More WTF: Point And Shoot

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If you've been following this site, you know I've been taking in images from Ashley Gilbertson's book, Whisky Tango Foxtrot, based on the extended time he spent as a war photographer in Iraq.

In this shot, we see an American soldier snapping a photo of a dead Mahdi Army fighter. The Iraqi was killed in May 2004 in the course of an overnight grenade-lobbing battle in a Karbala amusement park between insurgents and  troops of the First Armored Division.  According to Ashley's caption, Army policy is to leave Iraqi dead for other Iraqis to recover and bury.  As a result, the body was still on the street the next morning.

Based on Ashley's text, the soldier is taking the photo because the scene is "an object of curiosity for GI's."

The allusion reminds me of a bumper sticker that was popular during the Vietnam War.  It read:  "Join the Army: Travel to exotic distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them."  Of course, the slogan has everything to do with cynicism and next-to-nothing to do with insight.  Still, looking at an image like this, it makes me think hard about the intersection of war (especially a U.S.-instigated cultural and religious war) and personal digital photography and video. (You do remember this, right?).

Call it a mixing of metaphors, but at a perverse level, where does a shot like this depart from the sphere of work-a-day war fighting and become, a lá the bumper sticker, a sadistic exemplification of tourism?

At the same time, I'm interested in the politics of the shot, and the curiosity of one shooter -- a professional -- shooting an amateur.

As Gilbertson conveys throughout the book, the largest portion of the shots he ended up with were the result of his -- and the visual media's -- limited access to the war.  That being the case, one thing this picture captures is the irony that the troops -- so many of them with a point-and-shoot on their person -- had the media in their pockets, while the war photographers, and by extension, the rest of us, had next-to-nothing.

BAG's WTF series here.  Purchase WTF here.  WTF Web Site right here.

(Images from "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War".  © Ashley Gilbertson. Used by permission.)

Comments

[Victor F]

Digital means you can shoot everything. Anybody can shoot everything, if they have access anyway. You don't have to worry about processing film or having your printer refuse to reproduce your frames. Like you said, the cameras are everywhere, but the professional shooters are left "out of the picture" so to speak.

I think war is a sadistic activity and being a part of it must be like being a tourist in hell. Why not take some pictures back if you're in hell anyway? These soldiers can delete these images any time they want, but I doubt they will forget what they saw. It's a morbid curiosity, I don't know if their motive is sadistic but it is part of their reality.

[Vigilante]

"a dead Mahdi Army fighter"? So this guy was not AQI. So this guy was a resistance fighter, an "insurgent", fighting against the occupation of his country. He IS an 'object' of interest.

[demit]

And these are the people who will be coming back from the war and rejoining a normal everyday world. The adjustment—them to us and us to them—will play out for the next thirty years. God help us all.

[tina]

Reminds me of church servi-touists who pay to go on two-week "mission trips". They travel, but they learn nothing except how to reinforce their own prejudices and their view of the rest of the planet as a wretched, shivering foil by which to measure the glory of America.

Most common statement, "Don't all those poor little children make you feel GLAD that you live in a great country like America?"

Virginia Woolf as her British couple sails past Portugal, "Oh, doesn't it make you glad to be English?" Only in the eyes of Americans, everybody else in the world is a coolie.

I literally heard the following after a church "mission trip" to an AIDS orphanage in Kenya that included a nine day safari (out of two weeks); helping the Africans included shopping for jewelry in a poor women's bazaar set up for that purpose. Nobody saw anything wrong with this. Anyway, elderly church lady narrating her pictures,

"Here's a picture of an antelope, and here's one of a little black boy. here's a picture of a hyena, and this one is of a little girl that has AIDS. Here's a cheetah on a rock, and this is some schoolchildren, isn't it amazing how clean they are?"

Yeah, why shouldn't their grandsons take pictures of dead Iraqis? It's nothing to them. And doesn't the sight of all that make you GLAD you live in America?

[margaret]

In 1955, I saw a snapshot made by the father of a fellow high school student during the war against Japan. It featured a kneeling Japanese soldier, hands tied behind his back, with blood streaming from his mouth, while an American soldier gleefully held up a pulled tooth. Surrounding the two were other soldiers, grinning at the Japanese prisoner's pain.

I was horrified to think that Americans could do such things, as I had been thoroughly indoctrinated at the Saturday matinees at newsreels during and after the war which propagandized the bravery of our men at war. It was, for me, a personal Abu Graib moment. That was a moment which Brokaw and others do not celebrate as they lavish praise for the "Greatest Generation."

The moral, as we know is: war dehumanizes the soldier; for how else could he shoot and kill his fellow man when every moral stricture says, "Thou shalt not kill."

[Gahso]

All the more poignant after seeing this video clip regarding the insurgents as defenders against a foreign occupation army.

This is a real horror for the US citizen to see. Imagine being an Iraqi and seeing this image of a foreign fighter musing over the the body of a resistance fighter. It would be enough to make you join the resistance.

[jtfromBC]

Gasho that's an excellent clip, I have just finished watching Steve Connors and Molly Bingham being interviewed on Democracy Now .
http://www.democracynow.org/streampage.pl

[Janet]

I would like to point out that the bumper sticker quoted was an anti-Vietnam war bumper sticker. In those days the social assumption was that wanting to kill people was barbaric, wrong, and shocking. These days is seems the same message would be interpreted in the opposite way as properly dismissive of "the other."

[Rafael]

The policy during the first Gulf War was that the GIs could not take any pictures, but they did. Many of the pictures came from the MP units who had to "police" the battlefield (clean it up, gather prisoners, direct traffic). Many of them had not seen the face of real modern warfare and where stun by what they saw and felt compelled to take pics.

I saw a group of them (pics) and to this day I am hunted by the image of those pearly whites sticking out of the charred corpses. You see a HEAT round (High Explosive Anti-Tank) would hit a vehicle and burn everything inside. The bodies where left in their last positions, the intense fires bleaching their teeth white in the process.

This could be read as "Hey look Ma! Look what I did!" or more like "I was here, and this is what I saw and did." Either way it is deeply disturbing.

[Rafael]

Of course there is a double standard operating here, a racist one. This a picture of an American snapping a pic of a dead Iraqi, but to even hint of showing the death of Americans, well that (for some unexplainable reason) seems to be taboo.

[croatoan]

In 2003 Bush administration officials were outraged about photos of American POWs and dead American soldiers.

Donald Rumsfeld: "The Geneva Convention indicates that it's not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war."

George W. Bush: "I do know that we expect them to be treated humanely. Just like we will treat any prisoners of theirs."

[Gasho]

Looking again, I bet it's a very heavy, serious, emotional shot for this soldier/mercinary/individual-- I just wonder how many of these shots he's taken and how long he'll have to go to unwind that karma.

[stevelaudig]

Somewhere in George S. Patton, War as I Knew It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947) there is vignette to the effect that the 200,000th prisoner of war taken by Patton's army was photographed and Patton's propaganda wing was going to release it when the military lawyers forbade it as a violation of the Hague Conventions. Sorry I can't provide the pinpoint cite. It will be along walk back to civilization beginning 20 January 2009. We can only hope the nation has the strength to get there.

[SEAS]

I'm struck by a paradox in the picture. The "Mahdi army fighter" (which we know because representatives of the US gov't said so)is the most intimately exposed/revealed (bare chest, face, hands and feet, and of course his blood is pretty personal)and yet do we really know the least thing about him? I kind of doubt he was carrying ID, and his clothing does not appear to my western eyes designed to establish his social, military or political position. In contrast, the shooter soldier (and pretty much all of the soldiers) is almost competely covered. Only part of his wrist, upper lip and lower jaw are exposed. Yet everything about what he is covered in telegraphs his affiliations, military connections, technical savvy and access. This soldier now has a permanent picture of what may be the most intimate picture ever taken of this man, and yet will he ever know a single thing about the man's life?

And so, after all these years of war, I still know nothing about the dead bodies I have at least indirectly created in Iraq (and which I, and everyone with a computer can see in such horrifying detail), or who is really underneath all the military equipment I, my kids and grandkids have been buying there.

That which is most revealed is obscure.

[Ashley Gilbertson]

Thanks everyone for your comments.

I thought I should give some background on the photograph.

First of all, I've seen marines and soldiers do this quite often. I believe they make the photographs for a couple of reasons. First, the American's almost never get to see who they're fighting, so, in cases like this they're fascinated with the face of the enemy -- if you look closely, you'll notice the MP is actually photographing the mans face. Second, I think there is some element of not being able to believe that they're there, seeing that stuff, so scenes are photographed almost as evidence. That's a normal reaction in soldiers, civilians and refugees in war zones. The very situation they find themselves in is often so preposterous, so awful, that they look to create a visual record to make it seem more real.

Lastly, the man did have an I.D. card which identified his as belonging to a force protection government agency (that was infiltrated by the Mahdi army), he died with a grenade in his hand (that photo is in the book next to the photo on this page) and he was killed in an amusement park after wounding at least two Americans during the fight. The park was being used by Muqtada al-Sadr's militia to store weapons.

[lytom]

I hope it (not knowing your enemy) is not a "justification" for the taking of photographs or even for shooting the man.
If reality has to be made real by taking pictures, then there is something horribly wrong.
Victims taking photographs is understandable, the occupation forces taking pictures for "evidence" seems to be evil.
I have a terrible distrust of something called "force protection government agency." That agency protects the occupation status of the country.
I do hope that the "reality" of killing sinks in and will haunt and wake up the conscience!

[Books Alive]

Ashley, my local CBS radio station airs the Weekly News Roundup on Sunday mornings, just after midnight. I usually try to stay awake and was rewarded this weekend by hearing your interview. The host did a great job covering the varied aspects of your new book, especially its title!

[Ben]

Great site, and yeah his photos are great! Check out this great Iraq selection http://www.newstatesman.com/200711010029