Byline: ELIZABETH COOK-ROMERO
Histories of war photography often begin with Roger Fenton's 1855 image from the Crimean War, The Valley of the Shadow of Death. It's generally believed that Fenton was careful not to record anything that would offend English Victorian sensibilities. He included no corpses, yet the cannonball-covered battlefield depicted in The Valley provides chilling evidence of how arbitrarily death chooses victims during a battle.
Less than a decade later Felice Beato spared no gory details in his photographs of the Opium Wars and the Indian Mutiny. Photography was then a slow process that could not capture the action of war, but Beato photographed the destroyed bodies of Chinese fighters, Indian mutineers being hanged, and dead Indian rebels whose bones were nearly picked clean by birds.
Some credit Beato with setting the tone for the American photographers who recorded the Civil War. Perhaps presidents and generals did not yet realize that photography, which was still less than half a century old, had the power to explode the myth that war was a glorious undertaking. Photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner set up their cumbersome cameras on battlefields and recorded putrid corpses -- and nobody stopped them. Many of those images were bound into books and sold to the general public as Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War in 1866. The images have become a part of American history, and for some they may now be too familiar to shock.
But, for photographer Benjamin Montague, time and familiarity have not diminished the horror of those Civil War photographs. "They show a side of war that we don't see today," Montague said during a phone interview. "They show bodies torn apart; they show dead American soldiers; they actually show faces of the dead."
While creating the tintypes for his installation, Images of Conflict, which opens at Addison Arts on Friday, Oct. 27, Montague said he looked to the stark truth that O'Sullivan and Gardner captured. "There is one really amazing photograph by O'Sullivan called A Harvest of Death; it shows bodies on the battlefield of Gettysburg. Their pockets are turned out and they are missing their shoes and pants. It shows just how awful the situation was, and that is something the modern media protects."
Montague made all of his dry-plate tintypes in Ohio, far from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. He works with images appropriated from the news, Internet postings, war toys, and video games.
The news bureaus at network and cable TV stations and newspapers -- outlets that many middle-aged and older Americans turn to for information about the wars -- censor the grim realities that O'Sullivan and Gardner included.
Videos and games, which usually attract a younger audience, don't censor the mayhem of war. But, according to Montague, they trivialize it, leaving the players desensitized to violence and suffering. "Military games are more realistic than what you can see on the news. They're very gory; you see the blood splatter." The players are first-person shooters. Montague said he once rented a copy of Battlefield 2 and found it terrifyingly real.
America's Army: Special Forces, a game developed by the U.S. Army, can be downloaded from the Internet. It's the worst of the military video games, according to Montague. "If you played this video game in which you've blown up a whole village and mutilated all the soldiers, is it going to be disturbing if you see it on TV in the news? I don't think so," he said. "The whole idea that the army has put out a game that incorporates military tactics and prepares you for war -- it's hard to verbalize how wrong I think that is."
Montague worries that there's a lack of outrage about the wars. "That is what spurred this project: how can we torture people and have very little debate about it? I'm outraged, and I'm sure other people are too."
Many soldiers have video cameras and iMovie programs and are making their own films, Montague said. "They put a soundtrack with it, and they cut and splice the images at a fast pace. I saw some on MTV News, but you can see even more on Web sites like MilitarySpot.com or YouTube." For the soldiers, Montague said, perhaps the videos are a way of saying, "We are here."
"They are showing some really gruesome stuff, but they are showing it in a fast-paced, MTV way, and maybe that makes it a little more palatable because that is the way we are used to seeing things."
Images of war have always been manipulated. Historians believe that Gardner and O'Sullivan moved bodies and guns to make their pictures more dramatic. "There is a picture credited to Alexander Gardner of a sniper lying against a wall," Montague said. "There has been a lot of debate about whether he pulled the sniper over there and posed the whole picture. But the debate doesn't lessen the impact of the photograph."
Montague's photographs are manipulated in obvious ways. The texture of the computer or TV screen from which he photographs them is clearly visible in some images. One depicts a young man's face that at first glance appears dead, but with further study it becomes clear that it is only a toy soldier still in its plastic wrapping.
Together the tintypes in Images of Conflict seem to ask what is real and what is created illusion; Montague said that as an artist he cannot tell anyone what to think. "I don't want to preach to anyone because I don't like being preached to. I don't want to say war is wrong. I want people to come to their own conclusions."
Montague uses modern tintype printing because it lacks the slickness of video or even the polished look of gelatin silver prints or digital color images. "I didn't want them to look exactly like Civil War images, but I did want them to have that rawness," he said. "The tintypes' surfaces are a little strange. You can't look at them easily; you have to move around.
"I have some very strong views, and I don't think the work expresses those views as strongly as I feel them. I think they are a little more ambiguous, so people can ask their own questions."
details:
Images of Conflict, an installation by Benjamin Montague
Opening reception 5-7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 27; exhibit through Nov. 18
Addison Arts, 209 Galisteo St., 992-0704
CAPTION(S):
1. Benjamin Montague: Gas Mask, 2006, dry-plate tintype, 8 x 12 inches
2. Shock and Awe, 2006, dry-plate tintype, 8 x 12 inches; images courtesy Addison Arts
3. Marching Soldiers, 2006, dry-plate tintype, 8 x 12 inches
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