Feb 7: About War and Pictures

Feb. 7: Week in Photography

Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs.

📸For Your 👀 Only:

A Conversation with Ben Brody

Ben Brody

Attention Service Member, the newest book by Ben Brody, captured my attention over a year ago at an art book launch {remember those?), and I've been meaning to highlight it since. But as we all know, time is both relative and meaningless and it's taken until now to do so. War in America is never not a relevant topic, and our military has served as a microcosm for larger cultural shifts, from racism to misinformation to #MeToo.

The book is like a remix of war photography, with the traditional images of dudes with guns, but also sharp commentary on how those images are used and seemingly banal photos of bureaucratic moments that are very real but never seen. Brody served in the military as a combat photographer and then revisited Iraq and Afghanistan as a freelancer, before his current role as photo director at a local journalism nonprofit. He was kind enough to jump on the phone and talk through some of the ideas.

HOW HAS DISINFORMATION INFORMED YOUR CAREER?

It's something that I wrestled with my entire career, from when I was a brand-new soldier to when I was a photojournalist in Afghanistan working on commissions and grants. I think the book really tracks through all my different attempts to understand and illuminate what I think the reality is. Sometimes my strategy would be to go to the farthest-flung outpost, where there would be no public affairs oversight, but ultimately I found that to be a losing strategy — all my pictures looked like Hollywood war photography. I found it was more effective to stay at these big bases and let the bureaucracy and the lies and the stage management come to me, and photograph that in a really straightforward way. Of course, those are deliberate strategies that I took when I was a more experienced photographer.

Images taken by combat photographers are considered public domain — this image by Brody from the battlefield has been re-appropriated numerous times.

Ben Brody

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE BOOKMAKING PROCESS?

It was like a pathological need to create a tangible object of this story that I had been totally consumed with and dedicated to my whole adult life. I wanted something I could hold in my hands.

The first thing I think you notice about the book: It's pretty thick. The intention of making a book that has that sort of mass to it is to communicate that these wars have been going on for a really long time. This book will transport you not just to a battlefield, but to this never-ending grind.

I didn’t want some coffee-table vanity project saying my work is really important and you should celebrate it, you know? I wanted it to reach a broader audience. To be honest, Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five was a bigger point of reference for me than any single photo book that had been made about the wars. That literary strategy that Vonnegut used to dislocate the reader in time, I tried to do that by using the communication between the text and the images in a nonlinear way, so you’re physically moving backwards and forwards through the book. You’re not tied in to this linear, chronological timeline — it's all about creating this experience for the reader.

There is a big part of this that is an assault on the mythology of not just the war hero, but also the heroic war photographer. Breaking down that mythology is really important to me — there is something that is missing in the canon about these wars, where many books are written by some Navy SEAL who was on some crazy historical mission or from the view of a famous journalist. I wanted to make a book that was from the perspective of a totally normal soldier, somebody who was photographing their life, wrapped up in this event, rather than bestowing my perspective from on high.

Almost none of the books about the wars are funny, especially the photo books. I wanted to make a photo book that was hilarious.

Ben Brody

WERE YOU WRITING THIS FOR A PARTICULAR AUDIENCE?

I definitely thought a lot about my audience. I took a diaristic approach because that was a strategy to connect with an audience that hadn’t experienced war themselves, to help put them in my shoes and walk them through what it was like really being there, and what the consequences are, so that they can see these far-flung wars fought by volunteers from their own backyard. All of these themes of the book, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, veterans, PTSD, the media, I figured were of general interest to the Western readership. Luckily, it's been a hit and I was able to make a second edition, so it remains available to people who are not just Dutch book collectors.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

I think the military, at least from the junior enlisted infantry squad level, went pretty hard for Trump in 2016, and I think Trump proved over and over again how little he understood or respected military culture. Like pardoning war criminals, that pisses soldiers off, and not just generals — that pisses everybody off. Also giving orders via tweet — there is a way the military works, and when you make them try to pivot on a dime with these parallel command structures, it makes everyone insane. An interesting statistic that I saw from Georgia, which is where I was stationed when I was in the military, is that Liberty County, which has Fort Stewart, went to Biden by 23 points, so that will tell you something. The Biden administration is still kind of a wild card as far as what that will mean for military engagements.

Ben Brody

📸THE WEEK'S PHOTO STORIES FROM BUZZFEED NEWS 📸

This week marked the beginning of celebrating Black History Month, after a year when race was brought to the forefront of the news. Here at BuzzFeed News, we'll be highlighting Black stories all month. As always, here are some of the best photo stories from around the internet, and what we loved this week.

THE AMERICAN ROAD TRIP IS DIFFERENT IF YOU'RE BLACK

Amani Willet

RARE PHOTOS OF THE LAPD SHOW THAT SOME PROBLEMS WITH POLICING ARE NOTHING NEW

Joseph Rodriguez

FIVE FAVORITE IMAGES: THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ANTWAUN SARGENT

Chris Steele-Perkins

📸SOME HOPE 📸

Anmad Gaber / Reuters

Children play in the snow at Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Feb. 1, 2021 (I love snow days)

📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. Pia Peterson is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. You can always reach us here.
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