NAM: Vietnam Deprimed

by Disphotic

For the last month I’ve been researching and writing a small book about the effects of war on human bodies. The finished book is available to download here, be warned that it contains very graphic images showing the effects of various weapons on people. As a more indepth explanation of what this book is about, here’s the introduction and some photographs of the hard copy of the book.

‘The horror, the horror.’ This ambiguous quote ends Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam film, Apocalypse Now, which, as in Conrad’s novella, implies that the real heart of darkness lies not in the orientalised inhabitants of the jungle, but in the Europeans who brutalise them. The horror of war, particularly of the kind perpetrated in Vietnam is a well known and explored fact. Or is it? We might know in an abstract sense that a rifle can maim and kill, but do we really know how violently?

Vietnam Deprimed is a visual experiment which aims to engage with two issues. First, the way mass media show, or rather don’t show, the graphic horror caused by war. Second, the way popular culture can normalise or even fetishise weapons, disconnecting them from the violent physical effects they have on human bodies.

The first half of the book will explore in essay form the notion of what horror is, how the consequences of the Vietnam War have affected the ability of the media to show it, and the ways that popular culture helps to normalise weapons and war while understating their violence. It will round off with a brief discussion of the approach used to create the second half of the book.

The second half of this book attempts to reconnect weapons and violence more directly by positioning images of Vietnam-era weapons opposite medical archive images of their effects on people. The intent is to visually deprime the viewer, to shock the readers out of their accepted way of viewing weapon and wound as isolated images, and persuade them to reconsider them as profoundly connected.