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För. By Agnieszka Sosnowska.

För
Photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska

Trespasser, Austin, TX, 2024. 88 pp., 47 tritone plates, 11x13½".

“There is no progress in art, any more than there is in making love.”

— Man Ray

One of my favorites in Robert Adams’s first book of essays, Beauty in Photography, is a piece called “Making Art New.” It’s a funny and playful essay written after paging through the latest copy of Artforum delivered to his front door in rural Colorado. Adams ultimately feels that what defines new, at least by the magazine’s standards, feels a bit like a Sears Roebuck catalog selling the latest washer and dryer set. Contemporary art, Artforum tries to persuade him, is just like the newest mechanical technologies offering experience and luxury unlike anything before it; the latest trends in post-performancism are no different than the magic of this year’s wrinkle guard¹. This way of thinking leads Adams to some important questions. What does new mean in art? What is the distinction between new and novel? Shouldn’t art aspire to a truth greater than novelty? Answering these questions, he concludes something different, and that the only “contemporary” that matters in art is whether it speaks to the current situation. Would anybody question that Shakespeare’s insights don’t still reflect on our societies and behaviors today? I do fundamentally agree with Adams; quality in art is not a metric based on technology or appearances but is really about the creator’s ability to reflect on the essential joys and struggles of life, to render truths that seem essential to our being and in a way that evokes empathy from its audience. Perhaps it is easiest to think of it this way: anyone falling in love for the first time is experiencing love as if it has never been experienced before, and thus it is a tale that never grows old.

When I spend time with För, the lovely new publication of photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska published by Trespasser Books, it is easy for me to imagine the photographer taking similar inspiration from Adams’s essay. För is a laconic book, mostly pictures with very minimal text and presented in a clear and concise manner. The photographs are made with Graflex 4x5 (there are a couple of exceptions), and all in a classical, documentary style. The pictures in För, however, tell a rich story about love and pain, joy and loss, and are executed with emotional clarity and technical precision, rooted in a deeply personal connection to photography. Simply designed photographs made with traditional black-and-white values, Sosnowska demonstrates, can still convey the most essential attributes of being human today, which is ultimately what led me back to Adams. Her approach couldn’t be simpler — photograph the people and places she calls home with an equal affection for her subjects as she has for making photographs. Through the course of För, we see a small selection of people (presumedly family) leading a humble, pastoral life in the stark, harsh tundra of East Iceland. The pictures are simply developed but rigorously seen, and presented with a rich, open, and inviting black-and-white palette. The place she describes is harsh — I can almost feel the biting winds — but also full of warmth and love, days occupied by the beauty of vast landscapes, horses, imaginative children, and warm baths.

Given the minimal information offered in För, I did some inquiry into Sosnowska and learned she was born in Poland and lived most of her early life in Boston before settling in Iceland. The pictures in För are from her current home, or at least as what I understand as such, an unnamed place in East Iceland photographed between 2001-2021. I find this significant because when I look at Sosnowska’s photographs, it’s not only easy for me to see her tattered and highlighted copy of Beauty in Photography somewhere close by, but I can also imagine her as something of an exile, a stranger in a strange land where no place feels totally like home. Herein, I think, is the real impact of Sosnowska’s pictures — clear, affectionate photographs driven by a profound personal emptiness. Throughout För, there is an incredible tension between connection and isolation, a balancing act between loneliness and love.

Implied, I think, in Adams’s conclusions in “Making Art New” is patience. Anybody reading Shakespeare for the first time knows it’s not easy, and you must take the time to really understand his complex understanding of language and storytelling. Thinking of this photographically, I remember Frank Gohlke once telling me that if you make 7 good pictures in a year you should consider it a success. In the age of social media, we’ve totally lost sight of this, but composed over 20-years, För is a brilliant example of what can happen when you think of photographs this meticulously. Towards the end of “Making Art New,” Adams quotes both Man Ray — that idea that making love can only evolve so much — but also shares a lovely idea from American poet Robert Frost: “Poetry is like love. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Any lasting love requires rigor and patience, and in my mind these ideas lead quickly to wisdom and empathy.

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1. Beauty in Photography was first published in 1981; the cover story in Artforum in October 1981 was “Post-Performancism” by Douglas Davis.

Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Bury Me in the Back Forty By Kyler Zeleny.

Bury Me in the Back Forty
Photographs by Kyler Zeleny
The Velvet Cell, Berlin, Germany, 2024. 168 pp.

When we last checked in on Kyler Zeleny, in November 2020, he had just published Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle. The product of 10,000 miles and 4 years of road tripping, this sharply observed monograph revealed the rural Canadian heartland through a colorful blend of portraits, social landscapes, and prairie vistas.

Crown Ditch was the second volume in a planned trilogy of photobooks, following on the heels of Zeleny’s debut Out West (The Velvet Cell, 2014). That title had staked out similar territory (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in methodical style: square format pictures of rural outposts captioned simply by census counts, e.g. 633, 504, 394, 108, and so on. You didn’t need the place names to get the general gist of either book. These were tiny burgs to begin with, and their populations seemed to shrink before Zeleny’s lens.

For the final book of his trilogy, Bury Me In The Back Forty, Zeleny has turned his attention to the Canadian prairie once again. This time he has zeroed in on a single location: Mundare, population ~700. This is a small town in central Alberta, first settled by Ukrainian immigrants in 1907. It proudly claims to host the world’s largest garlic sausage statue. It is also the original hometown of Kyler Zeleny. Never mind Thomas Wolfe’s warning. Zeleny can indeed go home again. He toted along his camera gear, plus an old yearbook for good measure. The resulting monograph documents some of the people and places of modern day Mundare. Better yet, it offers a window into Zeleny’s shifting curatorial style.

What do I mean by stylistic shift? Well, design-wise Bury Me In the Back Forty is markedly different than either of its predecessors. For starters, the raw physical framework is lifted directly from an earlier book, a decidedly non-artistic community history from 1980 called “Memories of Mundare”. As best I can tell, this was something like a town almanac or annual register. Its bygone happenings are reproduced as facsimile pages, renumbered and repurposed into the new tome. Zeleny provides all of this material without much explanation or context, at least initially, and it’s up to the reader to sort through the mundane Mundare minutae. A table of contents lays out the local nuts and bolts, listing such subjects as the Mundare Choir, the Mundare Fire Brigade, the school system, and various civic stalwarts and events. Taken altogether, “Memories of Mundare” is a sort of book length encyclopedia entry. It’s comprised of dense two-column text, spiced regularly with half-tone monochrome pictures, all faithfully replicated.

The old tome is well produced and squeaky clean, and it glows with civic pride. It’s a pleasant enough read. But for Zeleny’s purposes, “Memories of Mundare” is merely the first layer. Its fawning accounts become a sort of visual wallpaper, the foundation for a mélange of added photos, notes, and mementos. A color print of a friend in a bar is nice enough on its own. But it takes on new meaning when montaged atop past social gatherings. A studio shot of glazed donuts makes an intriguing contrast with posed photos of group calisthenics. Zeleny’s photos of utility poles, campers, and obscured ladders veer into experimental territory in their own right, and they’re given an absurdist jolt when juxtaposed with old news accounts.

The old pages are generally subservient, sometimes buried completely, other times lost in the experimental frenzy. After all, who needs an archival counterpoint when contemporary playthings are right at hand? Zeleny bobs and weaves between various media, interjecting cutouts (a symbol for declining rural populations?), sewn collage, crayon markings, cropping notations, and typewritten correspondence. “The result,” at least according to Velvet Cell, “is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events.”

The range of specs, styles, and approaches is impressive. Zeleny probably had a lot of fun putting this book together. But it’s hard to get a good fix on his intentions. Is Bury Me In The Back Forty meant to be a trip down memory lane (he was born in 1988, several years after “Memories Of Mundare”), a post-modern assemblage, a slice of prairie living, or avant-garde monograph? Hmmm. I’m afraid I can’t answer that question with much certainty. But rest assured, his book is entertaining. And readers will likely learn some Mundare trivia while browsing. After all the visual fireworks have closed, Zeleny’s lengthy afterword sheds some light on the subject. His essay ties together Mundare’s history with some of his own connections there. Zeleny himself has decamped for Edmonton (roughly 40 miles west of Mundare) and the rest of the town is on a similar trajectory. The story is the same throughout Canada’s rural west. Most towns face declining prospects. “The prairie party is over,” Zeleny writes. “Today the town is full of solitary drinkers, drinking from bottles that empty them.”

Although Zeleny’s essay is interesting, the tone is somewhat impersonal and academic, closer to reportage than diary. Perhaps that’s just his inner photographer speaking, hewing to straight facts? Or maybe some of the old almanac’s expository style has rubbed off? Or it could be those many years living away from Mundare, tucked in a cohort of urbane photo theorists. In any case Bury Me In The Back Forty leans smartly into the contemporary photobook zeitgeist, which has come to favor curation, editing, and design over the straight style of his debut. This is probably why it succeeds as the final volume of the trilogy. He’s come a long way from Out West, in both years and method. Bury Me In The Back Forty feels like a mark in the sand. Here I am, it announces, the third and final book. This is the impossible spot where Mundare meets photoland.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

As We See It. By Suzanne Newman Fricke.

As We See It
Conversations with Native American Photographers
Edited by Suzanne Newman Fricke
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2023. 224 pp.

Some years ago, I reviewed a book by James C. Faris titled Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representation of an American People (University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Over 392 pages it deeply considers photography’s role in exposing and commandeering culture. According to the publisher, Faris “calls attention to the inability of most photography to communicate the lived experiences of native people or their history.” I remember being enthralled by the book and surprised at the author’s revelations.

I also recall thinking that, despite all the academic, linguistic, and ethical exegesis, Faris seemed motivated by something fairly simple — a sense of indignity, a personal wound of sorts that he suffered at someone’s hands in relation to or on behalf of Navajo peoples. (He even cautioned against using the word “the” in conjunction with “Navajo” for fear of inappropriately objectifying or drawing a collective conclusion.) I wished that, in addition to all of the well-reasoned third person argumentation, Faris could have said, “listen, here’s why I am writing about this topic.” Breaking the fourth wall, as narrative theorists would say, because there was something so distanced about his writing despite what could only be construed as passion for the topic.

This bit of personal/intellectual friction revisited me as I read Suzanne Newman Fricke’s As We See It: Conversations with Native American Photographers. Fricke interviews and generates illuminating copy about ten Native American photographic artists, with an additional chapter about a non-Native photographic influence. (More on that in a minute.) The organizing principle of the book is that of a primer, an introduction to contemporary Indigenous photographers, and how they address their personal experiences through their art. Fundamental and useful stuff for those who appreciate a glimpse of “lived experience” as filtered through art.

Wendy Red Star, Fall, 2006

My own Faris moment here has to do with the photograph on the cover of the book. It’s a 2013 wet plate portrait by William Wilson (born 1969, eight years younger than I am) titled Will Wilson, Citizen of the Navajo Nation, Trans-Customary Diné Artist. Wilson’s incongruous white-glove treatment of an SLR camera seems to me to symbolize the care-taking attitude assumed throughout the text toward photography as a phenomenon. (Upon further consideration I realize that the latex gloves he’s wearing are probably those of someone who has recently been pouring a wet plate. Still, there’s a cradling quality to the gesture that I find peculiar.) I am drawn to his circumstances in ways that are distinct from how others may respond.

Back to the studium of the present volume. What strikes me is a big question about the “it” of the book’s title. Was the implication that “we,” Fricke and her ten artists, are using cameras to weigh and assess Native American life? Or is something else being seen and articulated by this assemblage? My surmise is that “it” refers to the practice of photography in general, and by specific extension within the topic area of American Indian life.

Shelley Niro, Memories of Flight, 2011

This is where the ghostly presence arises to qualify the entire argument. Edward S. Curtis, to be precise, is the centenarian, white elephant in this room. The position feels obligatory, like we can’t have a book about photography and Native Americans without addressing the problematic Curtis enterprise. The chapter is the last piece in the book, the last word, and it leaves an acidic taste. As Fricke puts it, “perhaps someday, writers, art historians, curators and other scholars will be able to discuss Native American photography without first referencing Edward Sheriff Curtis...[Nonetheless] it is clear that today is not that day.” Well, maybe it is.

Tom Jones, Shades of Red, 2008

Curtis is a flagrant example of early 20th century attitudes toward indigenous peoples, yes. But does your entry-level reader need to emerge from an enlightening volume like this with Curtis’ darkcloth weighing on their head? There are ten contemporary photographers that one might become fascinated by and study further. The considerable value of this book lies in the words of the artists edited from interviews with Fricke, the ample bibliographies for further study, and the tantalizing handful of illustrations.

In her section about Jamison Chās Banks, Fricke observes that his “work highlights the fluidity in who is the enemy and who is the ally, positions that are relative and constantly changing.” I think this is a crucial frame for seeing the ten dynamic contemporary artists and the one enduring adversary here. Allow yourself to see “it,” that untethered pronoun, for yourself.

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Shelley Niro, The Rebel, 1987

Wendy Red Star, Stirs Up the Dust, 2011

Shelley Niro, La Pietà 3: Sorrow, 2004

George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/

Image c/o Randall Slavin

Sex. Death. Transcendence. By Linda Troeller.

Sex. Death. Transcendence.
Photographs by Linda Troeller
Reviewed by Juliette Melia

TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2024. 96 pp., 48 color / 11 duotone plates, 9x13".

Gender, sexuality, desire... Sex.

You can’t have missed it. Edgy and eye-catching, Linda Troeller’s frontispiece shows her on all fours, bottom bared, ready to accept a lover doggy-style. Her vulva is facing away from us, and indeed, better leave it to our imagination in our pornified society. Vertical, almond- shaped, glistening in its jungle of dark eyelashes, suggestively resting on the floral bedspread (flowers are the sex organs of plants, Robert Mapplethorpe once famously said), the artist’s eye replaces it, a female gaze in all its subversive reversal.

With its flashlit, snapshot aesthetics, this self-portrait is reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s work about her and her friends’ intimacy, or of Natasha Merritt’s, who uses her own body and sexuality in her very erotic self-portraits. Troeller’s sexual coming-of-age coincided with the sexual revolution, which may explain why she revels in her seductiveness and her sexuality. The fetishism inherent in the kneeling neck brace picture has already been noted by Darcey Steinke. There is also fetishism in the full-bodied bandages picture – who doesn’t want to unwrap this gift – or in the arm’s length photograph of Troeller’s younger self in which she looks at the viewer in a seductively defiant gaze, her neck adorned with a black ribbon tantalizingly contrasting with her white skin.

The high erotic load of Troeller’s self-portrait is heightened by the fact that they are of a woman, by a woman, in a feminist rewriting of the naked-or-nude debate. For celebrity art critic Kenneth Clark in the 1950s, the naked body was huddled and defenseless, associated to embarrassment, and could only become a glorified nude through the mediation of the artist’s talented hand, thanks to which the female body could become balanced, prosperous and confident. The gendered aspect of the process is unmistakable: the embarrassing and embarrassed female body is here to be given a proper artistic form by the male artist. This gendered view is also inherent in Marxist art theorist John Berger’s discussion of the same topic twenty years later: the ideal spectator is still supposed to be male, the image of woman is still aimed at arousing him, although Berger is critical of the power imbalance between the two genders. When Troeller represents herself not only naked but sexualized, she empowers herself and her viewers to take charge of their own representation, even in the vulnerable position that is the desired and desiring body.

Beauty norms, the ageing female body... Death.

The 1746 painting Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty by Pompeo Batoni insists on the horror, the violence, of an old woman (Old Age of course has to be a crone) scratching the face of the allegory of Beauty (a young woman in swathes of pink material in case you pictured a young Adonis). Time, a winged male figure, oldish according to his hair but with a still muscular body, guides the hag’s hand with his imperious finger. The painter’s rendition of old age is probably meant to induce horror: the wrinkled, saggy neck, the sunken eyes, the gnarly fingers standing out against Beauty’s rosy cheek. The latter’s expression, however could be that of Troeller upon discovering her first chin hair. Curious. Unphased. Expectant, even.

Old age and the impending mortality it evokes has often been a taboo in the representation of the female body. But overcoming this taboo is a challenge that Troeller’s nude self-portraits fully take up. In The Naked Nude, Frances Borzello’s analysis of female nudes by female artists, we are reminded that in the 1970s, the second wave of feminism was in its heyday and that female artists consequently wanted to take back control of their representation, mainly by sharing the full subjectivity of their experiences. For Troeller, ageing is part and parcel of this subjective experience, and the representation of her ageing female body is the crux of her work. It brings to mind Clarke’s now outdated reservations about the status of nude photography in art, because of photography’s inability to erase the wrinkles, pouches, and other skin blemishes, that might remind the (male) viewer of the humanity of the (female) model. Those reservation are outdated but, I think, still influential if we consider modern communication, be it only advertisement that still uses a majority of young, white, slim, able- bodied female bodies. I can hear Troeller from here, along with other female photographers representing their or other people’s old age, like Mélanie Blanchot or Elinor Carucci, scoffing at Clarke’s retrograde ideas. Her wrinkles, the stains and folds on her skin, are exactly what make her work interesting, because it shows, through the inexorable advance of the years on her body, her philosophical acceptance of death.

Immanence, the divine, potentiality... Transcendence.

Confidently did I set about explaining the sex and the death present in Linda Troeller’s self- portraits, but transcendence is a whole different ballgame. It is a potent philosophical concept that has been defined and redefined, sometimes contradictorily, by several philosophers, and I worry that my feeble attempts will not do full justice to Heidegger or Jankélévitch’s reasoning. Usually, transcendence is all about (wo)man’s relationship to God, because the divine transcends, that is to say goes beyond, our daily experience. Like sex and ageing, the divine is also part and parcel of Troeller’s work. Often, it seems to me, ironically. The divine magic of the diffracted sunbeam sending a rainbow on her face, also reminiscent of the gay flag. The Madonna on the ring of the hand that is also in a position of chokehold on the neck. The torn holy pictures, with an uncanny similarity in the saint’s and Troeller’s eye colour, making us wonder why there are so few images of older women in religious imagery? Could it be the same logic as in advertising and its perpetual reuse of standardized female bodies and faces? There is also the plaster angel, their forever young face chipped and bruised contrasting with Troeller’s, looking aged but ever so strong and resilient.

The definition of transcendence I cherish is the one I take from Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. For her, you reach transcendence when you are not prevented, by society, others, yourself even, to reach your full potential. You study, love, create, laugh, travel, whatever you fancy, as much as you can or want, and the results are fulfilling for you. I feel that this aspect of transcendence corresponds with Troeller’s self-portraits: not the social norms and taboos, nor personal shame or guilt, could prevent her from offering us this beautiful trajectory of a woman living, loving, and ageing, on her own terms.

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xxx

Juliette Melia is a French lecturer and a researcher. She teaches English Communication at la Sorbonne and the history of American art at the ICP in Paris. Her writings mainly focus on the representation of minorities in photography. What matters to her is when an artist pushes the boundaries of what was, so far, accepted as a proper subject for art.

Medicine Tree. By Lucas Olivet.

Medicine Tree
Photographs by Lucas Olivet

Skinnerboox, Jesi, Italy, 2024. 112 pp., 9¾x11½".

The collisions between Western Civilizations with Indigenous communities have never been pretty. Too often, colonialism resulted in outside powers exploiting distant lands for the commodities needed back home – sugar, oil, rubber, coffee, and timber. When I was a kid in school, we learned about Manifest Destiny and about the genius engineering that allowed trains to traverse the Rocky Mountains and the building of the Hoover Dam, but we did not learn about the deforestation of the Pacific Northwest and Leonard Peltier. It seemed all that might change when Joe Biden appointed Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior, but then we heard about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Chevron. It’s a bleak history, and one that unfortunately is easier to ignore.

Photographer Lucas Olivet splits his time between Michigan and Switzerland, but his new book Medicine Tree looks at Prince George and the painful legacies of its indigenous people and the remarkable destruction of a major timber industry. Prince George is a rural community in British Columbia, the Canadian province part of the Pacific Northwest region between Oregon and Alaska. Medicine Tree offers insight into the bleak histories of colonialism and environmental destruction. Olivet doesn’t dwell on the physical scars of timber production, but rather the psychic ones, the individual and social trauma inflicted by the Canadian conquest of the Pacific Northwest.

British Columbia became part of Canada in 1871, twelve years after Oregon joined the United States. Prior to European conquest, native populations like the Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitxsan, and Tsimshian called it home. At one time boasting over 30 different languages, expansionist ideologies driven by railroad, timber, and mining interests quickly dominated the region, “unifying” it under the English language and Canadian flag. Today, when most of us think of British Columbia, we imagine the most incredible landscapes and cities Canada has to offer, not acknowledging that it was founded on genocide and continues to provide timber products around the world.

Medicine Tree is divided into two parallel narratives. Olivet’s is the strongest voice, creating a portrait of the region in pictures developed by 2014-2018. Interspersed throughout the photographs is an essay/story by Lauren Haddad, which is fragmented and works as both a social documentary and a personal narrative. Developed by wandering and talking with the people on the fringes, she relates stories heard from native artists and outlaws, people slinging meth and carving beautiful mandalas into birch bark to sell to tourists.

Olivet’s narrative is comprised of two different types of pictures. Most of the photographs are straightforward, made in a documentary style and with a handheld camera, quick and intuitive but also with great self-awareness and control, perhaps similar in style and content as Ron Jude’s Lick Creek Line (made just across the border in Idaho). There is also a small selection of pictures that have a fuzzy, dreamlike quality, reminding me of an effect analog photographers achieved by rubbing Vaseline or leaving breathe condensation on the front of the lens. These pictures lend the book a slightly different feel, perhaps revealing spiritual scars instead of physical ones.

The book’s production emphasizes its objectness; Medicine Tree was obviously developed with material metaphors in mind, using the physical production to mirror back elements of the story. Haddad mentions two Cree artists, both named Angelique Merasty, who make bitings, exquisite mandala-like carvings on birch bark. Similarly, Haddad’s story is printed on a paper chosen to resemble wood or bark, a heavier weight paper than the bright white one used for the pictures, colored and textured like the inside of a birch.

At the end of her essay, Haddad tells about the medicine tree at the heart of the story: “It’s a black spruce, a tree that’s found in every one of Canada’s provinces, a tree with a preference for harsh environments. Randy calls it his medicine tree in the middle of hell. ‘Maybe it weeps so much because it has to work so hard for the poison here,’ he says.” This is a remarkably concise expression of all that unfolds in Medicine Tree, but it also served as a source for the book’s cover. If Haddad’s pages represent the soft side of birch bark, the cover is made to resemble a harsher exterior. It is dyed with burnt sienna and raw umber tones, like the rough skin of a black pine, and with a picture of Randy’s medicine tree pasted on top. Interestingly or strangely, I am not quite sure which, the cover is also varnished to resemble Randy’s tree, varnished with shiny, thick blotches like sap oozing from the medicine tree, offering both its tears and a tonic for all our poisons.

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Look at the U.S.A. By Peter van Agtmael.

Look at the U.S.A.
Photographs by Peter van Agtmael
Thames & Hudson, London, UK, 2024. 352 pp., 7½x9½x1¼".

Over a two-decade career, Peter van Agtmael has earned a reputation as one of America’s best war photographers. He has covered active conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Kuwait, among other distant locales. The resulting pictures have helped him gain admission to Magnum, win a Guggenheim and ICP Infinity Award, and supply the contents for five photography monographs to date. By every measure he is on top of the photo world.

But war has its costs. An environment of constant anxiety, violence, loss, and moral ambiguity will wear anyone down over time. That’s true for photographers as well as soldiers or hapless civilians.

Van Agtmael is a case in point. When he first left college to cover the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, he was a gung-ho young stud, eager for adventure. He’d do nearly anything to get the shot he needed, risks be damned. After all, “every twenty-year-old thinks they are going to be one of the lucky ones.” After more than a decade of conflict coverage, his tune had shifted. He had hit the photo wall, or perhaps just matured, depending on your point of view. “One morning I woke up groggy, having drunk most of a bottle of arak the night before, and felt glued to my bed” he journaled in 2017. “I couldn’t bear to drive down the road to Mosul again. I called my editor and said I was done.”

Spoiler alert: that decision turned out to be a false alarm. The adrenaline junkie in van Agtmael could not quit so easily, and he soon resumed his photojournalist duties. Once back on the front lines, another conflict simmered inside, a tug-of-war between his lifelong drive to make photos and his growing disenchantment with the enterprise. “Sometimes I felt like a real bastard to be taking pictures,” he remembers, “but it felt worse when I hesitated and let a powerful moment pass.”

The above passages come from van Agtmael’s recent photobook Look at the U.S.A. It’s a dense book of words and images, and its subheading — A Diary of War and Home — is a fitting description. Blending photographs, screenshots, graffiti, memories, and straight reporting, this book is a deep reflection on both international conflict and inner development.

The majority of material is drawn from 2005 to the present. Followers of van Agtmael will recognize most of the images from past books and photo essays. Photographically speaking Look at the U.S.A. is a checklist of old favorites, some of them bordering on iconic. It might be considered a mid-career retrospective of sorts (in conjunction with a related 2022 exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center). But the book’s multitude of texts and personal asides make for something more than a simple highlight reel, hewing closer to memoir than slideshow. Van Agtmael’s edit is deft and varied, mixing words and images into a multimedia timeline with real narrative pace. Imperialist folly gets taken down a notch in the process, as van Agtmael becomes an outright critic of reactionary policies. But the more interesting subplot is van Agtmael’s personal growth.

It’s no surprise that van Agtmael became disillusioned with war. We have seen the same dawn of recognition in numerous infantry protagonists, from Henry Fleming to Paul Baumer to Billy Pilgrim. But where past heroes left their critiques on the battlefield, van Agtmael’s awakening takes a woke twist back home. I began to understand the U.S.A. when I was in Iraq,” he writes. After arriving home, he visited protests, rallies, demonstrations, and other fault lines — and the American underbelly turned up ugly scenes. Several dozen are included in this book. “Rather than being an abomination of the past,” he writes, “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were an extension of the reckless and hubristic empire building that we always called something else. That violence started at home.”

Van Agtmael had no trouble finding photographs to support this conviction, especially during the Trump years. In fact, his dystopian verdicts come across as vaguely Trumpian. In any case, pictures of Klan rallies, George Floyd protests, and the January 6th Capitol riot evidence a nation of deep internal turmoil. Tensions boiled over in 2020 — events from that time give the book a slightly dated feeling — but make no mistake, the nation is still on high simmer. After initially miring in foreign affairs and camouflaged figures, a good chunk of its latter half is taken up regular citizens caught up in domestic strife. “Look at the U.S.A.” indeed. Ironically the title is adapted from an Iraqi library card.

Regardless of venue, van Agtmael is a talent. Put him in Mosul or Arizona and he will come back with stellar pix. This volume is packed with strong photographs. Of course we knew that already, as proven in past monographs. The revelation here is that he’s a powerful writer too, with a direct and diaristic voice. Reading the various passages, you can feel him sorting through his thoughts on the page, wondering about the fate of himself and his country. If his reporter’s voice occasionally comes off as didactic, it fits the bland center-left tone of mainstream journalism. Look at the U.S.A. in 2024 and you’ll find a nation wrestling with its identity and its future, observed by an increasingly worried media as well as other nations. This book manages to cover all three POVs. But above all it expresses van Agtmael’s.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

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