Illustration
Photo: Ronen Basch
War of photographs
Photography is more democratic than the democracy it promotes or illustrates. Truth, a funny thing, is a perception within a photograph, within someone's dearest memory of love and loss
As well as taking photographs, I collect them. Photography has been a lifelong passion. Some of you may know my photo credit for the photographs I took on 9/11 and the months that followed. Few people have seen my personal collection of photographs, only a few are on the wall.
Photography Schools don't teach classes on how to read a photograph, even though we are a visual society, constantly stimulated by movie stars, pornography and war.
Right now I'm looking at two different images. The first is a black and white photograph of a bombed building. The building appears to have seven floors; however it's hard to tell, because of the damage. This is a hotel, The King David Hotel, where in June 1946 then little known Menachem Begin would begin his career.
Over ninety people would die in that June day, not too different from the average mortality rate in Iraq today. Many of them had families, or at least mothers. The photographs are now digital instead of film so we can see these images faster, makes you wonder about the speed of our priorities.
Begin would later become Prime Minister. It seems that in the Middle East, being a terrorist is a prerequisite for being Prime Minister; you need look only to Israel, Iraq, Iran or Palestine for role models.
But a photograph does not give you the why or how, it's just an image followed by text, credits and footnotes - you must do the rest. Photography is more democratic than the democracy it promotes or illustrates.
The second photograph appeared on The New York Times at the 14th of July, 2006. It was taken by Adnan Hajj and looks like the 4th of July in New York Harbor: Bright sensuous colors which made me buy the paper, lights flickering in the background.
It's beautiful and sensual, only it's not New York, it's Lebanon. And the fireworks are laser guided missiles. It will be several months until families can recover their loved ones, if at that point they can recognize them.
Photography can be abstract – and an ultimate truth. Truth, a funny thing, is a perception within a photograph, within someone's dearest memory of love and loss.
War is costly, much like an acclaimed photographs of it, but where do these Governments get the money to help produce a photograph? We Americans supply the cash. As I type this, we supply an aid package of laser-guided bombs to Israel and another package of Band-Aids to Lebanon. They are going to need them.
The journalist Lou Dobbs wrote that the United States gives USD 2.5 billion a year to the Israeli government, and to Lebanon we give USD 40 million, but no laser guided bombs. All for a photograph that ends up on a newspaper, that your cat uses, or for an exhibit in the local museum.
This is not an FEMA operation, though the same administration is in charge. The aid ship is not going to New Orleans, where it is needed. Money. The billions that we throw into the wind. This is the circle of violence. One side always has more and why? What did they ever do to deserve it?
There are calls for more bloodshed. More photographs will be taken until we are sick of it, or have we become so numb that we don't feel at all? We enjoy this lust, as long as we don't have to dirty our hands, but our hands are not dirty –¬ they are bloody.
The death of UN observers, which mirrors a deliberate act of the sinking of the USS Liberty in 1967 in international waters is a war crime, but who are the criminals,? those that pull the trigger or those that supply the means? Their families are lost in anger, and no government agency can replace such a loss.
Whether you live in Northern Israel or Lebanon, after the dust settles your most important remain will be a photograph or the family album, a memory of a gentler time when a family was united.
The photograph will also torment you, remind you of your loss, and remind you of your own idleness as you are helpless, without any control.
Now a refugee, like so many others standing in line hoping to feed your children, maybe you'll have your photograph taken.
John Patrick Naughton is a New York based photographer
