NAM: The Horror

by Disphotic

Since my last post about the NAM Vietnam research project I’m working on I’ve made considerable progress. I’ve stuck with the idea of making a book that attempts to reconnect weapons and the harm they do to people, by juxtaposing images of the weapons and injuries. It’s preceded by an essay which talks about tropes in the media and military towards distancing the public from the impact of war, and deflecting attention on to the clean technology of conflict instead of the horror of dirty and damaged bodies (a concept which has the rather brilliant name ‘technofetishism’).

The project has involved trawling through some truly horrendous archive images of wounds, mostly taken in field hospitals and medical facilities during the war. Images of land mine victims, people who let go of grenades slightly too late, gunshot wounds, napalm victims. The list goes on. It’s had a surprising effect on me, I’ve slept badly during the making of this project, with images from the photographs I’ve handled penetrating my dreams. At least it’s somewhat dispelled the idea of compassion fatigue for me. These images are still appalling even seen for the hundredth time.

Despite this, and unlike many of my colleagues on the MA who seem a bit skeptical of the value of this research project, I’ve definitely got quite a bit from it. I was determined from the start that I didn’t just want to write another research paper that no one would want to read. I’m not an academic and the contributions I can make to that world are I think fairly limited. Instead I wanted to try and combine theory and practice, or praxis to make something that would be fairly intellectually rigorous, but which didn’t demand a high level of knowledge to look at and understand.

It’s still a vastly problematic book, with my use of the images raising all sorts of questions about the ethics of viewing suffering, recycling these images for a purpose far removed from the reason they were originally made, and so on. But it was an interesting test of an idea. Once I’ve finalized the essay and images I’ll be posting a digital version of the book, and some extracts from the essay up here in the coming weeks.