouts of malaria. He did not talk about
the war. And so he drank. He became an acute embarrassment to our family,
who lived in a manse where there was no alcohol. He could not hold down a
job. His marriage fell apart. Another uncle hired him to work in his lumber
mill, but Maurice would show up late, often drunk, and then disappear on
another binge. He finally drank himself to death in his trailer, but not
before borrowing and selling the hunting rifle my grandfather had promised
me. The money, I am sure, went for a few more bottles.

There was only one time he ever spoke to me about the war. It was at my
grandmother's kitchen table. He spoke in a flat monotone. His eyes seemed to
be looking far away, far across the field outside the house and the warmth
of the heavy porcelain stove, far across the snowy peaks, to a world that he
could never hope to explain.

"We filled our canteens up in a stream once," he said. "When we went around
the bend there were twenty-five dead Japanese in the water." Those who pay
the price, those who are maimed forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled
up and thrown away. They are war's refuse. We do not want to see them. We do
not want to hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float
around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message
they bear from war is too painful for us to absorb. And so we turn our
backs, just as society turned its back on my uncle, as it turns its back on
all who come back and struggle with the horrors of wounds, physical and
emotional.

In 1962 the United States set out to destroy the crops and forests that gave
succor and sanctuary to the Vietcong. The herbicide our government used to
accomplish this task became known as Agent Orange, after the color of the
canisters used to distribute it. Some of the herbicide contained dioxin, one
of the world's deadliest poisons. This herbicide had cataclysmic effects on
the foliage of Vietnam, but it also seems to have sown a "genetic time bomb"
that has left in its wake thousands of deformed children. Many died shortly
after birth. Griffiths has set out to photograph those unfortunates who
survived.

There is a fierce debate about the link between the deformities and the
herbicide, but the incidence of birth defects in areas that were sprayed is
substantially higher than in those that were not sprayed. The wives of US
servicemen who were exposed to Agent Orange gave birth to a disproportionate
number of deformed babies. The affected families of Vietnam veterans were
paid $180 million by the chemical companies that produced the herbicide,
although none accepted liability. Needless to say, the Vietnamese victims as
well as Vietnam veterans from other nations, such as South Korea and
Australia, have received nothing. The only way to understand war is to see
it from the perspective of the victims. The face of war is in this book. It
stares out at you from the formaldehyde bottles that entomb dead infants
with savage deformities. It stares out at you in the portraits of orphans,
crippled, plagued by skin diseases, abandoned in hospitals and orphanages.
It stares out at you in!
  the pictures from the village of Cam Nghia in central Vietnam, where one
out of ten children is born with deformities. In Cam Nghia families care for
children who suffer from spina bifida, mental retardation, blindness and
tumors, children born years after the war but wounded as if the war never
ended.

We prefer the myth of war, the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism,
abstract words that in the terror and brutality of combat are empty and
meaningless, abstract words that mask the plague of war, abstract words that
are obscene to those ravaged by war. The children in this book know war.

I too went to war, not as a soldier, but as a war correspondent. I too
battle the demons that defeated my uncle. Perhaps it is hopeless to expect
anyone to listen. This book is hard to look at, just as war is hard to see.
The myth has a powerful, intoxicating draw. It permits us to make real the
darkest undercurrents of our fantasy life. It permits us to destroy, not
only things but other human beings. And in that power of wholesale
destruction we feel the power of the divine, the power to revoke another
person's charter to live on this earth. What we do not understand until it
is over is that by unleashing this destructive impulse we destroy not only
others but ourselves. War reverberates for years afterward, spinning lives
into a dark oblivion of pain and suffering.

Most war films and images meant to denounce war fail. They fail because they
impart the thrill of violence and power. War images that show scenes of
combat become, despite the intention of those who produce it, war porn. And
this is why soldiers who have not been to combat buy cases of beer and sit
in front of movies like Platoon, movies meant to denounce war, and they
yearn for it. It is almost impossible to produce antiwar films or books that
portray images of war. It is like trying to produce movies to denounce
pornography and showing erotic love scenes. The prurient fascination with
violent death overpowers the message. The best record of war, of what war is
and what war does to us, is that which eschews images of combat. This is the
power of Griffiths's book. It forces us to see what the state and the press,
the handmaiden of the warmakers, work so hard to keep from us. If we really
knew war, what war does to minds and bodies, it would be harder to wage.
This is why the!
  essence of war, which is death and suffering, is so carefully hidden from
public view. We are not allowed to see dead bodies, at least of our own
soldiers, nor do we see the wounds that forever mark lives, the wounds that
leave faces and bodies horribly disfigured by burns or shrapnel or poison.
War is made palatable. It is sanitized. We are allowed to taste war's
perverse thrill, but usually spared from seeing its consequences. The
wounded and the dead are swiftly carted offstage. The maimed are carefully
hidden in the wings while the band plays a majestic march.

War, at least the mythic version, is wonderful entertainment. We saw this
with the war in Iraq, where the press turned it into a video game, with a
lot of help from the military, and hid from us the effects of bullets,
roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. War is carefully packaged, the
way tobacco or liquor companies package their own poisons. We taste a bit of
war's exhilaration but are safe, spared the pools of blood, the wailing of a
dying child.

Only those works that, like Agent Orange, eschew the fascination with
violence to give us a look at what war does to human bodies grapple with
war's reality. We can only understand war when we turn our attention away
from the weapons my father refused to let us see in museums and look at what
those weapons do to us, look at those who bear war's burden.

Modern warfare is largely impersonal. It mocks the idea of individual
heroism. Industrial warfare, waged since World War I, means that thousands
of people, who never see their attackers, can die and suffer in an instant.
The power of these industrial weapons, to those of us who have not seen them
at work, is incomprehensible. They can take down apartment blocks in
seconds, burying everyone inside. They can demolish tanks and planes and
ships in fiery blasts. They can leave a country like Vietnam defoliated and
poisoned for decades after an afternoon flight.

Those left behind to carry the wounds of war feel, as my uncle did, a sense
of abandonment, made all the more painful by the public manifestations of
gratitude toward those who fit our image of what war should be. We see only
those veterans deemed palatable, those we can look at, those who are willing
to go along with the lies of war. They are trotted out to perpetuate the
myth, held up as heroes for young boys to emulate. We do not tolerate
deviations from the script.

My family was not unique. There were tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of
thousands, of families like ours, families that cared for the human refuse
of World War II. There are families today that carry similar burdens, from
Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War and now Iraq. And there are their
counterparts, once the enemy, now part of the suffering mass of humanity
that survived the war, brothers and sisters of the maimed.

Agent Orange allows us to look beyond the nationalist cant and flag-waving
used to propel us into war. It looks beyond the seduction of the weapons and
the pornography of violence. It looks beyond the myth. It focuses on the
evil of war.

War corrupts our souls and deforms our bodies. It destroys homes and
villages. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and
sacred. It is a scourge. It is a plague. Before you agree to wage war, any
war, look closely at this book. Look at the faces of these children. Look at
the faces of your own children.  

Fond regards,

G e o r g e   L o t t e r m o s e r,    imagist?

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