Just as vulnerable and unremarkable human moments make superheroes relatable, the same can be said of our servicemen and women. A new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery aims to assess the reality of the combat experience.
The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now features work by six artists who capture soldiers at work, rest, and play from Iraq to Afghanistan and back home. In video, drawing, painting, and photography, members of the armed forces sleep, sweat, crack a few smiles, and stare out from behind their frames.
“There are two kinds of photographs: photographs you look into as a viewer, and photographs that look out at you,” Photojournalist Louie Palu says. “These are the kind of photographs that are confrontational, where you actually in some sense have [an encounter] with the person.”
His images show faces on the front lines. One is covered in dust and looks exhausted. In another, a female helicopter crew chief appears stoic, her blue eyes big underneath her helmet. In another, a 26-year-old soldier sits shell-shocked after carrying out a mission.
“I think that there’s a relationship happening in these photographs where they’ve obviously stopped what they’re doing and they’re looking into the camera, knowing that there’ll be an audience that is going to be looking back at them,” Palu says.
In a separate room, thousands of eyes look back at the viewer but without the piercing gaze seen in Palu’s work. Every one of the nearly 1,500 people depicted in Emily Prince’s flesh-toned drawings made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country.
“I wanted to break down the abstraction of numbers that I was hearing in the news about ‘this many people died today and this month.’ I wanted to know who the people were behind the numbers,” she says. “So it came from an impetus of inquiry and I wanted to create a space of empathy that humanizes that abstraction.”
The artist, an archivist at Stanford University, has drawn 5,200 of these likenesses so far, all of which were showcased in a well-received 2007 installation at the Venice Biennale. Each portrait is hand-drawn and comes with an envelope on which she’s typed out the name of the soldier and the date of their death. The cards are meticulously filed and organized into the vitrines that line the hallway of the exhibit.
“I think it’s the one coping mechanism that we have to deal with grief,” Prince says of her impulse to organize.
Curator Asma Naeem says, “It reminds me of when your family member passes away and you have to go through their things, that incredibly embattled time in your head where you’re looking through memories and you’re also trying to organize the threads that are left and think about the future, but all of these different emotions are coming through.”
The “Honor The Fallen” section of Military Times is Prince’s go-to resource for her ongoing tribute. The website provides obituaries, articles, official photos, and family snapshots. When given a choice between a formal, pressed uniform photo and a casual picture in a hoodie, she chooses the latter. But sometimes no photo is provided at all. Those individuals are included with blank pieces of paper that bear their names.
And there are “ghosts” absent from the representation, Prince says, the Iraqis and Afghans who make up the other side of the loss of life in these wars. “It’s like any map,” she says. “What’s not pictured is equally important.”
That is certainly the case in Ashley Gilbertson’s photographs, which have no people in them at all. In the bedrooms of the fallen, we see a Kurt Cobain poster, a Ron Jon sticker, a teddy bear, an embroidered pillow bearing a lacrosse number. While scanning a childhood bedroom, filled with so many random artifacts from a life, it’s striking to consider that the person who slept there was shot by a sniper or overdosed in his dealer’s home after returning from war.
The exhibit speaks not only to the toll of war in battle, but back home. Artist Vincent Valdez uses painting and video to honor the life of his lifelong friend John, 2nd Lt. John Holt, Jr., a combat medic who lost his battle with PTSD after returning home from Iraq.
In the video, a coffin draped in an American flag floats down Texas streets the friends once walked together. The antiwar song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” performed by The Pogues, plays in the background.
Dorothy Moss, curator of painting and sculpture, says, “I think that war is becoming in some ways so normalized that we forget to acknowledge the individuals that are out in the conflicts. We really want to not only honor them, but to make people aware that this is still happening.”
This exhibit showcases servicemen and women as human beings, capturing who they are over what they do. In Air Force photographer Stacy L. Pearsall’s images, soldiers relax with a book, brush their teeth, and play baseball with a rock in place of a ball.
“I’ve often heard war described as perpetual boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror,” Pearsall writes in her exhibition notes. “I’ve seen and documented both.”
Both sides of war are sensed in Tim Hetherington’s photos of soldiers bonding. In this collection of casual portraits, the men nap, pose buddy-style without their helmets, and smile at a camera held by a photographer who would later lose his life covering the insurgency in Libya.
The Face of Battle brings the cost of war home, not in the faces of grieving parents or in the body count of lost lives, or in an action shot of a tactical maneuver, but in the laughter, exhaustion, and absence of the people behind the uniform. Visitors leave thinking not about numbers, but names and stories.
The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now is on view until January 28, 2018 at the National Portrait Gallery, 8th and F Sts NW. Free. Gallery hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. Closed Christmas Day.
