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After seeing 'A Bitter Fruit', Magnum photographer Paul Fusco’s
portfolio of funerals of American soldiers who died in Iraq, I was
moved to these thoughts.
There are times when a still photo is so much more powerful than a
moving image. With a strong still, a set or suite, as here with Paul
Fusco's photos of those who suffer at home because of the war in
Iraq, his somber and quiet images allow us to peer inside the souls
of the people he depicts as they struggle with loss. As viewers of
stills, we only look as long as we want, and then turn away when we
feel the onset of tears. With moving images, which are also often
powerful, they are usually past us before their final impact. With
still photos we have the option of lingering or turning away,
depending how it moves us. Many of the people in these stills appear
to be numb. No wonder. Behind every shot is a back-story of sons,
daughters, husbands and wives going off to war. For the lucky ones,
returning from Iraq unchanged in one’s heart and body forever is not
a story we often see. Not returning at all, as many of these photos
show, is enough to make the most hardened among us incapable of
feeling and warmth, tenderness or righteousness about this war.
These photos should be enough to get inside the hearts and minds of
our leaders who are responsible for it. That is too much to ask and
will never happen. Kudos to Paul Fusco for sharing these moments
with us through his powerful, yet quiet and affecting images. They
should be required viewing for all who believe the war is just.
More than a week after writing these words, I spoke with Paul Fusco,
and in speaking with him, I could easily detect his quiet anger
about America, the country he loves, and what he calls, “the
indecent war in Iraq.” Speaking with dignity, there were times I
could barely hear him during a brief phone interview.
“I believe in democracy and freedom,” he says. “I hate what this
administration is doing to our country. It intentionally never tells
the truth. That is unacceptable.”
Paul Fusco is a veteran photographer of war and grief and social
issues. He served in the Army Signal Corps as a photographer during
the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. No stranger to life on the edge,
he has chronicled major social issues such as AIDS, homelessness,
welfare, and the horrific results of Chernobyl. His current
portfolio is as far from combat as possible, but it is all about war
and how war destroys lives. Showing the results of combat puts the
lie to those commercials, which practically beg the young to enlist,
the many patriotic posters we see everywhere, and the recruiting
officers patrolling the streets and byways of our country. Fusco
shows what he calls “the end cost of war,” that time when our young
come home, when families bury them, and when they weep for their
loss. And he is very successful in doing it.
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© Paul Fusco/Magnum |
Quietly, very quietly, but with the power of his convictions, Fusco
spoke to me of the what he calls “the veil of secrecy” put forward
by our government, especially its lies about WMD in the run-up to
the war. Of equal importance, though, is what he, and any
self-respecting journalist, must recognize is an attempt at
“censorship by the government” to keep the press away from, among
other things, funerals at home for those who died in Iraq. To beat
that cover-up, he decided to attend as many funerals as he could,
something that George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld want to
cloak in the shadow of obscurity. We are familiar with the
restrictions the government places on returning caskets from Iraq
when they land at Dover Air Base in Delaware. We know the trouble
some amateur photographers had when they released pictures of bodies
after their return home from the war zone. Clearly, under the guise
of respecting the dead and their grieving families, the government
is enforcing censorship on what we can see about the results of the
war, results that are never in the service of the government’s
cause.
At every funeral but one, and he attended as many as 26, the
military in attendance tried to turn him away. Only one family
allowed him access, and to shoot pictures without a fuss. But he
managed to get inside the other funerals and once inside those in
charge did not stop him, probably because, as he says, “they did not
want to make a scene.” He only saw local press, but never any
national media. He wants to make clear that he does not blame the
journalists for not covering these events. They work for editors and
publishers. It is their fault rather than the reporters, that we are
not witness to the grief at home that goes unseen and largely
uncovered.
Amen to that.
You can view “A Bitter Fruit,” Paul Fusco’s copyrighted photo essay on
line at
http://www.abitterfruit.com.
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At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
