On war photography.

ON WAR PHOTOGRAPHY

AS WE BEGAN climbing the mountain that separates Pakistan from Afghanistan, it soon became clear that slogging through the snow at 15,000 feet was not the same as running laps around the Yale pool. I had hoped that the latter form of torture would prepare me for the former. I felt plenty strong. I just couldn't breathe.

"Leave me to die,' I suggested, collapsing in the snow.

Itebari, my native guide, declined. Apparently, leaving helpless refugees from the bastions of effete intellectualism to die in the snow is forbidden by the tribal code of Afghan hospitality.

We got going again. Periodically a malnourished Mujahed would come bounding by, cavalierly balancing a case of ammunition on one shoulder, passing us as if we were standing still, which we frequently were.

As one lies face down in the snow, gasping for breath, one is willing to make certain concessions to the school of photojournalism that forsook tripods and wooden cameras sixty years ago. I hoped to put these all-but-forgotten tools back into action on this journey. It was and is my belief that war photography reached its peak during the American Civil War. The photographers of that day used awkward and bulky equipment similar to that which I was now finding so burdensome as I crossed the Durrand Line.

In a perverse paradox, it was as a result of the most unpleasant attributes of their equipment that the work of the nineteenth-century photographers achieved its distinctive character. They used large wooden view cameras. View cameras require tripods; they are heavy and difficult to move, and, in those days, they required exposures of at least several seconds. These limitations precluded action pictures and severely limited the number of images the photographer could record.

A 35-mm. photographer can easily take several hundred photographs in a day, an ordeal that would probably be fatal to a view-camera photographer. With fewer opportunities, the viewcamera photographer must choose his subjects carefully Composition is more critical for him than for the photographer using the one-hundred-monkeys approach.

Moreover, the view-camera photographer must view the image of his subject as projected upside down on a large piece of ground glass. The artistic effects of this inversion are not quantifiable, but I believe it forces one to give more thought to the composition of the image. Meanwhile, because the view camera uses large sheets of film rather than narrow strips, it reproduces the subject with exceptional resolution and tonal gradation.

The contrasting qualities of the 35-mm. camera are responsible for the course of modern photography. First of all, it's fast. Photographers can get shots that would have been long gone before a view camera could be set up. It freezes time. We can go back again and again and watch a South Vietnamese officer blow some VC's head off, as in the famous photograph by Eddie Adams. It is a slow-motion instant replay. It is a style made of moments.

Second, the 35-mm. camera is portable. It can go anywhere the photographer can and get as close as the photographer is willing to risk getting. Third, with the multitude of pictures a 35-mm. photographer can take, a few of them are bound to be OK. And finally, because the viewfinder of a 35-mm. camera is so much smaller than the ground glass of a view camera, and because the smaller film will not record as much information as large-format sheet film, the 35-mm. photographer has a tendency to narrow his view, to make his subject larger and show less of the overall scene. View-camera photographers, using wider lenses, can stand back, showing a larger vista, recording with great detail and artistry the lasting images of war.

The evolution of the technology of war photography mirrors the evolution of the technology of war itself. Over the course of the twentieth century the infantryman has been equipped with ever lighter rifles, firing more bullets with less power, requiring less effort to carry, less skill to master. The 35-mm. is the photographic equivalent of the modern assault rifle.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, although not a war photographer, was the first photographer fully to realize the potential of hand-held cameras. His expression "the decisive moment' refers to the moment when the photographer, upon seeing his composition reach perfection in the viewfinder, clicks the shutter, freezing time. Robert Capa, the famous photographer of World War II and other conflicts, used to say, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.' No one could gainsay Mr. Capa's bravery. In fact, he was killed pursuing his craft. (He stepped on a land mine in Vietnam in 1954. A few seconds before, he had snapped a picture of the spot where he was killed.) He greatest works were a product of his disdain for his own safety and his ability to click the shutter at "the decisive moment.' His most famous photograph, of a Spanish Loyalist, was taken at the moment his subject was shot, before his dead body hit the ground. It is in some ways a magnificent photograph. But to me it is less artistically and journalistically pleasing than, say, George Barnard's great photographs of the ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, after General Sherman had been there.

Much of what war photographers seek to capture is an expression of tragedy. Modern sensibilities, with the help of modern cameras, find the ultimate expression of tragedy in the destruction of a single human being. The view-camera photographer, compelled to shoot stationary subjects, found the expression of tragedy not in war's action, but in its aftermath: the destroyed cities and villages, the battered edifices, the smoking ruins, the tragedy of an entire community, an entire society. Considered artistically, the story of the battle for Charleston is told with greater power by Barnard's haunting images of the once great city's skeletal remains than it would have been by a Robert Capa photograph of a soldier at the moment of death or by an Eddie Adams picture of a Union officer executing a Confederate spy without trial. For within Barnard's study of war's aftermath these unseen images are contained as well, visible to the mind's eye for the larger truth he has told us.

The best photographs are those which, standing alone, tell the most. By that criterion, the nineteenth-century photographers remain unequaled; modern war photography is less true to life and far more subject to manipulation. A good example of the problems with present-day photography can be found in the Eddie Adams execution photograph. Perhaps the most famous image to come out of the Vietnam War, this picture was widely believed to be graphic proof of the injustice of the American cause in Southeast Asia. Whether it is or not, it is undeniably a photograph of a man getting his head blown off. It cannot tell us why.

Eddie Adams was in the right place at the right time to reduce the Vietnam War to a photographic statement as simple and direct as a bumper sticker. A photographic concept without context. By contrast, it would be difficult to take a photograph by George Barnard or his contemporaries out of context. War photography swings between the objective and the subjective, sometimes creating moods, sometimes stating stark facts. The Vietnam War should not have been reduced to a single image of apparently irrational cruelty.

In Vietnam, as in most of our wars, the enemy got a lot less press coverage. Had American photographers been allowed to follow around the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese army, pictures like Eddie Adams' would have been a lot more common. Adams's picture was a journalistic feat precisely because it was so unrepresentative.

For a profession that would have a hard time getting by without the expression "the big picture,' journalism makes scant use of big pictures. For too long, photographers have been earning their pay by providing newspapers with small pieces of the big picture.

A year after my first trip there, I returned to Afghanistan. In Peshawar, Pakistan, I met Robin Moyer, a well-known photographer on assignment for Time magazine. When I explained my interest in photographing the ruins left by the war, he gave me a business tip: "Nobody buys rubble.'

A sad comment on the state of war photography.

WAR PHOTOGRAPHY should show the story of war. If photo editors can only find room for sensational frozen moments, then they are not telling the whole story. Good journalism inspires thought; frozen moments of violence, out of context, apparently without purpose, inspire not thought but superficial responses to sensational images.

I've had enough of gruff managing editors who say gruffly, "Don't bother me with art--bring me news!' as though there were some contradiction. Gruff managing editors should stop posturing and think from time to time.

A few months after returning from my first trip to Afghanistan, I spread photographs of a ruined village on the floor of New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz's office. Peretz looked like the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia--an aging hoppie in blue jeans. We sat cross-legged on the floor of his executive suite and discussed my pictures. The New Republic's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier--not exactly a gruff managing editor, but temporarily assuming that role--argued against my photos as follows: "These pictures are too beautiful.'

I can't help it. That's the way it was.

Photo: Left: The ruins of the Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, Virginia, 1865. Two separate glass plates were needed to record this panorama. The two images, taken by a member of Mathew Brady's studio, are here reproduced as one, possibly for the first time.

Photo: Above: A British military cemetery in the Crimea. Roger Fenton, 1855.

Photo: Below: Bombed-out ruins of a village in Paktia Province, Afghanistan. Charles Bork, 1983.

Photo: Opposite: Ruins of the Railroad Depot at Charleston South Carolina. George Barnard, 1864.

Photo: Tools of the Trade

Top: The author in Afghan drag with wooden camera in Paktia Province.

Bottom: Roger Fenton's photographic van, the Crimea, 1855. Five cameras, seven hundred glass plates, and a darkroom.