Shooting War:
O'Brien, Dennis
SHOOTING WAR Photography and the American Experience of Combat Susan D. Moeller Basic Books, $25.95, 520 pp. Dennis O'Brien Is "one picture worth a thousand words"? SusanMoeller'scompre-hensive...
...Hemment took twelve by twenty glass plate negatives in the Spanish-American conflict the images had to be more "artistic" than Larry Burrows's "snaps" with a motor-driven 35-millimeter Nikon in Vietnam...
...Hardly...
...And there is the rest of war: the odors, the noise, the cold at the Changjin reservoir...
...A photograph of war stops an action which seems both infernal and eternal...
...Thus was public attitude shaped or enhanced...
...One longs for a history of war photography with photographs...
...For the later wars we get brief accounts of technical photography such as aerial reconnaissance...
...Neither flesh nor fleshless...
...Eliot that makes an ironic comment on the still photographer's product: At the still point of the turning world...
...there is the murky sameness of shellholes and attack and the wounded trooping to the rear...
...Finally, one comes to the photographic situation...
...The resolution of its partial horror...
...Skilled professionals like David Douglas Duncan, whose work in Korea Moeller applauds, fade in her eyes as recorders of Vietnam...
...Moeller's subject is fascinating, her thesis is basically correct, and she has executed the work fastidiously...
...Thus, a powerful large color photo by Catherine Leroy from the end of the Vietnam period becomes a small, unrecognizable, black and white smudge...
...Underlying all Moeller's historical detail about the different conflicts is the single thesis stated in an even earlier American bloodletting: War is hell...
...Shooting Wars recounts at length the role of American photojournalism from the Spanish-American War through the Vietnam conflict...
...My uneasiness on the balance of text is all the more acute because of the heavy "revisionist" flavor of the historical account...
...While these are inherently interesting subjects, the principal interest presumably is the aesthetics of the images...
...Moeller has a straightforward method of attack for each period...
...Protects mankind from heaven and damnation Which flesh cannot endure...
...My judgment is that there is either too much or too little general history of the wars and their respective journalistic possibilities...
...But even the most powerful photograph creates a beauty and decorum that finally distorts the truth of war: that flesh cannot endure.t flesh cannot endure...
...First one gets a sketch of the political mood of the war: jingoism, the war to end all wars, police action, etc...
...Moeller has researched everything from the focal length of lenses to the attitudes of combat photographers, their editors, and publishers...
...What is the final worth/reality of an Ektachrome version of hell...
...None of the photos are seen as they would have been presented by Life or Look in their original size, layout, or color...
...The written word is at least temporal and it can note if not reproduce the sounds and smells of the event...
...Yet the enchantment of past and future...
...First of all, the book itself is poorly balanced in its own weight of pictures and text...
...Just so...
...It is not until the "amateur" photography of the new journalism of Vietnam days that war is revealed in all its unfocused horror...
...Does the "best" picture give us the reality of the hell of war...
...Her theme is that the photographic depictions created (by choice or chance) a specific value image for each conflict...
...The images created in previous wars turn out to be fraudulent either by government design or photographic self-consciousness...
...The scanty reproduction of the basic data is particularly striking because Moeller does so well in analyzing the impact of magazine layout and the introduction of color photography in the Vietnam War...
...A photo montage of stalwart young faces from World War I appears above the inscription dulce et decorum estpro patria mori: it is pleasant and proper to die for one's country...
...There is the boredom of endless waiting...
...Some of the photographs that Moeller most admires were taken by journalists who had never handled a camera until they came to Saigon...
...Nevertheless, the respective worth of words and pictures remains a problem...
...With such a great truth in mind, historical detailing is rather irrelevant...
...First there is what World War II photographer George Rodger called "the disappointing sameness of it all...
...A photograph is a sort of "resolution" of the partial horror which protects the viewer from damnation...
...When J.C...
...There are long and interesting sections from the diaries and reminiscences of combat photographers...
...Susan Moeller's thesis is that early photographs distorted the terrible reality of war-there is truth in that view...
...The basic story is intriguing and Ms...
...Then there is a general account of the journalistic situation for that war (written and photographic): how much censorship, what was the extent of coverage...
...There are sixty pictures reproduced at small scale and 412 pages of text...
...If one laments the economics of publishing that crimped the pictures, I am also inclined to fault the author for disbal-ancing her own text...
...This is a history of war and its photography that could only have been written after the Vietnam War...
...In the Vietnam War, Nick Ut's photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack suggests that there is nothing pleasant or proper about war-and who was dying for whose country anyhow...
...Each photograph lifts the long drag or dramatic compression of war into a timeless moment...
...Moeller begins her book with a quotation from T.S...
...More extensive treatment of the earlier conflicts would lead to a more complex judgment about both public mood and political events than Moeller suggests...
...Any and all wars are hellish...
...Moeller properly details the importance of certain technical aspects in determining the nature of the image...
...SusanMoeller'scompre-hensive study of the photographic record of five recent American wars inadvertently proves and disproves the claim...
...Finally, there is what Moeller calls "the aesthetics" in which the basic theme of the book is addressed: how do these images create an attitude toward the war...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 12
