【纽约时报博文】Showcase: The War’s Long Shadows

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Showcase: The War’s Long Shadows
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/showcase-3/
June 11, 2009, 12:01 am    By James Estrin


Nina Berman is not an objective photojournalist. And she doesn’t want to be.

“I don’t believe in the notion of the objective photographer, that somehow a photo is balanced and you’re dispassionate,” she said. “I don’t think that would have value. That’s like a security camera.”

“That doesn’t mean I have an agenda,” she was quick to add. “But I do have areas of interest.”

Among them are the effects of the Iraq war. Ms Berman’s first book, “Purple Hearts — Back from Iraq” (Trolley, 2004), and an accompanying exhibition at the Jen Bekman Gallery received glowing reviews. A slide show, “Purple Hearts,” ran on The Times’s Web site. “Marine Wedding,” her portrait of a disfigured Marine and his bride on their wedding day, is an iconic image of the war. Holland Cotter wrote in The Times that “‘Marine Wedding’ speaks, as powerfully as a picture can, for itself.” Like the war, there was no fairy-tale ending. The couple was divorced after three months.

Ms. Berman’s current book, “Homeland” (Trolley, 2008), portrays the less obvious consequences of war. It is a meditation on the militarization of American culture after 9/11. In this disturbing collection of color photographs taken between 2001 and 2008, she said she portrays a country that “is having a love affair with war and violence.”

“We developed a sense of identity based on the fact that we were attacked,” Ms. Berman said. The response to 9/11 exaggerated a tendency to see the military as a problem solver.

To make the point that the culture often visualizes war as something fun — or at least as entertainment — the book includes photographs of military recruiting in the Bronx where camouflage-painted children play with real weapons and of massive, fantasy nuclear-war emergency exercises in the Midwest. Many of the images are underexposed, with flash; an effect that adds to the artificiality and theatrical nature Ms. Berman sees in these events.

“Homeland” is not light fare. But its unflinching view makes it an essential document of America’s identity crisis in the new century.

Ms. Berman is a contributing photographer for Mother Jones and has worked for Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. Her work has been recognized by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Open Society Institute’s Documentary Photography Project and World Press Photo.

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