Taking a dive

I’ve always been fascinated by that stuff. I want to experience what it’s like to be in a war

OK, I know I’m banging on about the war but ’twas not my intention when I came here for a nice weekend of diving. Bali, the island of the gods of mass tourism, complete with underwater traffic jams and prepubescent Legong dancing girls. Yet even here the war catches up with you, well me, in unexpected ways. And by the way, for someone used to the Middle East Bali’s supposedly strict security measures may seem touchingly low-key at the moment.

Anyway, on my first dive trip, and the drive to the site of the wreck of the USAT Liberty, I was joined by two gregarious young Americans, students at Wharton who just started a six month stint in Singapore, Ben and Arman. They duly asked me what I did for a living followed immediately by, “ever been to any war zones?”. For the next four hours, except underwater where talking is frowned upon, they continued to question me relentlessly on the subject. One of them in particular unhesitatingly expressed an interest in the mechanics of war, the personal danger etc. including the desire to actually be in a war. Short of joining up that is. I suppose because you don’t squander a degree from Wharton on the army.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with either of these seemingly reasonable and well-travelled business students. They sounded sincere and very well-informed. Who says that today’s students don’t follow the news?

What did strike me was their interest in my war stories. I’ve written before that usually people’s eyes start glazing over when I talk about my job and what I did in some conflict areas. I always thought it was me, the way I told it. But these two, a bit too long only to be polite, seemed genuinely interested, in the physical reality of the journalist, in the details of war and in some broader policy questions. They asked why journalists keep doing it if so many get killed. So sue me, I may have hammed it up a bit. Or maybe not so much. Maybe it’s an age thing and the people in my cohort have heard it all before. Who knows. Maybe it’s just that war is indeed a young men’s game and the younger we are, the more we’re fascinated by it.

We did two dives to the wreck of the US Army Transport Liberty, an American warship that was torpedoed off Bali during WWII. The two war-curious Wharton students thought the first dive a bit dull,we stayed well clear of the structure and just watched the marine life. But they went all hooyah over the second one when we ducked through some openings and hovered really close. None of it means much, except that I went for a dive.

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The Balinese coast at Candidasa

The banality of motivation

I finally went to see, Infidel, Tim Hetherington’s posthumous solo show at Foam Amsterdam and it left me in a heavy mood. Even accepting that the show offers only a small glimpse of his work as a photographer and cineast, its quite relentless focus on war is a chilling indication of the life he made for himself and how he chose to frame his own experience. It is not a choice I’d ever be comfortable with. I count myself lucky that besides covering the shooting and explosions I had an alternate existence reporting lighter fare such as the plastic surgery craze in Beirut or drunken gay parties in the Saudi desert or even the more staid political and business stories. In Diary, the very personal video account of his work, just a few minutes of syrupy footage are dedicated to what might count as the good things in life. “This is as good as it gets” a voice (Hetherington’s?) declaims over idyllic images of a blond girl playing in the green grass against the backdrop of a forest, “This is England, early autumn. Look at it”. And back to the war it is.

I noticed from the comments on my previous piece on Hetherington that many people wonder why war photographers do what they do, and keep doing it. I have no answer and maybe there is no single answer to that question. Questions of motivation tend to lead to circular arguments: I did it because I thought I had to/it would be good for me/it would be good for others/I wanted to see it/understand it etc. Yes, but why?

Which leads me to what I had intended to write about originally in this post, Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Last week, while I was sick with a stomach bug, feverish and weak, flitting in and out of semi-lucidity and the bathroom, I finished re-reading her account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Probably not the best way to ingest a treatise on the Holocaust, a painful exercise at the best of times, but I had been at it since I saw the eponymous Margaretha von Trotta movie in which Barbara Sukowa plays the Jewish German/American political thinker as she attends the Nazi’s war crimes trial and faces the reaction to her controversial book on it afterwards:


I thought the movie was OK, not great, and it addressed some interesting moral questions. Main among them was the price we may have to pay when we stick to our convictions and confront people with what we might regard as uncomfortable truths. But after re-reading Arendt, I think that the movie missed the point. It portrays Arendt as overwhelmingly driven by a a quest for logic and rationality, despite some heavy-handed attempts to balance that with a couple of rather mushy scenes from her private life supposedly meant to show her soft side. Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s account and analysis of the trial, I was struck by how she is clearly struggling with her own feelings. It can be seen in the overly zealous attempt to create distance between herself and the Jewish participants in the trial, the prosecutor, the judges, the witnesses etc.  and conversely her strained apparent attempt to be fair to Eichmann, by her small digressions and detours, and by the tone, which is didactic but strangely equivocal at times. It may be reading too much of her biography into her work but it’s hard to see how she could have written about it free of emotion; after all it dealt with genocide, the extermination of her own community, the perversion of her actual and philosophical birthplace and at a different level with her conflicted feelings toward the Jewish people and the state of Israel. In the context of her time it made sense for her to present the account as a strictly neutral, rational analysis of the proceedings. Nowadays we’d personalise such a story in a flash, appropriating it as our own if there’s even the slightest connection, to better stake a claim to it.

Arendt of course had good reason to present her account as unemotionally and rationally as possible; it was the continuation of an immense and important professional body of work on totalitarianism and violence. Yet, knowing that as a young woman her dissertation was on the subject of love in the thought of St Augustine, her later turn toward researching anti-semitism, totalitarianism and violence is very likely to have been motivated exactly by the kind of personal interest that she sought to ban from her Eichmann analysis. I’m not often inclined to advocate partisanship in reporting – Eichmann in Jerusalem was also a kind of reportage, for The New Yorker – but it’s probably preferable to an unsuccessful attempt to cover up one’s feelings toward a highly emotional subject, such as the Holocaust. Then again, we owe Arendt a huge debt for her insight that great crimes can be committed in a very humdrum way, that going along with injustice is often the easy and even seemingly logical option. Whatever the motivation behind her work, it is important and we are lucky to have it. Maybe we should look at the work of war photographers such as Tim Hetherington in the same way. Motivation is neither here nor there and is often unimportant compared to the outcome. On the other hand we often cannot help but let  the writer’s/artist’s motivation affect our understanding of the work. It remains a conundrum.

An evening on Tim Hetherington – and all I took were some lousy phone pics

More musings on conflict reporting – my conflicted view

Stephen Mayes, director of the estate of Tim Hetherington, talks at de Balie in Amsterdam
Stephen Mayes, director of the estate of Tim Hetherington, talks at de Balie in Amsterdam

Tim Hetherington was a wonderful photographer and documentary maker who operated mostly in conflict zones, which on 20 April 2011 got him killed in Misrata, Libya. The Arab Spring, so hopefully named, has been particularly deadly and otherwise damaging for those covering it. An exhibition of Tim’s work arrived in Amsterdam in July and a new film on his life, a tribute directed by Sebastian Junger with whom he made the 2010 award-winning documentary Restrepo on life at an American outpost in Afghanistan, also had its Dutch premiere…


Various friends of Tim’s attended the launch and gave presentations that I won’t go into; I want to talk about me and Tim. I never met Tim, never heard of him before Restrepo and only vaguely afterwards. But we had a few things in common, apart from rugged good looks (I wish). We both did journalism courses in the UK and we both ended up in war zones. I know it’s not much but it’s more than some. Yet when I listened to the presentations and as I watched the film, the gulf between our experiences seemed vast, making me question the way I engaged with some of the same topics that Tim came across. There was a charming bit in which he has to talk about what it is that he’s doing. He starts out with a rather worthy description, only to stop himself short and say “that’s bullshit”. More attempts follow before he gets it right, kind of. It feels like it’s meant to show the difficulty war reporters have in talking about their work without sounding pompous, full of pathos and bravado or, on the other hand, overly jaded. But it can also be seen as defanging any such qualms pre-emptively as in, ‘see, he knew how difficult it was to talk about it’. Yet he talked about it a lot, on camera and on the record…


It always makes me feel uncomfortable. I have not heard people talk about war reporting in public in a way that sits well with me, probably reflecting a puritan streak that urges me: do, don’t tell. I find it almost impossible to talk about my decade or so covering conflict in a way that does not somehow trivialise it, dramatise it or worse, instrumentalise it for my own greater glory. When I sometimes try to discuss it, as dispassionately and in as sparse and stripped-down terms as I find possible, it feels as if nobody listens. Poor me. It is as Tim also said: you need to communicate in order for people to be able to engage with the subject. But I feel utterly conflicted about people who continue to communicate such issues outside the context of immediate war reporting. In the film on his life, many also said of Tim that he was always engaged with his subjects, the people he came across, whom he kept treating as individuals, as human.

Stephen Mayes, James Brabazon and Max Houghton talking about Tim Hetherington at de Balie, Amsterdam
James Brabazon, James Brabazon and Max Houghton talking about Tim Hetherington at de Balie, Amsterdam

Expressing such engagement also makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Maybe there’s a big difference between writers and photographers, also in the levels of danger encountered and in the way they process what they see, but I find the exhortation to keep in mind that the people you write about or photograph are also human, individuals with their own stories and not just characters in a larger plot, utterly redundant and preposterous. The cliché that war reporters only write about cannon fodder or people as numbers, is misleading and tiresome. Overwhelmingly, reporters who risk their lives, who insert themselves knowingly into dangerous situations, are very much aware of the excess of humanity around them. Human yes, always interesting? No. War and conflict tend to polarise people, resulting in a couple of standard narratives that many of those involved and engaged in conflict employ. It is a reporter’s job, maybe not a photographer’s, to puncture those shells and dig down to the real story if there is such a thing. Combat may temporarily heighten one’s senses but continual conflict flattens everything, including what distinguishes people. After a while, all stories become similar, whether it’s an American soldier’s or an Iraqi Jihadist’s. The logic of violence is often frighteningly similar and therefore also horribly clichéd. Yes, it is ritualistic and it has to do with male bonding but to me these themes never held the fascination they seemed to have had for Tim Hetherington. Perhaps that is at the root of much of my unease; I have always been a reluctant war reporter with a visceral distrust of people who sought out such situations willingly. Just maybe the life and work of Tim Hetherington will start me thinking differently about such things. But I’m a hard nut to crack.

I yet have to see Tim Hetherington’s show ‘Infidel’ at Foam Amsterdam and may post on this again afterwards…

Art, conflict and pretty pics – Nat Muller on Richard Mosse’s The Enclave

Poster for The Enclave, Irish Pavillion, 55th Venice Biennale
The poster for The Enclave at the 55th Venice Biennale. On the back Lac Vert Lullaby. A text at the bottom said that it was recorded by Ben Frost at Lac Vert, Congo, in 2012 for The Enclave.

“Artists do not per se have an accountability towards their audiences. If anything their accountability is to make interesting work”

Nat Muller, independent curator and critic with her share of experience  in conflict areas and former conflict areas such as the Middle East and the Balkans, shines her light on Richard Mosse’s The Enclave, shown in the Irish pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She reacts to my doubts about a work that straddles the divide between art and photojournalism, and more directly to the criticism by Louise Williams, the Irish journalist with extensive experience in Congo. You can follow Nat and Louise on twitter: @nat_muller and @Loureports and Louise has a blog: travels with my microphone