Media/Events

Time of War: Panel Discussion, Portland Art Museum, Noon, Oct. 19

Randy Rasmussen (staff photographer for the Oregonian), Todd Tubutis (executive director, Blue Sky Gallery) and I will be doing a panel discussion about Iraq War photography at the museum from noon to 1 p.m. in the Miller Gallery (which is in the Mark Building), 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR 97205. The talk is free, and you can bring lunch if you wish. It’s hosted by the museum’s Photography Council, and sponsored by Pro Photo Supply.

Tubutis is the moderator; he’ll be asking questions, and calling on people from the audience who want to ask questions. Which means, of course, that anyone who comes and wants to participate (actively) in the talk is welcome to do so.

The question I get asked most (relative to my Iraq photos) is, “What was it like being in Iraq?”

I’ve never felt like I’ve given (or could give) an adequate answer. Imagine someone asks you, “What’s America like?” It’s an awfully broad question, and no amount of verbiage is going to do it justice. I usually respond with something like, “Sad and scary, but the people are great.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All true, but ... again, not a very tangible or thorough answer. It’s easier for me to talk about why I took an image in a certain way, how I came to find/see/know the person (or persons) in the photo, whether I ever had problems with military censorship and those kinds of things, than it is for me to attempt to summarize a people, my relationships with Iraqis, my experience with U.S. troops, the heat, the sadness, the taste of any given day, seeing families sell their books to get enough money to eat, the looks on the faces of fourth graders as they talk with their teacher about saying goodbye to their friends before the war starts, the things people say when they’re trying to be honest but honesty hurts, what it means when a ballet dancer who is now a waiter because he’s been wounded serves you tea in a hotel, and he’s handsome, and you are able bodied, and he’s now your momentary servant, and the smell of rotting garbage in the streets around the mosque, and what it means to make someone who’s been designated your enemy laugh so hard you both start crying.

And what it means to capture them. Hold them. Distill them. In shapes and colors, and sum them up in newsprint and hope you have somehow, despite the vivisection, the ridiculous abstraction of little illusory pieces of them, have somehow “done them justice.”

And that you have “made art.”

Or news.

The truth is, if you worry about things, if you’ve ever been afraid, if you love your mother, if you have a friend who is having problems in his marriage, if anyone has ever been kind to you when you weren’t expecting it, you have been closer to Iraq than you might think. It’s shocking sometimes how much we and they are alike. How much we share in the basic things we believe in, and value. It’s somewhat redundant, then, for me to try to talk in some omniscient manner, about what Iraq was or is.

I do much better talking about specific images. Or experiences. Or specific people. With questions such as, “Who is that? Why did you chose to photograph her in that way? What are you asking us to see?”

And so on. Of course the best thing of all is when I get to listen. Truly. Because one thing photographers rarely get to hear is how a viewer feels when he or she is looking at your images. Not just how the person feels, but why he or she thinks feels a particular way. What the image provokes. Causes. Feeds. 

Or doesn’t do. Why the image has failed. It’s good for me to hear this, because sometimes I take photos that I feel very passionate about ... that are dead in the eyes of viewers. It’s good to find out what’s different about the way I see (or feel) and the way viewers feel or see.

So if you come, I hope you speak up. And tell me (I’m not sure how Randy or Todd feel about this; I can’t speak for them) whether you think I’m doing well, or failing, or that you feel sad, and why you feel sad, or that you’re excited about something you see, and why that is.

This isn’t just a talk for Todd, Randy and me. It’s for anyone who’s interested in photography (war photography in particular) and wants to start a conversation. We’d love to hear from you.

Other Media

Booktease Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq. A booktease is a web file that illustrates a set of pages from a book.

Portraits of Iraq
Interview and article by D.K. Row, Oregonian arts critic (Feb. 22, 2008).

Photographers’ Showcase from No Caption Needed: Remembering Iraq. No Caption Needed is the title of both a book and a blog (by professors Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites) addressing images addressing “Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.”

“These images from the early phase of the war in Iraq can be see as aides-memoire for a war already fading into oblivion, and as reminders that war ravages time–by filling it with terror, and creating vast stretches of boredom, and making lifetimes prisons, and giving all that happened the unreality of floating outside of ordinary experience ...”

NPR podcast of Aug. 19 interview (by Jefferson Public Radio’s Jeffrey Riley) on the Iraq War and war photography

The first part of the audio file is an interview with opera singer Khori Dastoor. My part begins about midway through, just after Garrison Keillor reads. The file opens without giving a listener the chance to define exactly where you want to begin listening, otherwise I’d list the timecode for the start point. Sorry!

Images of Iraq: An Oregon writer and photographer discusses war and people

This is Susan Palmer’s story about a public discussion of the Iraq War I led in Eugene, Ore. Aug. 19, at the Eugene Public Library.