Authors: Graham Swift
Had rebellion and protest been factors in my career?
I said I did not see myself as a professional rebel. I saw myself as an observer, a visual reporter. I disliked the word ‘specialized’, since I had photographed many other things beside wars.
My interviewer smiled as if we could now relax. He had established a disputatious tone. This would be good TV.
If not rebellion, then emulation perhaps? If we could stick with war for a while. (We stuck with war for most of the programme.) My father was a holder of the
V.C
. and a hero of the First War, and a fair proportion (let’s say) of my work might be described as ‘front-line’ photography – pictures that must have taken some nerve (he gave the word a subtle stress) to take.
I said that it took a good deal less nerve to photograph many of the situations I had photographed than to be an active and involuntary participant of those situations. That a large part of a photo-journalist’s work was spent on the relative periphery of events or in routine concerns (transport, communication, the protection of one’s gear). That you went into things with the knowledge that you could soon pull out (press men also were ‘privileged’). Of course, you were sometimes inescapably caught up, but then it wasn’t a case of heroics, just of dedication to the job.
What were my most hazardous assignments? Had I had any
close calls? Had anyone tried to smash my camera, seize my film? Etc. Etc.
I told two half-prepared anecdotes (Algiers, ’61; Stanleyville, ’64) and one (poor) joke: my most dangerous assignment had been to photograph the film actress D— in a New York hotel, the day after her live-theatre come-back had been unanimously panned by the critics. Couldn’t we get back to the photographs themselves?
Of course. Did I think there were any limitations to ‘dedication to the job’?
That needed explaining.
Flash on to screen, while interviewer speaks, photograph of Vietnamese woman, with contorted face, holding a blood-soaked child.
‘This photo of a grieving mother, included in your
Aftermaths
collection, appeared, in full colour, in millions of Sunday newspapers shortly after the event it records. Mr Beech, your work has been much praised – even if praise may not be your object. But many people take exception to it. They would say that you invade privacy.’
He leant back expectantly in his chair.
(Later, I could not help following that young man’s career, through the echelons of TV, in the Sixties and Seventies. At the end of our twenty-five minutes, as the credits rolled and we were off the air, he said, without a trace of innuendo, ‘That was tremendous! Really
good
!’ and proffered his copy of
Aftermaths
for signing.)
I said that in the case of that particular photo, privacy was hardly an issue. The woman’s village had just been destroyed by American rockets. She was by no means the only grieving mother. I was by no means the only onlooker. I imagined the fact that her grief was on view was the least important element of it.
(Cut from talking head back to photo: close in on central image.)
Frankly, I found the idea of ‘invaded privacy’ curiously misplaced. Since the suffering observed in my photographs was frequently the result of quite literal and traumatic invasions. When civilian homes were bombed or communities forced into refugeedom, or even when a soldier was conscripted into a war he did not understand, this was a theft of privacy of much greater significance than any taking of a photo. In my experience, privacy was a notion that in fact meant little to a great number of people in the world, because they did not possess it or had little chance of keeping it. It was – I paused over the word – a privilege of the West. A notion particularly dear to the English.
Whose
privacy were we talking about anyway? The privacy of the people in my photographs or the privacy of Sunday-morning newspaper readers wanting to enjoy their breakfasts?
Cut to Ia Drang valley, South Vietnam, November ’65. Supine G.I., encircled by two anguished buddies (helmets removed: dangled crucifix just visible) and medic with drip-pack. (Strong breeze blows across group: helicopter rotors, out of picture.)
Cut to north-eastern Congo, October ’64. Three prisoners squatting on ground beneath banana-leaf canopy, hands bound behind backs and necks linked with a rope. A guard or captor stands behind them in jungle camouflage fatigues, holding an automatic rifle. The guard is burly and erect and totally absorbed for the moment with having his picture taken. He beams at the camera, like a jovial stall-holder. The prisoners, clad only in shorts and singlets, are also facing the camera, but they are wearing blindfolds.
Cut to Birmingham, Alabama, September ’63. Bare interior, with family group. A listless-looking man lies, eyeing camera, on a mattress, rear of picture. A bulky woman, centre picture, in ragged cotton shift, arranges the hair of a second female figure who sits on an upturned crate and is in garish contrast
to her surroundings. She is got up in the costume of a whore: tight fake-satin dress, high heels, heavy lipstick, piled-up hair. This superficially makes her look older than she is, but at the same time accentuates her actual youth. You can tell from the angularity of her body she can be no more than twelve.
While these pictures appeared in quick (too quick) succession on the screen, they were simultaneously displayed by back projector behind us in the studio. As the first appeared, my interviewer swivelled his chair round, thumb and forefinger to his chin, in an exaggerated gesture of attention, leaving me to do likewise or to be caught briefly looking abandoned and awkward. (This too was a picture!) Before the third image disappeared and when we were once more on camera, he swivelled back again, with equal studiedness, catching the camera’s eye.
‘But do you not often feel, when taking your photographs, like an intruder?’
Yes, I did often feel that. Precisely that. But this struck me as being in the nature of photography itself, especially of news photography. You could not photograph the news by prior arrangement. The great value of photography was its actuality, its lack of prejudicial tact, its very power of intrusion. This could not be achieved by knocking at the door first.
‘A sort of shock tactics?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘But you intend to shock. You set out to do that?’
‘I don’t have intentions. I don’t engineer effects. If my pictures shock it is because their subject-matter shocks.’
‘But you select the subject-matter. Isn’t that a kind of engineering?’
‘I’m a news photographer. I can’t select the news.’
‘But would you say then that there is no personal element in your work. Nothing of yourself. No bit of Harry Beech?’
‘The point of a photograph isn’t to portray the photographer. If someone looks at a photo of mine and they think of me, the photographer, then I’d say that that photograph has failed.’
Cut to Kyrenia, northern Cyprus, April ’64 (and hold on back projection). Interior scene after mortar attack. A teenage boy crouches by a lacerated victim, but at the moment of the photograph his head has swung imploringly round, without yet registering (the last thing he has expected) the camera. His face is a blurred scream for help.
‘But isn’t that – if you’ll forgive me – just how many people do respond to your photos. They think: What makes a man take a picture like this?’
There were always in those days those two kinds of reaction. Either I was this new type of hero, this okay type of hero, a hero without a gun, without a weapon, but flinching at nothing to bring back the truth. Or (the majority?) there was only one thought: What kind of freak, what kind of sicko stands in front of the maimed and dying and desperate, and calmly (calmly! Stands!) snaps their photograph? And what kind of warped mentality
voluntarily
sets out looking for such pictures in the first place?
A defence mechanism, of course. Whip the messenger because of the news.
And just look what happens in the spring of 1972 when that news that he has been pursuing for over fifteen years finally catches up with
him
? He stands off-stage, like a gormless understudy. His shady mock-heroics pale before the real, the true – the ultimate – stuff of his father. And what’s more to the point, almost overnight, it seems, he abandons photography. Like some confession of guilt. Leaves the field and disappears from the world.
So, wasn’t that quits? No? Not only the subversive but the
reneger too? So what did they want? That for the sake of integrity, I should have snapped my own father’s death?
People look for motives, reasons (as a last resort, try the Oedipus Complex), things to explain things away. Never mind the cause if the effect failed, never mind the effect if the cause can be discredited. A personal thing, you see. A psychological thing. He was a bit of a case. So we don’t have to take seriously those grim souvenirs he brought back from far-off places.
Just an observer! Just an eye behind a lens!
Have you heard the one about the white-coated scientist? (Or, say, impartial observer, or, say, photographer?) He came along once upon a time and said, Now, at last, I can show you how the world really is. Very impressive, very persuasive. Until someone said, Hold on just a second – the fact that you’re standing there looking at it is changing the way the world is anyway. If you’re going to tell us how things are, then maybe we should start with you.
Have you noticed how the world has changed? It’s become this vast display of evidence, this exhibition of recorded data, this continuously running movie.
The problem is what you don’t see. The problem is your field of vision. (A picture of the whole world!) The problem is selection (true, Mr Interviewer), the frame, the separation of the image from the thing. The extraction of the world from the world. The problem is where and how you draw the line. (Sometimes it’s simple: Hold those shots of the African refugees, we need the half-page for the airline ad.)
There is a picture of mine (one of the ‘famous photos’) of a marine throwing a grenade at Hoi An. His right arm is stretched back, his whole body flexed, beneath the helmet you can see the profile of a handsome face. It’s pure Greek statue, pure Hollywood, pure charisma. And it’s how it was. It must have
been. Because the camera showed it. A second later, that marine took a round in the chest and I took two more shots and then some more as they got him clear. I wanted the whole sequence to be printed. But you can guess – you know – which single shot they took. This was ’65. And that picture got syndicated everywhere, and even got transferred, with or without my knowledge, but never with my consent, on to posters, book-jackets, propaganda hand-outs, even T-shirts, till no one remembered any more, if they had ever known, that this was a picture of a real man, who’d died seconds afterwards, or wondered who he was or what small town in the Mid-West he came from (it was Bloomington, Indiana), or ever considered – it was an image, it was
there
– that someone must have taken the original pic.
What is a photograph? It’s an object. It’s something defined, with an edge. You can pick it up, look at it, like a pebble from a beach, like a lump of rock chipped from the moon. You can put it here or there, in an album, on a mantelpiece, in a newspaper, in a book. A long time after the event it is still there, and when you look at it you shut out everything else. It becomes an icon, a totem, a curio. A photo is a piece of reality? A fragment of the truth?
I am sixty-four years old, and the picture looms before me, exquisitely framed, of building my life round a beautiful girl of twenty-three.
When I was nine or ten or so I used to make the journey several times a year between my home and my prep school, thirty miles away in Hampshire. I would be driven to Dorking station. The chauffeur in those days was called Beatty, and the car, believe it or not, was a Lanchester 21. The porter would take my bags and I would give him the coins that Dad had given me to give him, and he would touch his cap as if he were studiously playing the character of a porter. Then I would get a train, changing at Guildford, to Petersfield.
It never occurred to me that there must be sons of parents living in London who were dispatched to boarding schools in Surrey, near Dorking, or that a whole system of English education was based on the removal of the young to, at least, the next county.
I should have found the outward journeys, the back-to-school journeys, the more wretched. But I could never have said which was worse, going to school or going home, because I dreaded both places. The two dreads would sometimes cancel themselves out into a sort of numb suspension, so that I would say to myself: You belong nowhere. Or rather:
This
is the only place you belong – this transit region, this in-between space.
I would sit with my face to the window while the damp Surrey fields slid by, and think: All you are is your eyes, all there is is in your eyes, your vision is you. And there was a corollary to this which if I couldn’t formulate I could feel. If you exist in your vision, then nothing can hurt you, you need never be frightened of anything.
If you talk to news photographers who from time to time will put themselves in the most dangerous situations or amidst the most terrible scenes in order to get their pictures, they will describe a similar sensation. The camera seems to make them invisible, invulnerable, incorporeal. They are like those immortal gods and goddesses who flitted unharmed round the plain at Troy. This heady sense of immunity will even compel them, over and above their obligations as journalists, to keep on visiting these zones of danger. Hey, don’t shoot me, don’t blame me. I’m only here for the photograph.
This is, of course, an illusion. It didn’t stop Bill Cochrane, amongst others, from being killed with his camera in his hand. But it is a potent illusion, which exists even in the most amateur and innocuous forms of photography, and perhaps it is why the photo, the film, which once people existed entirely without,
has become almost a necessity of life. A photo is a reprieve, an act of suspension, a charm. If you see something terrible or wonderful, that you can’t take in or focus your feelings for – a battlefield, the Taj Mahal, the woman with whom you think you are falling in love – take a picture of it, hold the camera to it. Look again when it’s safe. I have always loved flying.