Known and Strange Things Read online

  My parents live in Lagos, Nigeria. Sometimes, when I miss them or miss home, I go to Google Maps and trace the highway that leads from Lagos Island to our family’s house in the northern part of the city. I find our street amid the complicated jumble of brown lines just east of the bus terminal. I can make out the shape of the house, the tree in front of it, the surrounding fence. I hover there, “visiting” home.

  The slippage between the domestic and the threatening aspects of aerial surveillance is something the photographer Tomas van Houtryve has explored in his powerful project Blue Sky Days. The title comes from the testimony of a thirteen-year-old Pakistani boy whose grandmother was killed in a drone strike. “I no longer love blue skies,” the boy said, speaking before Congress. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” Houtryve attached a camera to a small drone and traveled around the United States, making aerial photographs of the sorts of events that have been associated with intentional or erroneous drone strikes: funerals, weddings, groups of people at play, in prayer, or during exercise. His images show Americans in the course of their daily lives, photographed from a great height, in bright sun that throws their distorted shadows far ahead of them, presenting them as unindividuated, vulnerable, and human. Houtryve makes it clear that the people in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, or Afghanistan who are killed by American drones are also just like this. With simple, vivid means, Houtryve brings the war home.

  Houtryve’s work has been published in magazines and, meticulously printed in large format, displayed in galleries. But there are other photographs made by or about drones that you encounter almost solely online. Two of these projects, very different from each other in effect and intent, happen to have settled on an identical name: Dronestagram. One, hosted at the website www.dronestagr.am, invites submissions from aerial-photography enthusiasts who are using small, commercially available or homemade drones to take photos or make videos. The site runs a photography contest, sponsored in part by National Geographic, and the winning images tend to be pretty, brightly colored landscapes of the kind that might end up on calendars or in tourist brochures. Photoshopped, wide-angled, and hectically spectacular, the photos are popular, garnering thousands of likes. But mostly they lack the element of formal provocation or conceptual rupture on which memorable images depend.

  The other project that shares the name Dronestagram was created a little earlier, in 2012, by the computer artist James Bridle. He scours the news media for information about drone strikes and presents those events in capsule written form, accompanying them with a Google satellite image of the location or vicinity of the strike. In Bridle’s project, which he presents on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, we see a landscape directly from above, with buildings visible in plan form, set in brown or green surroundings. These are places where people died, whether they were suspected terrorists or bystanders. The images—sober, descriptive, clinical—are undramatic and sufficient. They make explicit the continuity between reconnaissance and attack and also embed the grim promise that it’s not over. There are more strikes to come.

  The two Dronestagrams, the sanguine and the melancholic, add to our ever-increasing archive of possible landscapes. Imagine all those pictures stitched together into a single image. In this ideal aerial view, neither the pervasive violence nor the sometimes cloying prettiness would be visible. Conquest and sentimentality would both be irrelevant. In other words, the image might be like the “blue marble” photograph of Earth, taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972. It is our world, serene and self-contained, seen in one glance. It is not a view that excites us into plans for bombing our enemies, for it includes us as well. It is a view that reminds us of how mighty we are, how fragile, how delicately connected, and how beautiful.

  Against Neutrality

  THE PHOTOGRAPH AND the words arrive simultaneously. They guarantee each other. You believe the words more because the photograph verifies them, and trust the photograph because you trust the words. Additionally, each puts further pressure on the interpretation: a war photograph can, for example, make a grim situation palatable, just as a story about a scandal can make the politician depicted look pathetic. But images, unlike words, are often presumed to be unbiased. The facticity of a photograph can conceal the craftiness of its content and selection.

  This is why I noticed a tweet by John Edwin Mason, a historian of photography: “Another reminder that manipulation in photography isn’t really about Photoshop or darkroom tricks.” Embedded below this line was another tweet, which contained the photograph of a young woman. She was blond and wore a scoop-neck black sweater over a white blouse. Her eyes looked off to the side. The photograph was black and white, reminiscent of old Hollywood headshots. There was a link to an article at Foreign Policy’s website, and the subject of both the article and the photograph was Marion Maréchal–Le Pen, a twenty-six-year-old French politician and rising star of the far-right Front National. Maréchal–Le Pen is the granddaughter of the enthusiastically racist Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the Front National. She has been careful not to sound too much like her grandfather, but she remains closely associated with his nativist priorities and xenophobic vision. She holds, for instance, the charming view that Muslims in France should not be allowed to have the same “rank” as Catholics. In a France gripped by anti-immigrant fears in the wake of terrorist attacks, Maréchal–Le Pen and the Front National have had obvious appeal and increased political success.

  What kind of communication happens when a sympathetic photograph is used to profile a figure like Maréchal–Le Pen? I asked Mason what he meant by “manipulation” in his tweet. “The style of photography is instantly recognizable as that of a celebrity profile,” he replied. “It’s inviting us to identify with the subject and see the subject as attractive and desirable. If you wanted to glamorize young [Maréchal–]Le Pen, you’d pick precisely this photo.” Benjamin Pauker, the executive editor of Foreign Policy, sees nothing untoward in the image (by the photographer Joel Saget), and he objected to the idea that it was in some way glamorous. But it was hard not to contrast Saget’s image, which appeared on the home page, with another, by Patrick Aventurier, that accompanied the full text of the piece. Aventurier’s photograph is in color, and it shows Maréchal–Le Pen on the podium, at a distance, with several other people, and with French flags in the foreground and background. This photograph, by emphasizing Maréchal–Le Pen’s political role as well as her nationalism, sends a clearly different message.

  The right image to use with a written piece: it’s an old worry, relevant to portraiture, but argued about much more with regard to war photography. The question has been taken up again by the writer David Shields, in his recent book War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict. Shields believes that The New York Times, in particular, “glorified war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images.” He selected sixty-four photos from the thousands that ran on page A1 of the Times between 2002 and 2013 and arranged them into ten brief chapters under titles like “Playground,” “Father,” “God,” and “Pietà.”

  The book includes a number of crepuscular or otherwise moodily colored scenes of choppers and trucks that could be outtakes from Apocalypse Now. But we also see a navy doctor cradling an Iraqi orphan, President George W. Bush meeting U.S. troops in Qatar, the blasted landscape of an Iraqi city, an imam blessing a newborn in Brooklyn, a grief-stricken Palestinian man carrying a boy killed during a protest, and a dead Iraqi soldier lying in the dust. Are these sixty-four photos, some of which are not war pictures at all, representative of The New York Times’ coverage over the decade in question? Even on the evidence Shields presents, the Times has published some great images, some less great ones, some that could be read as antiwar and some that could be read as pro-war propaganda. Imagine looking at a pile of thousands of photographs taken over many years by a wide range of photojournalists: you would be able to select sixty-four to suit j
ust about any argument.

  An image depends radically on context, on how it is placed but also on who is looking at it. Susan Sontag observed: “The frankest representations of war, and of disaster-injured bodies, are of those who seem most foreign, therefore least likely to be known. With subjects closer to home, the photographer is expected to be more discreet.” American journalism, The New York Times included, remains in thrall to this expectation, an expectation that is ripe for sustained and perceptive critique. But War Is Beautiful is not that critique. It feels instead like a missed opportunity, and it made me return to other recent projects that have addressed related questions more incisively.

  Disco Night Sept. 11 (2014), by the photojournalist Peter van Agtmael, is not as high-concept as Shields’s book. In fact, it is not conceptual at all. It is simply a courageous record of recent American wars by a photojournalist who made repeated trips to dangerous outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but who also visited injured and bewildered American veterans in places like Wisconsin and Texas. Van Agtmael captions most of the photos with a paragraph or so of reportage, and his captions are no less resonant than his uncannily crisp, dreamlike photos. A typical image is one taken in 2009 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Against a pale brown desertified landscape, seven soldiers are seen sweeping the ground for improvised explosive devices. Each man is separated from the others by a few paces. They are working together, but each is alone, and at this distance and from this height (it is hard to tell if the photographer is in a helicopter or on a rise), the men look like toy soldiers. They search, and they find nothing. Minutes later, there’s an explosion. Disco Night Sept. 11, which presents many images from the moments just before something terrible happens or, even more vividly, from the years of aftermath, conveys the madness, confusion, theatricality, and ironies of war. It made me think what any book about war photography should: Just what the hell is going on here?

  A very different project is War Primer 2 (2011), by the artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Like Shields, Broomberg and Chanarin make use of appropriated imagery. In their case, it is actually an appropriation of an appropriation: War Primer 2 is based on Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel (War Primer, 1955), a book of press photographs, largely culled from newspapers and magazines from the previous decades, that Brecht captioned with bitter, poetic quatrains.

  For their update, Broomberg and Chanarin have pasted photographs associated with the Global War on Terrorism, downloaded from the Internet, into Brecht’s book, layering them directly onto his original images. The new photos, as visceral, graphic, and sometimes plainly horrific as the old ones, include scenes of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Hussein’s execution, the White House during the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden, and George W. Bush serving soldiers at Thanksgiving. Alongside Brecht’s lines, the images become an uncanny indictment of American conduct in these recent wars, but also a lament about the evil of war in general.

  The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction. This is what Brecht meant in 1931 when he wrote, “The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter.” What then are we to do with this devious tool? One option is to resist the depiction of violence, to side with the reader who protests an unpleasant photograph and defends the bounds of good taste. But another—and to me, better—option is to understand that the problem is not one of too many unsettling images but of too few. When the tragedy or suffering of only certain people in certain places is made visible, the boundaries of good taste are not really transgressed at all. “We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. What is hard is being vividly immersed in our own pain. We ought to see what actually happens to American bodies in situations of war or mass violence, whether at the moment they happen, as Broomberg and Chanarin show us, or in the wake of the violence, as presented in van Agtmael’s book. We must not turn away from what that kind of suffering looks like when visited on “us.” Photojournalism relating to war, prejudice, hatred, and violence pursues a blinkered neutrality at the expense of real fairness. (Domestically, this manifests as a tolerance for black suffering that would not be extended to white suffering; the proliferation of videos of black people being killed by police, for example.) All too often in our media, the words take us all the way there, but the photographs, habituated to a certain safety, hold back.

  SECTION III

  Being There

  Far Away from Here

  ONLY A FEW slender strings were attached: two public readings and a commitment to spend the majority of the six months in the country. Beyond that, I would be left to my own devices. An apartment would be provided, and a stipend. I didn’t think about it for very long. I wrote back: yes.

  The invitation had come from the Literaturhaus in Zürich, one of those wonderful arts institutions of which Europe seems to have so many. Every six months they selected one writer, from anywhere in the world, to stay in the apartment they ran with a foundation. When I received the invitation, I felt as though I’d won a raffle I didn’t even know I had a ticket for.

  Switzerland: the place comes with an easy set of mental associations. But I suspected there was more to it than its reputation for calendar-pretty landscapes, secretive bankers, and regular trains, and here was a chance to see for myself. Besides, I had a manuscript to work on, a nonfictional narrative of Lagos, Nigeria, the city in which I grew up. Where better to write about chaotic, relentless, overpopulated Lagos than in modest, quietly industrious Zürich? There would be so little else to do in Switzerland anyway (according to my less-than-enthusiastic friends) that I would be mainly absorbed in writing during my time there. Perhaps I might even continue my photographic exploration of landscape and memory, a project that comprised images from many countries I had visited over the past few years.

  I arrived in June. The apartment was in a peaceful neighborhood of the compact and elegant city. The writing desk faced a row of windows, and there were mountains in the distance. I grew up mountainless, close to the lagoon and the sea, in a city where the only heights were high-rises. I was familiar with the extremes of city life: the crowds, the traffic, the energy, the crime. But nature’s extremes, of violent weather or vertiginous terrain, were unknown to me. Those mountains, visible from my desk, were faint and blue in the distance, not particularly imposing. But already they beckoned.

  I had taken a good camera to Zürich with me, a professional-grade Canon. There was a subtle problem with it that I often encounter in digital cameras: they are fine for bright landscapes, but they tend to struggle with highlights and the resulting images sometimes have a plastic sheen. The Canon had served me well on a recent trip to Palestine, but it wasn’t working in Switzerland. I had also brought along a film camera, a beautiful Contax G2 range finder. But that wasn’t working either: it didn’t give me the focusing control I wanted, and I missed the momentary darkening of the visual field when I pressed the shutter, which is something you get with the flipped mirror of an SLR but not in a range finder. The iPhone 5 camera, meanwhile, which I don’t rule out as a tool, wasn’t going to give me the detail I needed for the prints I had in mind.

  What I wanted was an SLR film camera. Sure, there was the cluttered cabinet in my New York City apartment with its eight cameras and their various lenses and filters: the Hasselblad, the Nikon, the Leica, a couple of other Canons, some cameras I hadn’t touched in years. Each sat there, the physical evidence of some previous fervor. Nevertheless, the heart wants what it wants, and, about a week after arriving in Zürich, I bought an old Yashica and two lenses from a dealer near the Hauptbahnhof, for the very low and un-Swiss price of twenty-five Swiss francs, just a little over twenty-five dollars.

  I loved that Yashica. During my six months in Zürich, I wrote a bit about Lagos and did a bit of other writing. But I stumbled into a surprise: the majority of my time went into travel
ing around Switzerland taking photographs, in all weather and at all elevations, thinking with my eyes about the country around me. The drama in these landscapes was real, and seemed almost to demand a response from the viewer.

  August 2014. I’m on the Gemmipass, 2,770 meters above sea level and 670 meters above the town of Leukerbad. James Baldwin wintered in Leukerbad in the 1950s. Later he would write, “From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came.” The Gemmipass is a high mountain pass that connects mountains in the canton of Valais with those in the canton of Bern. I’m hunched over the tripod, pressing the shutter every few seconds. The weather has suddenly turned. Is this rain? Fog? I wipe the lens clean. Not only am I the only black man on the pass just now, I am the only human being of any kind. It’s just me and the lake, the surrounding mountains, the rocks nearby, and some signs on the hiking trail. I have the wrong shoes on, and my jacket is not waterproof. I clamber over some hillocks so that I see the reverse of a yellow trail sign, the side on which there’s no writing. The rocks on the mountain face are a beautiful scatter. The mist goes as it came, without warning. I put another roll of film in the Yashica and keep shooting.