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Soldier photography: visualising the war in Iraq

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

LIAM KENNEDY
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Abstract

This article focuses on the production and dissemination of photographic images by serving US soldiers in Iraq who are photographing their experiences and posting them on the Internet. This form of visual communication – in real time and communal – is new in the representation of warfare; in earlier wars soldiers took photographs, but these were not immediately shared in the way websites can disseminate images globally. This digital generation of soldiers exist in a new relationship to their experience of war; they are now potential witnesses and sources within the documentation of events, not just the imaged actors – a blurring of roles that reflects the correlations of revolutions in military and media affairs. This photography documents the everyday experiences of the soldiers and its historical significance may reside less in the controversial or revelatory images but in more mundane documentation of the environments, activities and feelings of American soldiery at war.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 817 - 833
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2009

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References

1 ‘Rumsfeld Testifies Before Senate Armed Services Committee’, Washingtonpost.com, 7 May 2004, {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8575-2004May7.html}

2 See Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2005); Liam Kennedy, ‘Securing Vision: Photography and US Foreign Policy’, Media, Culture and Society, 30:3 (2008), pp. 279–94.

3 On the impact of citizen journalism on the profession in the United States, see Neil Henry, American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in the Age of New Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). On photojournalism, see Dan Gilmor ‘The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist’, The Center for Citizen Media, 4 December 2006, {http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/12/04/the-demise-of-the-professional-photojournalist/}

4 Rita Pyrillis, ‘The Blog of War’, Biz Tech Magazine, 21 January 2006, {http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=273}

5 While there is some disagreement about which soldier produced the first blog in Iraq there is consensus that the most significant first postings were by Specialist Colby Buzzell in Mosul in August 2004. He created a blog under the name CBFTW (in army slang, FTW means ‘fuck the world’) and wrote extensively about the fear and horror of battle and also commented with some scepticism and wit on army culture. Buzzell was one of the first soldiers to be censured by the military for running a blog when his commanders warned him he was endangering mission security. The blog attracted major media attention and influenced many more soldiers to create online diaries.

6 Quoted in Megan Putnam, ‘Soldier Blogs: Bringing the War Home’, AngeLingo, {http://angelingo.usc.edu/vol104issue01}

7 Quoted in John Hockenberry, ‘The Blogs of War’, Wired, {http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/milblogs_pr.html}

8 Quoted in Putnam, ‘Soldier Blogs’.

9 Greyhawk, ‘A Brief History of Milblogs’, The Mudville Gazette, 11 September 2003, {http://www.mudvillegazette.com/milblogs/2003/09/} In Matthew Burden's view, ‘We just don't get a firsthand opinion on what it's like to be a soldier. We don't know what's happening on the ground and why this soldier is doing what he's doing. You hear three guys died, but you don't hear that they have taken down a hundred terrorists. They just want their fair shake’. Quoted in Pyrillis, ‘The Blog of War’.

10 In line with the broader strategies of bloggers devoted to political affairs, particularly the more conservative ones, they question the objectivity or veracity of mainstream media reporting on the war in Iraq. Military bloggers were partially responsible for the resignation of CNN executive Eason Jordan over comments he made about US troops targeting reporters in Iraq. See Mike Spector, ‘Cry Bias, and let Slip the Blogs of War’, Wall Street Journal, 26 July 2006, {http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115388005621517421-FmiVf9I3IoQ4cYnDSnAAHhLyIDo_20070725.html}

11 Gary Trudeau, the author of the Doonesbury cartoon strip, has drawn on blogging commentaries for his strip's narration of soldier's experiences in Iraq. In 2006 Trudeau created a milblog titled ‘The Sandbox’, where ‘the focus is not on policy and partisanship […] but on the unclassified details of deployment – the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd.’ See {http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/}

12 See David Levi-Strauss, Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture (New York: North Atlantic Books, 2004).

13 Jason Hartley, Just Another Soldier, http://blog.justanothersoldier.com/. Hartley was unrepentant about his activity and went on to produce one of the first books based on a blog, also titled Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq (New York: Harper Collins, 2005).

14 Quoted in James Hebert, ‘The Front Line Online’, The San Diego Union Tribune, 18 July 2004, {http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040718/news_blogcpy.html}

15 Quoted in ‘Soldier Photographer’, BagnewsNotes, 1 December 2007, {http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2007/12/current-oif.html} Of course, this relationship between ‘soldiering and photographing’ also speaks to the ‘embedded’ nature of all soldier photography. It engenders a ‘frame’ for the imagery (symbolised by Romano's shots from within military vehicles) that is always already charged with interpretation. See Judith Butler, ‘Photography, War, Outrage’, PMLA 120:3 (2005), pp. 820–26.

16 Romano makes this comment on his flickr site, {http://www.flickr.com/photos/70355737@N00/}

17 Posting images of his last tour in Iraq, Romano selected one image for particular emphasis as symbolic of the distance between the Americans and the Iraqis. It depicts a young street sweeper staring at the photographer. Of this image he remarks, ‘I will always remember the countless blank stares received from the people we were supposed to be helping, supporting and fighting for […] If this was my life, my world […] the indifference makes sense. For a pseudo-American civilian life I've now found myself in, these stares have left me guilty. There's a certain detachment many of us “over there” have spoken about during our time over there. And it is true if you look at how we have evolved our war fighting. I come home and see where this indifference and detachment has come from.’ See {http://www.flickr.com/photos/70355737@N00/}

18 Quoted in Devin Friedman, (ed.), This Is Our War: Servicemen's Photographs of Life in Iraq (New York: Artisan, 2006), p. 125.

19 ibid., p. 160.

20 Mark Glaser, ‘Porn Site Offers Soldiers Free Access in Exchange for Photos of Dead Iraqis’, Online Journalism Review, 20 September 2005, {www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050920glaser}

21 This is to suggest the photographs register the ‘optical unconscious’ of American policies in Iraq, refiguring ‘unknown knowns’ of American culture, what Slavoj Zizek defines as ‘the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values’. Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Empty Wheelbarrow’, The Guardian, 20 February 2005, p. 22. See Kennedy, ‘Securing Vision’, pp. 287–91. The connections with the imagery of Abu Ghraib are suggestive in this regard but would require detailed comparison. At the very least, we can observe that a common element of these visualisations is that they illuminate aspects of American military culture that are publicly disavowed and only rarely documented. The more obscene practices of the military at war, accentuated by conditions of stress and trauma, remain largely hidden. This disavowal remains an important structural component of the military's need to align security with ‘American values’, a task not made easier by the advent of a digitised soldiery.

22 Jason Hartley, in his blog ‘Just Another Soldier’ occasionally provides tentative thoughts about this. Following the killing of a civilian Iraqi family by US forces, who mistook them for insurgents, Hartley reflects on his inchoate feelings about such killings: ‘I've been stewing over this dead family thing for couple of weeks now. I've been painstakingly mulling over in my mind the things these insurgents do and the things we, the US Army do and the unintutitive peculiarity of how the drive to be violent seems to precede the purpose to be violent and how rampant it is to meaninglessly develop one's identity through injury, but frankly I don't feel I've figured it all out well enough yet to even cludge together a coherent line of thought.’ Along with his commentary Hartley posts a photograph of one of the dead civilians. {http://blog.justanothersoldier.com/?p=30}

23 Quoted in Hockenberry, ‘The Blogs of War’.

24 ‘Army to Crack Down on Military Bloggers’, Military.Com, 31 August 2005, {www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,76350,00}

25 ‘It's Not the Cellphone Stupid’, Stock Photo Talk, 4 June 2004, {http://talks.blogs.com/phototalk/2004/06/its_not_the_cel.html}

26 Elizabeth L. Robbins, ‘Muddy Boots IO: The Rise of Soldier Blogs’, {http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/Staff/g7/InformationOperations-RobbinsMuddyBoots.pdf}

27 Quoted in Nikki Schwab, ‘Blogs Chronicle War From Soldiers' perspectives’, washingtonpost.com, 2 May 2007, {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202253.html}

28 See {http://www.defenselink.mil/Blogger/index.aspx}

29 See {http://www.youtube.com/MNFIRAQ}

30 See {http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/}

31 Mark Glaser, ‘Milbloggers Upset With Restrictions, But Won't Stop Blogging’, Mediashift, 23 May 2007, {http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/digging_deepermilbloggers_upse.html}

32 Dennis Dunleavy, ‘The Next Revolution Will Be Digital’, Digital Journalist, May 2004, {http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0405/dunleavy.html} Luc Sante, ‘Tourists and Torturers’, New York Times, 11 May 2004, {http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E0D7123CF932A25756C0A9629C8B63}

33 This includes the refusal to photograph as well as the refusal to see what is photographed. Censorship is not simply a resource of those who govern, citizen journalists self-censor in myriad ways, as do the soldiers posting imagery of their experiences online. See Michael Massing, ‘We Are the Thought Police’, in What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).

34 I refer to the famous short story by Tim O'Brien, in The Things They Carried (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).