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