Boredom, Fragility, and Exhaustion in the Forever War
In The Atlantic, former Marine Elliott Ackerman unpacks a series of portraits I made during the 2009-2010 troop surge in Afghanistan
For the 20th anniversary of 9/11, The Atlantic asked Elliott Ackerman, an author, former Marine, and intelligence officer who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, to write about a series of portraits I made in Afghanistan during the troop surge in 2009 and 2010, as President Obama attempted to turn the tide of the war.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94a831e0-d5b3-4270-9fc3-56dfa2490f68_1500x1500.jpeg)
In the closing paragraph of the piece, Elliot makes an interesting comment about my images: “There is a sameness to these portraits, which is in no way a criticism; in fact, it's what lends them their cumulative power. The torn uniforms. The fresh tattoos.” This statement made me reflect on the work, and the process of making a series of photographs that have a common thread.
I took these portraits while embedded and on assignment for Time. My goal for the magazine was to make a work of photojournalism about the war with my digital camera. But I also carried a Mamiya C330 analog camera and color Kodak Portra film, shooting for myself in the downtime between patrols and kinetic activity.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F036ca332-d09d-42ab-ab13-b3f8299c7569_3050x1500.jpeg)
I didn't really grasp what I was doing at the time. I was exhausted, out of my depth, trying to make sense of the war around me. Every now and then I would see a young soldier or Marine standing in a remote combat operations post and intuitively decide to make a portrait. Or I would come upon a fragile group of young soldiers and pose them for a simple and structured environmental portrait.
I remember thinking there was something raw and anthropological about this visual language that wasn't construed by a dynamic composition of action—the “spectacle of war.”
When I consider Ackerman’s description of my photos as having a “sameness,” I can agree with him in retrospect. Despite not grasping my own biases at the time, I was photographing boredom and exhaustion, and I think these are the emotions that give these photographs cohesion. They were the emotions that I personally gravitated to at the moment, negating the blind patriotism that had driven so much of our lives after 9/11.
Read: “Ask Us What We’ve Seen: American service members reflect on their time in Afghanistan.” (The Atlantic)
Great series. Reminds me of Tim Hetherington's book Infidel. I assume you know it? It's a bit strange to me his work hasn't resurfaced much during this “ending.”