{"id":3299,"date":"2013-03-04T10:10:31","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T10:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3299"},"modified":"2019-11-21T15:50:52","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T15:50:52","slug":"planet-of-the-apes-john-szarkowski-my-lai-and-the-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=3299","title":{"rendered":"Planet of the Apes: John Szarkowski, My Lai, and The Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012) <\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n
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Cover for Garry Winogrand, The Animals<\/em>, 1969,<\/em><\/b> with Gary Winograd,\u00a0New York,\u00a0<\/em>ca. 1963, photograph; book published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; cover \u00a9 1969 The Museum of Modern Art, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The reasons for their problems are not difficult to guess: they are under-employed and overly-sociable; they are deprived of the chance of both success and failure, and receive their food, their shelter, and their mates as welfare handouts; their relationship to their keepers\u2014the symbol of both their security and their internment\u2014is ambivalent if not overtly unhealthy. Under such conditions it is not surprising that they should spend their days concerned with unproductive sexual experiment, peanuts, popsicles, transistor radios, and popularity.<\/em>
\u2014John Szarkowski<\/p>\n

The time for art as diversion is over.<\/em>
\u2014Jean Toche<\/p>\n

Monkey Business<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a 1981 interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein, the photographer Garry Winogrand called the media\u2019s obsession with politics during the Vietnam War \u201cmonkey business.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> The statement is tinged with irony, not in its mockery of<\/p>\n

the role of photography to depict politics and war explicitly (Winogrand having been a professional photographer), but in the fact that Winogrand was known as a photographer of \u201cmonkey business.\u201d In 1969 Winogrand published The Animals<\/em> alongside an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). Though it has never been seen as such, it was a timely project, and represents a satire of American society during the height of a war \u201cunassimilable\u201d by popular culture.2<\/a><\/sup> By interpreting Winogrand\u2019s The Animals<\/em> as a social satire, we can reinvest the photographer\u2019s work with a redemptive quality it was seen as lacking due to its presentation by MoMA and show the relevance of Winogrand\u2019s photography within the Vietnam War era.<\/p>\n

During the period of US military involvement in Vietnam (1955\u201375), responses to the war in various cultural fields were indirect, with artists preferring appropriation, allegory, and satire as critical strategies.3<\/a><\/sup> Even in protest, artists of the time chose not to confront politicians responsible for the war, but museums of art, which were seen to be both ambivalent and implicated in the war. Two artists\u2019 groups, each formed in 1969, were typical of this war protest by proxy. The first was the Art Workers\u2019 Coalition (AWC), formed in 1969 as an organization to enact social change within cultural institutions such as MoMA.4<\/a><\/sup> A second group, which emerged from the AWC, was the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Guerrilla Art Action Group, ” A Call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art,” 1969,<\/b> action performed November 18, 1969,Museum of Modern Art, New York (artwork \u00a9 Guerilla Art Action Group; photograph by Hui Ka Kwong)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Confronting the Vietnam War by confronting the museum, thus conflating politics with aesthetics, GAAG\u2019s tactics were blunt. Mid-afternoon on November 18, 1969, the four primary members of GAAG\u2014Jean Toche, Jon Hendricks, Poppy Johnson, and Silvianna\u2014entered MoMA\u2019s lobby and distributed copies of a letter with the heading \u201cA Call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art.\u201d The letter outlined links between the Rockefeller family and the war in Vietnam, highlighting corporate profits members of the family would have seen as a direct result of the escalating conflict. After passing out their demands, the four members of GAAG began to quarrel; grunting, screaming, crying \u201crape,\u201d they tore at each other\u2019s clothes, ripping open sacks of beef blood they had hidden beneath their clothing. As blood spilled, the members fell to the ground, writhing as if in pain and the grip of death. Pausing for only a moment, the artists quickly rose, left the lobby, and subsequently sent an account of the action and several photographs to news agencies. What became known as \u201cBlood Bath\u201d appeared in media outlets such as Newsweek<\/em>, drawing remarkable attention to the efforts of both GAAG and, by extension, the AWC.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u201cBlood Bath\u201d was less a successful political action (Nelson Rockefeller did not resign from MoMA\u2019s board), than a prescient moment in the public perception of the Vietnam War. On November 12, 1969, a week prior to GAAG\u2019s per\u00adformance, the journalist Seymour Hersh broke news of the events that would become known as the My Lai Massacre\u2014an incident on March 16, 1968, in the Son My village of Vietnam that resulted in the death of 504 Vietnamese civilians. On November 14, Winogrand snapped a picture of a large peace demonstration in Central Park, in which thousands of balloons were released representing the rising death toll in Vietnam.6<\/a><\/sup> The following day, November 15, saw a nationwide moratorium against the war; the demonstration in Washington represented the largest rally against the war to date. Then, on November 20, 1969, the Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/em> published army photographer Ron Haeberle\u2019s photographs of the massacre at My Lai. The most striking of these images became a rallying point for those opposed to the war in Vietnam, proof of a policy run amok, and an echo of GAAG\u2019s documentation of \u201cBlood Bath.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Following the publication of some of Haeberle\u2019s photographs in Life <\/em>on December 5, 1969, the AWC contacted the photographer about reproduction rights.8<\/a><\/sup> It planned to make a poster in collaboration with MoMA, using Haeberle\u2019s image, adding text, printing fifty thousand copies, and distributing the work for free.9<\/a><\/sup> The poster would be plainspoken, reading, \u201cQ: And babies? A: And babies.,\u201d thus relaying the graphic violence found within the photograph.10<\/a><\/sup> Though MoMA initially responded positively to the collaboration, by the first week of 1970 its board of directors rejected any involvement in the project. A MoMA press release dated January 8, 1970, stated, \u201cMr. Paley [William Paley, board president] said that he could not commit the Museum to any position on any matter not directly related to a specific function of the Museum.\u201d By this point a printing house had already agreed to donate time and materials for the project, and thus the poster went ahead, without the museum\u2019s endorsement. With MoMA\u2019s public retreat from the poster project, the AWC staged a protest against the war and the museum, using the poster as its rallying point. Gathering around one of the great works of antiwar art, Pablo Picasso\u2019s Guernica <\/em>of 1937, the protest expressed not only artists\u2019 interest in using art as a means for public comment on the war, but also suggested MoMA\u2019s ambivalence toward contemporary politics.11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

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Art Workers’ Coalition, Q: And Babies?<\/em> 1970,<\/b> lithograph, 25 X 38 in. (63.5 X 96.5 cm). Yanker Poster Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-130601 (artwork \u00a9 Art Workers’ Coalition; Original photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the historian James Aulich wrote of Q: And Babies?<\/em>, the success of the poster was \u201cguaranteed by the museum\u2019s failure to co-operate: this rendered institutional appropriation of the art object impossible, and so left intact wider redemptive and socially transforming ideals common to most modern art.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> Aulich\u2019s presumption here is that art can only be redemptive, and socially transformative, if it exists outside the museum. At the time, a key member of the AWC effectively agreed with Aulich\u2019s later premise. The critic and curator Lucy Lippard wrote, \u201cThe first decision about the execution of the My-Lai massacre protest poster . . . was that it be \u2018nonartistic,\u2019 that no individual artist\u2019s name be connected with it, that the \u2018art\u2019 be a documentary photograph.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> As Lippard reaffirmed later, modern art was seen as \u201csafely ensconced in its own world.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> Documentary photography, not considered by Lippard and the AWC as art, would therefore provide a productive means of dissent outside the art institution\u2019s perceived ambivalence.<\/p>\n

The appropriation of Haeberle\u2019s image for an antiwar statement, and the manner in which such a sentiment could permeate the photograph only in its appearance outside a museum, suggests an identity crisis for documentary photography at the time. Documentary-style photography, a mode originating in the United States during the 1930s that carries a distinct subjectification of facticity, was on display at MoMA during the events held by GAAG and AWC.15<\/a><\/sup> In particular Winogrand\u2019s The Animals <\/em>was on view from October 24, 1969, through January 18, 1970. But, as Lippard\u2019s and Aulich\u2019s statements imply, such \u201cart\u201d was socially ineffective. At the same time, photographs found outside the museum, such as Haeberle\u2019s images of My Lai, were viewed as socially effective.<\/p>\n

The director of the Department of Photography at MoMA during these events was John Szarkowski. His program of exhibitions during the Vietnam War era can be seen as typical of the museum\u2019s apparently insular and self-serving agenda. Szarkowski\u2019s exhibitions scarcely touched on the issue of Vietnam, or photography and Vietnam, and when they did, they often undermined photography\u2019s role as impartial evidence. Though Szarkowski was present at some initial meetings between the AWC and MoMA, the group\u2019s demands never trickled into his curatorial efforts as head of the Department of Photography.16<\/a><\/sup> His curatorial program forged a modernist aesthetics of photography that valued the medium\u2019s formal attributes over social content, thus resurrecting American documentary-style photography in the 1960s, and with an eye for individualism. Winogrand\u2019s The Animals <\/em>fit Szarkowski\u2019s bill quite well.<\/p>\n

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Garry Winogrand, Central Park Zoo, New York<\/em>, 1962,<\/strong> plate 28 of The Animals<\/em> (1969) (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; Photograph provided by Frankel Gallery, San Fransisco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Animals<\/em> was Winogrand\u2019s first solo exhibition at the museum, a major accolade for any photographer then as now. Though he had had several exhibitions of his work prior to The Animals<\/em>, Winogrand was interested in publishing the zoo photographs as a book.17<\/a><\/sup> The book was not a large volume, but included forty-two images, five more than the exhibition. All of the images in The Animals<\/em> were made at the Central Park Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium, with the earliest dating to 1962.18<\/a><\/sup> Despite a culture apparently obsessed with animalism, and apes in particular, Winogrand\u2019s book was not particularly successful on the commercial market.19<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The Animals<\/em> is not, however, an unremarkable book. Consider the cover image, which updates Michelangelo\u2019s Creation of Adam<\/em> for the photographic age.20<\/a><\/sup> Instead of God meeting Adam\u2019s hand, we have a zoo-goer feeding an elephant\u2019s trunk. Where Michelangelo chose the creation of man, Winogrand chose the naming of beasts for his interpretation of Genesis. As with the strong diagonal formed by the wall in this image, Winogrand emphasized the distance between the irrational animal and the \u201ccivilization\u201d of humans by foregrounding the zoo\u2019s enclosures throughout his book.21<\/a><\/sup> For instance, on page 28 we see all enclosure, save for a set of lower teeth almost casually tearing at a sign naming the wild creature within. This image is juxtaposed with a serene moment on the facing page: a man, smoking, stares into the eyes of a rhinoceros, whose horn has previously been removed. With such internal juxtapositions, the images in The Animals<\/em> are at once ironic, humorous, and at times downright bizarre. Early in the book, for example, we view a woman in rhinestone-trimmed glasses posing for a portrait in front of a pair of rhinos. Later, on page 27, a couple of elephants catch the gaze of a couple in matching checked shirts, while another human couple watches from within a cardboard box. On page 32, a woman gazes at a llama; the woman wears a leopard print coat, while the llama wears a coat of cashmere.<\/p>\n

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Garry Winogrand, New York<\/em>, 1963,<\/strong> plate 9 of The Animals<\/em> (1969) (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; Photograph provided by Frankel Gallery, San Fransisco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a short text reproduced in The Animals<\/em>,Szarkowski discusses the work with a focus on the photographs\u2019 formal attributes. The curator notes that Winogrand\u2019s zoo \u201cis a surreal Disneyland where unlikely human beings and jaded careerist animals stare at each other through bars, exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments.\u201d \u201cAs complex and simple as ancient parables,\u201d Szarkowski continues, Winogrand\u2019s photographs succeed because of \u201cthe richness of their observation and the sophistication of their graphic command.\u201d As is often the case in Szarkowski\u2019s writing on photography, he generalizes about the content of the material as a means to praise the photographer\u2019s overall formal \u201cvirtuosity.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> Such judgment of photography on the basis of a photographer\u2019s individualized sense of style was established in Szarkowski\u2019s 1967 exhibition New Documents<\/em>. Itfocused on three photographers (Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus) who were commercially successful, relatively unknown, and yet stylistically distinct. Through their work, Szarkowski sought to redefine photography by declaring these acolytes of American documentary style devoid of ideology, thus leaving the photograph to become a conduit of the photographer\u2019s self.23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Szarkowski\u2019s rejection of documentary photography\u2019s redemptive role and his lack of engagement with contemporary issues such as the Vietnam War were criticized as conservative and apolitical. Szarkowski did not avoid speaking to the subject though. In the introductory essay to his 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows<\/em>, he argued that photography failed \u201cto explain large public issues,\u201d such as the Vietnam War.24<\/a><\/sup> Drawing on a well-known image from Vietnam, taken by the photojournalist Larry Burrows, Szarkowski further wrote that photojournalism cannot \u201cserve either as explication or symbol for that enormity [Vietnam].\u201d He continued, \u201cFor most Americans the meaning of the Vietnam War was not political, or military, or even ethical, but psychological. It brought us to a sudden, unambiguous knowledge of frailty and failure. The photographs that best memorialize the shock of that new knowledge were perhaps made halfway around the world, by Diane Arbus.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Garry Winogrand, New York<\/em>, ca. 1965,<\/strong> plate 32 of The Animals<\/em> (1969) (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; Photograph provided by Frankel Gallery, San Fransisco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Szarkowski\u2019s interpretation of Arbus\u2019s work cut against the grain of the loudest contemporary responses to her work. Critics positioned her photography as either exploitative or apathetic. Consider Susan Sontag, who critiqued Arbus\u2019s work in her 1977 book On Photography. <\/em>Sontag claimed that Arbus\u2019s photographs of \u201cfreaks\u201d makes us feel indifferent, and they keep us unaware of any social ramifications to understanding others.25<\/a><\/sup> While Sontag only implied that photographic apathy was the result of viewing photography within a museum, the artist and critic Martha Rosler saw the museum\u2019s role as paramount. In her 1981 essay \u201cIn, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),\u201d Rosler criticized Szarkowski\u2019s position. Writing of the New Documents<\/em> exhibition in particular, she noted that Szarkowski \u201cmakes a poor argument for the value of disengagement from a \u2018social cause\u2019 and in favor of a connoisseurship of the tawdry.\u201d26<\/a><\/sup> She observes, \u201cThe line that documentary has taken under the tutelage of John Szarkowski . . . is exemplified by the career of Garry Winogrand, who aggressively rejects any responsibility (culpability) for his images and denies any relation between them and shared or public human meaning.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Despite the efforts to position Szarkowski\u2019s curatorial program, and Winogrand\u2019s work in particular, as socially disengaged, the photographer\u2019s documentary tendencies prove otherwise. On the many walks Winogrand took through Central Park in the mid-1960s, in part taking photographs at the Central Park Zoo that would end up as part of The Animals<\/em>, he often attended and photographed protests, demonstrations, and other political events that can inform our understanding of the Vietnam War era.28<\/a><\/sup> Furthermore, Winogrand was fascinated by how the media transformed newsworthy events and persons into spectacle. Winogrand\u2019s 1960 photograph of John F. Kennedy shows the President from behind and juxtaposed with his own face on a television screen at the bottom of the image. Images such as this, or his photograph of the Apollo 11<\/em> liftoff, which focuses on mediation rather than the actual event, resulted in his 1977 photobook Public Relations<\/em>. If Szarkowski\u2019s modernism valued the individual behind the lens, Winogrand\u2019s presence (camera in hand) at critical political and cultural events intimates a social realism that critics and champions alike have overlooked.<\/p>\n

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Garry Winogrand, New York<\/em>, 1963,<\/strong> plate 14 of The Animals<\/em> (1969) (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; Photograph provided by Frankel Gallery, San Fransisco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The curator\u2019s job, according to Szarkowski, is \u201crather similar to the job of the taxonomist in a natural history museum. You don\u2019t have to collect and stuff every song sparrow in the world, but you\u2019re especially interested in those that seem to be, in some way or another, a mutation, a little different.\u201d29<\/a><\/sup> Winogrand was such a mutation. With a distinctly subjective stylistic sense\u2014the tilting frame a marker of the photographer\u2019s quick hand and eye\u2014Winogrand\u2019s vision was at once off-hand and focused; horizons list while vertical elements stabilize.30<\/a><\/sup> Szarkowski lauded the work\u2019s \u201ccondition of perpetual contingency,\u201d and reinforced Winogrand\u2019s idiosyncrasy by claiming him as an early American adopter of \u201cnew style\u201d European photography.31<\/a><\/sup> As Szarkowski wrote of Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alexey Brodovitch, and Robert Frank, \u201cThe goal of the new work was not clarity but authenticity.\u201d32<\/a><\/sup> Adaptation to history, as much as individualism, was central to Szarkowski\u2019s taxonomy. As the curator wrote, Winogrand was a \u201cprimitive,\u201d a \u201craw talent,\u201d whose work was \u201cundisciplined\u201d before coming under his tutelage at MoMA.33<\/a><\/sup> While Winogrand sought \u201cthe human condition,\u201d Szarkowski\u2019s discipline trafficked in the peculiarities of Winogrand\u2019s style rather than content.34<\/a><\/sup> cannot disguise its constant attention to the human condition.\u201d Coleman, \u201cDiane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand at Century\u2019s End,\u201d in The Social Scene: The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Photography Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles<\/em>, ed. Max Kozloff (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), 12.] Though Winogrand\u2019s subject matter was at times misogynistic (as in his 1975 publication Women Are Beautiful<\/em>), it was within such patriarchal conditions that Jonathan Green found \u201cthe possibilities of moving beyond social comment to social satire.\u201d35<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

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Garry Winogrand, New York<\/em>, 1963,<\/strong> plate 3 of The Animals<\/em> (1969) (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; Photograph provided by Frankel Gallery, San Fransisco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Animals<\/em> is Winogrand\u2019s most profound \u201csocial satire.\u201d Even Szarkowski saw the work as Winogrand\u2019s \u201cmost fully successful,\u201d not the least for its \u201ccomic drama.\u201d36<\/a><\/sup> Through their humor, Winogrand\u2019s zoo pictures remind us that as much as we go to the zoo in order to view animals, we also go there to view ourselves. A few images stand out in this regard. On page 6, back at the rhino display, a woman is entertained by two kids monkeying around, rather than by the rhinos\u2019 placid demeanor. In a more self-reflexive work on page 14, we find a man outside a large bird\u2019s cage, focused on and perhaps trying to figure out the camera in his hands. Another man walks past, a camera around his neck, gazing between the bird and the man, imagining the photograph he is not taking. Last, on page 3, a young boy points a toy gun at the face of a bear; the bear sticks out its tongue in response. The scene is crowded, as zoos often are, and we (the zoo-goers, positioned there by Winogrand\u2019s camera) cannot help but wonder at the boy\u2019s hostile gesture within the zoo\u2019s confines, a site where animalist aggression is assumed to be safely tamed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the center of the Art Workers\u2019 Coalition protests against MoMA was a photograph taken by Haeberle at My Lai. Instead of fetishizing the singular object hanging on the museum wall (as we might see in Winogrand\u2019s exhibition at the time), the AWC\u2019s poster embraced the ease with which photography could be a form for the masses, and in that way persuasive. To use a photograph as a means of mass communication, and to assert that such a use is \u201cart,\u201d as Lippard had, realigned art as a means to public action, rather than as a mode reserved for the privatized interest of a connoisseur. If we are to accept this reformulation of art as socially active, in its use of photography, mass media, and reproducibility, it is necessary to consider Haeberle\u2019s production of the image. For, unlike photography viewed in a museum, Haeberle\u2019s images existed primarily as reproductions, not as original works of art, and were vital due to their public presence.<\/p>\n

Sergeant Ron Haeberle was a US Army public information officer assigned to Charlie Company\u2019s 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, and 11th Light Infantry Brigade. The photographs from which the Q: And Babies? <\/em>image emerged were all taken on a single day, March 16, 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Haeberle carried two cameras with him that day. One was his army-issued Leica camera, carrying black-and-white film, the second his personal camera, a Nikon, loaded with color slide film.37<\/a><\/sup>, vol. 2: \u201cTestimony,\u201d book 11: Haeberle (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974), 54, 58. In vol. 3: \u201cExhibits,\u201d book 6, \u201cPhotographs,\u201d images P-43 and P-70 reproduce contact sheets from two rolls of black-and-white 35mm film. As Haeberle notes in this testimony, he may have in fact been carrying three cameras that day\u2014one with color slide film, and two with black-and-white.] The slide film, his personal color photographs, would not be developed until Haeberle went off duty following the My Lai incident.38<\/a><\/sup> The standard protocol with the other two rolls of film, the black-and-white, was that they be left with the Army\u2019s Public Information Office, which would then develop and consider the resulting images for internal publication.39<\/a><\/sup> Though Haeberle chose to publish his personal images (those in color), first in the Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/em> on November 20, 1969, and subsequently in Life<\/em> magazine the first week of December 1969, their most important appearance may have been alongside the black-and-white images in volume 3, book 6 of the Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident <\/em>in 1970 (commonly named the \u201cPeers Inquiry\u201d).40<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The first image Haeberle made on March 16, 1968, was in color\u2014a helicopter convoy arriving at \u201cLoading Zone Dottie\u201d in the midst of transporting troops to My Lai.41<\/a><\/sup> When Haeberle arrived on the ground, he set about his work; later he was forthright about his role: \u201cMy job as a photographer [was] to take pictures, a normal reaction I have with a camera, just picking up and keep on shooting, trying to capture what is happening around me. I feel that the camera did take over during the operation. I put it up to my eye, took a shot, put it down again. Nothing was composed.\u201d42<\/a><\/sup> Despite that statement, it later became clear that Haeberle\u2019s photographs were composed. Though each individual photograph may not have been formally preconceived, Haeberle took care to take different images with the color film and the black-and-white film. Thus, the images he would keep for himself, the content of which remained unknown to the army until its initial investigation in August 1969, were strikingly different than what he was making for the Public Information Office.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we look at the \u201cExhibits\u201d submitted by the army for the Congressional investigation into the My Lai incident, the differences between the personal and the official photographs are clear.43<\/a><\/sup> Scanning the first twenty-five images in this legal exhibit, which represents the first roll of black-and-white film, there is scarcely any evidence of massacre, but that is not to say we do not witness the terror of war. The Vietnamese pictured, primarily the elderly, appear full of fear as the US soldiers approach, as does the face of Private Herbert Carter, the only American to die that day (from a self-inflicted wound). We then see American servicemen taking a break, followed by a solider almost casually setting fire to a \u201chootch,\u201d or hut. The following images add more context to the arson, as well as depicting the gathering of prisoners and villagers. The second roll of black-and-white film, with photographic evidence numbers P-56 through P-69, exhibits similar scenes. (P-numbers refer to the numbering of images in the army report I cite in note 43.) From our standpoint, certain of these photographs depict unexpected compassion. For example, P-21 shows one of the outfit\u2019s Vietnamese translators, Sergaent Minh, speaking with a young Vietnamese boy.44<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Seventeen color photographs were reproduced in the photographic exhibits of the army report. Unlike the black-and-white photographs, their narrative is one of horror.45<\/a><\/sup> As one goes through the images, one aspect becomes apparent: the near-absence of identifiable Army personnel. Not only does Haeberle capture the terror of an atrocity invisible in the official black-and-white images, he seems to take care not to include any of his fellow soldiers. I read this absence as composition. Haeberle frames the atrocity in such a way as to not incriminate his fellow servicemen. That said, there are four images where soliders are identifiable\u2014two men stalking a field with their weapons drawn, from early in the operation (P-30), Specialist Capezza throwing rice fanners into a fire (P-35), Private Carter being carried off toward the helicopter (P-36), and Haeberle himself (P-37), reflected in the water as he photographs a corpse at the bottom of a well. With this image, Haeberle\u2019s shooting appears as the only moment of culpability within the color images. As he stated, \u201cI react with a camera and not a rifle.\u201d46<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

A story Haeberle recounted under oath highlights his camera\u2019s participation in atrocity: \u201cA small child came walking towards me and he needed medical attention, and he was shot through the arm and shot through the foot around the ankle. And, he kept walking towards me, and I kept on focusing, and I kept backing up and backing up. This GI knelt down beside me. I didn\u2019t know it at the time, because I kept taking the camera and backing up. Three shots were fired. The first shot hit him in the stomach. The second shot lifted him up in the air. The third shot put him down. A stroboscopic effect one, two, three. And the body fluids came out of his back.\u201d47<\/a><\/sup> Here Haeberle conflates the act of shooting with act of high-speed photography; the stroboscopic effect recalls the work of Harold Edgerton, whose use of strobe-lighting reduced movement to a series of stills. Haeberle sees the GI\u2019s gun as a camera, just as he sees his own camera as a gun.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Ronald L. Haeberle, Bodies Near Burning House<\/em> 1968,<\/strong> Black-and-white photograph, from Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident, volume 3<\/em>, “Exhibits,” book 6, “Photographs.” plate P-16, Washington DC, US Government Publishing Office, 1974 (photograph provided by pentagon library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Haeberle\u2019s photographs would prove pivotal in the investigation of the My Lai massacre, prompted first by Ronald Ridenhour, who sent letters to numerous political and military leaders in early 1969 detailing the incident at My Lai.48<\/a><\/sup> Using all of Haeberle\u2019s photographs as evidence, investigators could name names, show locations, and reveal the extent of death. Curiously, though, much of Haeberle\u2019s testimony focused less on the horrific scenes in the color images than on a single black-and-white photograph, P-16. To investigators, that photograph displayed not only evidence of dead bodies, but more explicitly the burning of huts, intimating that the Public Information Office (particularly John Stonich, to whom Haeberle reported) should have recognized and therefore reported the violation of war crimes.49<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Focused on P-16, an official army image, Haeberle\u2019s testimony scarcely touched on P-34, which was taken closer to the burning structure and displays the atrocity with a force only implied in P-16. As one of the investigators noted, the black-and-white images were \u201ccomparatively bland\u201d when seen against the color images.50<\/a><\/sup> This stark contrast led investigators to suspect censorship within the Public Information Office, provoking them to inquire as to whether Haeberle was asked not to take images that would be detrimental to the army\u2019s public image. Stonich testified that he \u201cnever instructed photographers not to take pictures of subject matter that would not be released.\u201d51<\/a><\/sup> Haeberle felt differently, stating, \u201cIf a general is smiling wrong in a photograph, I have learned to destroy it. What would happen if I had turned my color [film] in? . . . My experience as a GI over there is that if something doesn\u2019t look right, a general smiling in the wrong way, a picture of this, I stopped and destroyed the negative.\u201d52<\/a><\/sup> As we have seen, there is a clear distinction between what Haeberle made in color and in black and white. Despite the Vietnam War being mythologized as a war without censorship, it is clear that such freedom of the press did not apply to the army\u2019s own press corps.<\/p>\n

One question that haunted America following the public dissemination of Haeberle\u2019s images in late 1969 was how the war could have evolved to a point of irrationality. As Phillip Knightley elaborated, \u201cThe use of raw young soldiers, on a fixed period of service, bewildered by the faceless nature of the enemy, and encouraged to regard the Vietnamese as less than human, made an event such as My Lai highly likely to occur.\u201d53<\/a><\/sup> To Lieutenant William Calley, who was ultimately the sole person convicted in the case, on twenty-two charges of premeditated murder, the Vietnamese \u201cwere animals with whom one could not speak or reason.\u201d54<\/a><\/sup> Such a conflation of animal and enemy also surfaced in one of the more absurd legends among GIs: the existence of so called \u201crock apes,\u201d a band of wild simians that were said to emerge from the jungle and attack US troops with rocks.55<\/a><\/sup> It is clear, in such satirical misremembrances of Vietnam, that GIs not only slandered enemy guerillas by viewing them as gorillas, but that such a derogatory view of the enemy fed a lack of empathy. However, it was not only that American soldiers viewed the Vietnamese as animals, but also that the American soldiers had lost a sense of humanity. As GI Greg Olson recalled about My Lai, \u201cThese [were] all seemingly normal guys. . . . For a while they were like wild animals.\u201d56<\/a><\/sup> It was an animalism exploited even by the National Liberation Front (the NLF, or Viet Cong). As an NLF propaganda leaflet, dating from 1968 (after My Lai), read, \u201cWhen the American wolves remove their sheepskin their sharp meat-eating teeth show. They drink our people\u2019s blood with animal sentimentality.\u201d57<\/a><\/sup> The institutions responsible for the safekeeping of US troops and their training, and thus accountable for rationalizing war (as farcical as that sounds), set them free in a fit of feral action.<\/p>\n

Focused on zoos during the Vietnam War, Winogrand\u2019s camera (his \u201cpredatory weapon\u201d as Sontag might call it) draws the viewer toward an all but absent institutional boundary between rationality and animality. The zoo, which reconstructs \u201cthe wilderness\u201d within \u201cthe special, enclosed and policed enclaves nearer to our human homes,\u201d reinforces colonial geopolitics as well as humanity\u2019s taxonomic and architectonic enclosure of nature.58<\/a><\/sup> The events of My Lai reinforced that the debasement and disciplining of another (human or animal) does not exempt the colonizer from irrationality. When viewed in the shadow war, Winogrand\u2019s Central Park Zoo photograph of a boy pointing his toy gun at bear, who responds by baring his tongue, demands attention. What are we to make of the boy\u2019s aggressive body language? The bear\u2019s gesture is humanizing and mocks the boy\u2019s empty threats, but whom might the boy\u2019s gesture imitate?<\/p>\n

In the zoo, the role of those tamed and those undomesticated is uncertain. In Winogrand\u2019s zoo, as Green tells us, we see \u201cthe human in the animal and the animal in the human.\u201d59<\/a><\/sup> Though the Central Park Zoo was intended \u201cas a way to establish New York as \u2018the acknowledged seat of wealth and moral power,\u2019\u201d its public popularity broke down hierarchies of \u201cdecorum and order,\u201d thus displaying the \u201c\u2018ill-assorted\u2019 menagerie\u201d of modern urban space.60<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The persuasiveness of Winogrand\u2019s satire lies in the photographer\u2019s ability to use The Animals <\/em>to alert us to the public\u2019s passive participation in both the restriction and release of our all-too-accessible animalism. Evoked by Winogrand\u2019s repeated framing of the zoo\u2019s enclosures, a general state of conflict is alluded to in The Animals<\/em>. The tameness of the \u201cwild\u201d creatures in The Animals<\/em> forces us to realize the irrationality of confining nature. As viewers of the images, like viewers of animals in such parks, we participate in a peculiar, if not cruel, domestication process. If you forgot you were a part of this social landscape, consider pages 18 and 19, where at first another zoo-goer, and then a beluga whale, catch our eye, folding us into the scene. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the line between human and animal, between the domesticated and the wild, appears to have been lost. Similar scenes appear on pages 24 and 25. In these two images, we appear to move from outside to inside the enclosure. The photographer, the surrogate for the viewer, is both contained and liberated.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Garry Winogrand, New York<\/em>, ca. 1963,<\/strong> plate 43 of The Animals<\/em> (1969) (photograph \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand; Photograph provided by Frankel Gallery, San Fransisco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this way, The Animals <\/em>is an allegorical satire not only of humanity in times of war, but also of the photographer\u2019s real work and the cultural contexts between which it commutes. The first epigraph to this essay, which Szarkowski wrote for the book of The Animals<\/em>, reads as a description both of zoos and of the museum\u2019s relationship to artists. This theme of the enclosure taming human and animal equally culminates in the final images of Winogrand\u2019s book. On page 43 we look into a cage to see a bison and then, beyond, another cage containing a man. We keep the animal, and the animal keeps the man. Finally, in the last plate, a couple embraces, and we watch, apparently from inside an enclosure. Incarcerated, we witness their animal magnetism and are distanced from humanity.<\/p>\n

Though we commonly associate satire with literary, dramatic, or cinematic forms, the photography book (a \u201cliterarization of the conditions of life\u201d as Benjamin called the form) offers a means for photography to participate in this genre. By making this claim, we can situate Winogrand\u2019s The Animals<\/em> in the context of war satires from the Vietnam era. These include classic novels such as Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s Slaughterhouse Five<\/em> (1969), Patrick Ryan\u2019s How I Won the War <\/em>(1963, adapted into a 1967 film), and Joseph Heller\u2019s Catch-22<\/em> (1961).61<\/a><\/sup> Richard Hooker\u2019s M*A*S*H<\/em> was published in 1968, adapted for a 1970 film, and further adapted for a popular television series that aired 1972\u201377. Though each dates from the time of conflict in Vietnam (1955\u201375), none of them addressed Vietnam directly. The focus of each was World War II or the Korean War, though they can be read as indirect condemnations of Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Few satires of the period explicitly focused on Vietnam. Norman Mailer\u2019s Why Are We in Vietnam?<\/em> (1967) critiques American involvement in Vietnam told through metaphor: in the Alaskan wilderness, a father and son go on a hunting trip that descends into chaos. The most fundamentally antiwar satire to emerge from the period of conflict was not a literary text, but a musical play, Megan Terry\u2019s Viet Rock<\/em>, written and first performed in 1966. As Terry wrote of her use of satire, \u201cEvery positive and comic value in the play must be played, and then the dark values will come through with twice the impact.\u201d62<\/a><\/sup> Though typical of war satire in this regard, Viet Rock<\/em> is rare in that it directly addressed contentious issues such as the loss of innocent life and the draft. A farcical echo of the war\u2019s terror can also be found in the film Night of the Living Dead <\/em>(1968, directed by George A. Romero), which, according to the scholar Sumiko Higashi, amplified \u201ctelevised images of war\u201d by setting a new \u201cprecedent for grisly scenes\u201d on film.63<\/a><\/sup> We could add to this micro-genre the Arlo Guthrie album and Arthur Penn\u2019s film Alice\u2019s Restaurant <\/em>(1967 and 1969), and Brian De Palma\u2019s film Greetings <\/em>(1968). Each of these works resorted to satire during a time of conflict as \u201cthe Vietnam War . . . proved so disturbing that it invited repression.\u201d64<\/a><\/sup> As related elsewhere, most notably by Rick Berg and David James, the Vietnam war was peculiar in that it failed to be \u201ccompatible\u201d with forms of popular culture of the time.65<\/a><\/sup> Of course innumerable fictional books, narrative films, documentaries, plays, and artworks addressed the war, and its repercussions, after the war\u2019s end, but during the conflict itself we seldom see Vietnam explicitly depicted in the arts.<\/p>\n

Outside the literary and dramatic arts, and in the realm of fine art, the Vietnam War was often addressed indirectly, through satire (as with Winogrand), allegory, or appropriation. Rosler, whom we have seen as a critic of both MoMA and Winogrand, created a series of collages entitled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful<\/em> between 1967 and 1972. The works appropriated imagery from House Beautiful <\/em>magazine and juxtaposed them with graphic images from the popular press depicting violence in Vietnam. The stark contrasts within the images serve to remind the viewer of the distance between an insulated modern American lifestyle and the wars waged to preserve that lifestyle. Despite their serious and infuriated tenor, the images are strangely comical. Though choosing appropriation as an indirect means, as opposed to satire, the outcome is the same; to paraphrase Terry, the comedy redoubles the grave tone of the artist\u2019s intent. In Winogrand\u2019s social satire, Terry\u2019s Viet Rock<\/em>, and Rosler\u2019s collages, the only appropriate social response to a war that was \u201cunassimilable\u201d by culture was to caricature reality. Of course, the risk of lampooning social conditions during a time of war is that such material may appear ambivalent.<\/p>\n

Though Rosler would certainly hesitate to have her work placed in such a context with Winogrand\u2019s, as she was critical of Winogrand\u2019s compliance with Szarkowski\u2019s curatorial program, seeing his satire as socially disengaged is a reading of the work tied only to its existence within a museum. Recall that according to Aulich, the success of the Q: And Babies?<\/em> poster of the AWC was that MoMA failed to participate and thus appropriate the work.66<\/a><\/sup> What Aulich implied was that the socially transformative potential of modern art could only be realized outside institutional constriction. Therefore, Winogrand\u2019s book The Animals<\/em>, and not the exhibition, might participate in such a socially engaged definition of modern art, because like Q: And Babies?<\/em> it subverts \u201cthe dominant conventions of the art object and the market system.\u201d67<\/a><\/sup> That is, in lacking the singularity, authenticity, and thus connoisseurship one associates with fine-art objects, the photobook can circulate without the same cultural and social restrictions as a museum exhibition of photographs.<\/p>\n

More accessible, more public, and thus more political, Winogrand\u2019s The Animals<\/em> should be understood in a tradition of American photography books invested in social commentary. Itis part of a genealogy of books, dating back to those produced during the Great Depression, which embrace the book form as
a means of social documentation coupled with persuasive politics. As noted by William Stott in Documentary Expression and Thirties America<\/em>, the definitive book on the subject, published in 1973 in the shadow of the Vietnam War, the documentary photobook makes the reader feel that he or she is a \u201cfirsthand witness to a social condition.\u201d68<\/a><\/sup> Critical examples of the form are represented by Archibald MacLeish\u2019s Land of the Free <\/em>(1938), the Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange collaboration An American Exodus <\/em>(1939), and Margaret Bourke-White and the novelist Erskine Caldwell\u2019s You Have Seen Their Faces <\/em>(1937). <\/em>Despite the redemptive, New Deal politics they promote, they share with Winogrand\u2019s work a literary sensibility. MacLeish\u2019s Land of the Free <\/em>was \u201ca book of photographs illustrated by a poem,\u201d according to its author, while Taylor and Lange\u2019s An American Exodus <\/em>was a stark narrative of cross-country migration reaffirming the imagery in Steinbeck\u2019s 1939 Grapes of Wrath<\/em>. Bourke-White and Caldwell\u2019s book, though, was unapologetically fictional; Caldwell fabricated quotes to use as captions, while Bourke-White concentrated on the tragic and abject, thus creating a hyperbolic image of the state of American society during the Depression. Modeled on critical precedents, such as Walker Evans\u2019s American Photographs <\/em>(1938) or Robert Frank\u2019s The Americans <\/em>(1959), with their personal stylizations of documentary photography, Winogrand\u2019s The Animals <\/em>presents the photobook as a literary form with an appropriate genre to suit\u2014satire.69<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The American War<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t rationalize what you can do,\u201d Haeberle said recently regarding a common reaction he has had to his photographs. 70<\/a><\/sup> Why did he not intervene in the My Lai massacre? How could he have been a passive participant? Haeberle\u2019s response is that, unless present in the moment, one cannot hypothesize a reaction. Though Haeberle\u2019s reaction in the moment was one of photojournalistic intuition, his reaction to the color images after the fact appears to have been more calculated. As we have seen, Haeberle\u2019s images selectively limit the appearance of soldiers, thus limiting culpability of those involved in the My Lai massacre. As he revealed in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/em> (his \u201clast interview\u201d), Haeberle destroyed numerous color images taken with his Nikon.71<\/a><\/sup> Though seventeen images were submitted to record for the army investigatory report, a typical roll of Ektachrome slide film in the late 1960s would have contained thirty-six exposures.72<\/a><\/sup> At most, nineteen images were destroyed between the time Haeberle left active duty in March 1969 and initial visits to him by the Army\u2019s Criminal Investigation Department in August 1969.73<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Haeberle\u2019s act of destruction has barely been commented on. David Quigg, writing for the Huffington Post<\/em>, recently claimed that once Haeberle destroyed some of the color images, the remaining photographs no longer \u201cqualif[ied] as journalism.\u201d74<\/a><\/sup> As we can now recognize, though, neither did the black-and-white images. They too were selectively made to meet the needs of the army\u2019s internal reporting service. Haeberle\u2019s act of self-editing, with both cameras, is fundamental to a cultural shift in the acceptance of photography as a surrogate for reality.<\/p>\n

As Haeberle readily admitted, forty years after the fact, one cannot know the reality of an experience through a photograph of that experience. As viewers of the images, we cannot \u201crationalize\u201d what our reactions to the events of March 16, 1968, might have been\u2014we cannot know. In Haeberle\u2019s words, \u201cYou don\u2019t know. Until you\u2019re in that reality. You never know.\u201d75<\/a><\/sup> If the photographer, the figure here who is deemed responsible for realizing these events for the public, is not convinced of the photograph\u2019s communicative ability, can that event ever be present?<\/p>\n

Given this perceived limitation in the media\u2019s presentation of the war, that artists chose to represent the war indirectly (through appropriation, allegory, and satire) is telling. Even Haeberle participated in this logic of foregoing the photographic surrogate for a more personally expressive form. By editing, destroying, and sequencing his color images, Haeberle\u2019s photographs of My Lai are not evidence but a construction of events that expresses a singular perspective. In this sense, Szarkowski\u2019s New Documents <\/em>thesis was prescient: the documentary photograph was no longer socially persuasive and public, but individualistic and always personal. As Stott made clear in Documentary Expression, <\/em>documentary photography functions because of its human element; it is always \u201cbiased,\u201d as we cannot take for granted the person behind the camera.76<\/a><\/sup> Yet despite Szarkowski and Stott\u2019s revision of \u201cdocumentary photography\u201d toward the personal, in the realm of the law (and as military photojournalism), Haeberle\u2019s images were seen to imply no culpability on the photographer\u2019s part. The responsibility rested primarily on Calley, a figure never pictured in Haeberle\u2019s images. However, the turn to a public perception of documentary photography after My Lai that accepts the image as enmeshed in individualistic sensibility (central to Szarkowski\u2019s modernization of photography) has led to a limitation of photography\u2019s capability to insinuate guilt anywhere beyond the camera.77<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"
Harrell fletcher, The American War<\/em>, 2006,<\/strong> pages 44 and 45 (Atlanta: J&L Books, 2006)(Original Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle reduplicated on page 44; photograph on page 45 and complication \u00a9 Harrell Fletcher)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite the apotheosis of photography from socially persuasive function to individualistic expressive form at MoMA during the Vietnam era, I want to end by giving the museum a chance to be transformative and redemptive, and thus have a social impact. The example is not to be found at MoMA, nor in New York, but in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, at the War Remnants Museum. There we find Haeberle\u2019s images again appropriated, by way of their reproduction in Life<\/em>, and used to memorialize the massacre for the Vietnamese. In this context, the war is not the Vietnam War but the American War. Furthermore, the museum I am interested in is not the actual place, but its reduplication as a book: Harrell Fletcher\u2019s 2005 The American War<\/em>,which consists of the artist\u2019s documentation of exhibits at the War Remnants Museum. The story told by Fletcher\u2019s images of the museum is one often unrecognized in the United States. The American War <\/em>finds torture, terror, atrocity, and lifelong malady as the war\u2019s enduring legacy. Fletcher\u2019s book is a simple gesture: it shares information by making photographs of photographs. As Fletcher readily admits, the images in the book are partial: \u201cThe museum and my re-presentations of it are only showing one perspective, there are many others.\u201d78<\/a><\/sup> In that sense, Fletcher\u2019s project reminds us of the necessary role of photography in society: it provides different and personal perspectives onto the world. To recognize the photograph as a personal surrogate of reality (and not reality itself) is to recognize the photograph\u2019s human element. The photograph is a place of empathy and connection between cultures, and Fletcher\u2019s decision to realize the project in book form is critical.79<\/a><\/sup> As a book, it circulates publicly and is absorbed privately. Thus, unlike an exhibition of photographs, the book of photographs may simultaneously affect personal and social understandings of war, reminding us not only of the public need for photography, but also that its effectiveness rests on interpersonal connections.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chris Balaschak is an assistant professor of art history at Flagler College. His research focuses on the institutions and publications that cultivate definitions of documentary photography. He has recently completed a manuscript entitled \u201cBound: The Photobook and the Szarkowski Moment,\u201d which considers how photography books helped to forge a photographic modernism. Balaschak is currently researching the redefinition of social documentary photography within contemporary art\u2019s \u201csocial turn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Garry Winogrand, interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein, in Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography<\/em> (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 180. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. David James, \u201cRock and Roll in Representations of the Invasion of Vietnam,\u201d Representations<\/em> 29 (Winter 1990): 79. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Lucy Lippard\u2019s commentary on Leon Golub is key here. Included in her exhibition A Different War<\/em>, Golub appropriated media imagery as a means of representation, and in that way his is typical of work Lippard presented in the exhibition. See Lucy Lippard, A Different War<\/em> (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1990). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. As a consortium of artists, writers, and curators, the AWC coalesced around \u201c13 Demands,\u201d a letter calling for artists\u2019 rights to the use and publication of their work, as well as the need for exhibitions that represented the racial and sexual diversity of modern artists. See Documents I<\/em> (New York: Art Workers\u2019 Coalition, 1969). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. See \u201cArs Gratia Artis,\u201d Newsweek, February 9, 1970, 80. The narrative of these events is also retold in Lippard, 26; in Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change<\/em> (New York: Dutton, 1984); and in Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. The Winogrand photograph is often dated 1970, but the event took place in 1969. An Associated Press photograph by J. Spencer Jones dated 1969 shows the same event. For another description of the event that dates it to 1969, see Ann Charters, \u201cHow to Maintain a Peaceful Demonstration,\u201d in The Portable Sixties Reader<\/em>, ed. Charters (New York: Penguin, 2003), 141\u201355. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. The visual consonance between the images was first brought to my attention by Julia Bryan-Wilson while I was her teaching assistant at the University of California, Irvine, in spring 2010. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. See Francis Frascina, \u201cMeyer Schapiro\u2019s Choices: My Lai, Guernica, MOMA and the Art Left, 1969\u201370,\u201d Journal of Contemporary History<\/em> 30, no. 3 (July 1995): 499. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. See Lippard, Get the Message?<\/em> 8\u20139. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. The text was drawn from a November 24, 1969, interview between Mike Wallace and the soldier Paul Meadlo, discussing the victims of My Lai and his actions there. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. See Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 265. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. James Aulich, \u201cVietnam, Fine Art, and the Culture Industry,\u201d in Vietnam Images: War and Representation<\/em>, ed. Jeffrey Walsh and Aulich (New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 1989), 82. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. Lippard, Get the Message?<\/em> 8. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  14. Lippard, A Different War<\/em>, 17. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  15. William Stott affirmed the historical genesis of documentary-style photography in 1973. when he wrote that a documentary photograph is at once \u201cimpersonal\u201d and \u201chuman,\u201d its human element allowing for a sympathetic appeal to the viewer which could become a vehicle for ideology. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 6. Sources critical to Stott include Edward Steichen, \u201cThe F.S.A. Photographers,\u201d U.S. Camera 1939<\/em> (New York, 1938), 43\u201365; and Roy Stryker, \u201cDocumentary Photography,\u201d The Complete Photographer<\/em> (Chicago: National Education Alliance, 1942), 1364\u201366. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  16. Szarkowski\u2019s attendance is noted in \u201cArs Gratia Artis?\u201d 80. For essays on Szarkowski\u2019s broad influence, see Christopher Phillips, \u201cThe Judgment Seat of Photography,\u201d October 22<\/em> (Fall 1982): 27\u201363; and Maren Stange, \u201cPhotography and the Institution: Szarkowski at the Modern,\u201d Massachusetts Review<\/em> 19, no. 4, \u201cPhotography\u201d (Winter 1978): 693\u2013709. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  17. Winogrand\u2019s work had previously been included in MoMA exhibitions such as Edward Steichen\u2019s The Family of Man<\/em> (1955), and Szarkowski\u2019s The Photographer\u2019s Eye (1964) and New Documents<\/em> (1966). A 1968 article in Popular Photography<\/em> claims Winogrand was interested in making the book; the claim predates the MoMA exhibition by a year. See Jonathan Brand, \u201cCritics\u2019 Choice,\u201d Popular Photography<\/em> 63, no. 6 (June 1968): 139. Winogrand also states his interest in the Diamonstein interview, 181. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  18. See Tod Papageorge, introduction to Public Relations<\/em> (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 13; and Carl Chiarenza, \u201cStanding on the Corner . . . Reflections upon Winogrand\u2019s Photographic Gaze: Mirror of Self or World,\u201d Image<\/em> 34, nos. 3\u20134 (Fall\u2013Winter 1991): 50. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  19. For a sense of the popularity of aping animalism at the time, consider a few cultural artifacts: the film Planet of the Apes<\/em> (1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaeffer); Jane Goodall\u2019s book My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees<\/em> (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1969); and Desmond Morris\u2019s urban sociology The Human Zoo<\/em> (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). Szarkowski noted that The Animals<\/em> \u201cwas printed in gravure in an edition of 30,000 copies, to sell at $2.50, and was a resounding commercial failure.\u201d Szarkowski, The Work of Garry Winogrand<\/em> (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 22. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  20. The iconographic resemblance is pointed out in Diamonstein,182, but denied in the same interview by Winogrand: \u201cThat has nothing to do with what I\u2019m talking about now. It\u2019s just that I carry an arm around with me, you know. I wouldn\u2019t be caught dead without an arm.\u201d A further connection between Renaissance humanism and Vietnam-era satire occurs in the 1970 film version of M*A*S*H<\/em>, wherein Robert Altman stages a military meal as Da Vinci\u2019s Last Supper. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  21. Here I am invoking the sense of \u201ccivilization\u201d preferred by Sigmund Freud to imply the rationalization of the human animal at the dawn of its socialization. See Freud, Civilization and its Discontents<\/em>, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  22. John Szarkowski, untitled essay in The Animals<\/em> (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969), n.p. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  23. In a press release for the exhibition, Szarkowski explained that a \u201cnew generation of photographers has redirected the technique and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand.\u201d Museum of Modern Art, \u201cNew Documents, February 28\u2013May 7, 1967\u201d press release, February, 28 1967. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  24. John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960<\/em> (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 13. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  25. Susan Sontag, On Photography<\/em> (New York: Dell Publishing, 1978), 43. Sontag further notes, \u201cWhat happens to people\u2019s feelings on first exposure to today\u2019s neighborhood pornographic film, or to tonight\u2019s televised atrocity is not so different from what happens when they first look at Arbus\u2019s photographs. The photographs make a compassionate response feel irrelevant.\u201d This view fed Sontag\u2019s larger thesis that \u201cphotography is essentially an act of non-intervention.\u201d Instead of evoking empathy, she claimed, photographs evoke \u201cthe feeling of being exempt from calamity.\u201d Sontag, 41, 11, 168. Sontag\u2019s thinking on the role of photography continued to evolve; see Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), esp. 121; and \u201cRegarding the Torture of Others,\u201d New York Times Magazine<\/em>, May 23, 2004.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  26. Martha Rosler, \u201cIn, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),\u201d rep. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography<\/em>, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 321. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  27. Ibid., 320. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  28. Winogrand\u2019s many photographs of political events of the period include \u201cPeace Protest\u201d (1970), \u201cWomen\u2019s Liberation March\u201d (1971), \u201cHard Hat Rally\u201d (1969), and \u201cPeace Demonstration.\u201d (1969). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  29. Szarkowski quoted in Stange, 697\u201398. Szarkowski\u2019s allusions to a naturalist continued in a later interview, where he says about photography, \u201cI am interested in the entire, indivisible, hairy beast\u2014because in the real world, where photographs are made, these subspecies, or races, interbreed shamelessly and continually.\u201d Mark Durden, \u201cEyes Wide Open: Interview with John Szarkowski,\u201d Art in America 94<\/em>, no. 5 (May 2006): 85. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  30. Winogrand said, \u201cThere\u2019s an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference. And if you study those pictures, you\u2019ll see I use the vertical often enough. I use either edge.\u201d Diamonstein, 182. Carl Chiarenza also noted, \u201cContent overwhelms form in this book as well. Winogrand\u2019s vertical stabilizer holds the tilt or diagonal, and thus joins the play of content in some pictures.\u201d Chiarenza, 50. Winogrand added to these thoughts in 1979: \u201cWhat tilt? There\u2019s only a tilt if you believe that the horizon line must be parallel to the horizontal edge. That\u2019s arbitrary. In my pictures there\u2019s always something parallel to the horizontal edge and that rationalizes the photograph.\u201d \u201cQ and A: Garry Winogrand,\u201d American Photographer<\/em> 2, no. 5 (May 1979): 55. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  31. Szarkowski, The Work of Garry Winogrand<\/em>, 26. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  32. Ibid., 12. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  33. Ibid., 12, 18, 15. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  34. As A. D. Coleman wrote, from Winogrand\u2019s \u201cearly work\u2014up through The Animals<\/em> . . . [one ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  35. Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History<\/em> (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984) 112. See Garry Winogrand, \u201cWinogrand on Women,\u201d in Women Are Beautiful<\/em> (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1975). Carl Chiarenza writes, \u201cWinogrand\u2019s pictures are direct evidence of a patriarchal society, a society that forced women to aspire to a model formed long ago and continuously reinforced since.\u201d Chiarenza, 28. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  36. Szarkowski, The Work of Garry Winogrand<\/em>, 22, 21. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  37. See Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident <\/em>[\u201cPeers Inquiry\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  38. Ibid., vol. 2, book 11: Haeberle, 68. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  39. Ibid., 67. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  40. Though inscribed with the dates March 14, 1970 (when the inquiry was finalized), the volumes were first published in 1974. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  41. See Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai<\/em> (New York: Penguin, 1992), 104. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  42. Haeberle quoted in ibid., 124. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  43. Report of the Department of the Army<\/em>, vol. 3, book 6, is available as a PDF at www.loc.gov\/rr\/frd\/Military_Law\/pdf\/RDAR-Vol-IIIBook6.pdf (as of November 8, 2012). The book contains all the images to which I refer by exhibition number, e.g., P-1. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  44. Scenes similar to these are repeated in P-66 and P-67, where Sergeant Phu, another translator, is pictured interacting with locals. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  45. The army held no claim and had no restrictions on servicemen using personal cameras during combat. Even when army investigators learned of these images, Haeberle held copyright and required the army to return the images. As Haeberle testified, they were used for \u201ca series of illustrated talks about the war to various groups in Ohio.\u201d Bilton and Sim, 241. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  46. Report of the Department of the Army<\/em>, vol. 2, book 11: Haeberle, 46. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  47. Ibid., 53. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  48. See James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents<\/em> (Boston: Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 1998), 146\u201351; and Bilton and Sim, 218\u201319. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  49. See Report of the Department of the Army<\/em>, vol. 2, book 14: Stonich, 35. Such a violation is outlined clearly in the Fourth Geneva Convention, Section III, Article 53, \u201cDestruction of Property\u201d: \u201cAny destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.\u201d
    ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  50. Report of the Department of the Army<\/em>, vol. 2, book 11: Haeberle, 39. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  51. Ibid., book 14: Stonich, 1, 42. See also vol. 2, book 14: Roberts, 99, 101. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  52. Ibid., vol. 2, book 11: Haeberle, 71. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  53. Phillip Knightley, \u201cVietnam 1954\u20131975,\u201d in The American Experience in Vietnam: A Reader<\/em>, ed. Gracy Sevy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 129. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  54. Calley quoted in Bilton and Sim, 21. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  55. Kregg P. Jorgenson, Very Crazy G.I.!: Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War <\/em>(New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 33\u201336. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  56. Olson quoted in Bilton and Sim, 93. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  57. Quoted in Olson and Roberts, 135. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  58. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, \u201cAnimal Spaces, Beastly Places,\u201d in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations<\/em>, ed. Philo and Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000), 13. Also of note in this book is Gail Davies, \u201cVirtual Animals in Electronic Zoos: The Changing Geographies of Animal Capture and Display,\u201d 243\u201366. Regarding colonialism and zoos, see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science <\/em>(London: Routledge, 1990). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  59. Green, 112. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  60. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park <\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 342, 344. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  61. Each of these works, of course, owes something to George Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm<\/em> (1945). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  62. Megan Terry and Peter L. Friedman, \u201cViet Rock,\u201d Tulane Drama Review<\/em> 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1966): 197. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  63. Sumiko Higashi, \u201cNight of the Living Dead: <\/em>A Horror Film about the Horrors of the Vietnam Era,\u201d in From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film<\/em>, ed. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 184. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  64. Ibid., 186. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  65. James, 83. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  66. Aulich, 82. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  67. Ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  68. Stott, 214. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  69. Winogrand professed his admiration for Frank and Evans. See Charles Hagen, \u201cAn Interview with Garry Winogrand,\u201d Afterimage<\/em>, December 1977, 14; and \u201cMonkeys Make the Problem More Difficult: A Collective Interview with Garry Winogrand,\u201d Image<\/em> 15, no. 2 (July 1972):3\u20134. The connections between Winogrand and Frank and Evans are also discussed in Chiarenza, 19, 27. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  70. Haeberle quoted in David I. Andersen, \u201cPhotographer Remembers My Lai Massacre,\u201d Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/em>, November 19, 2009. For video, see http:\/\/videos.cleveland.com\/plain-dealer\/2009\/11\/photographer_remembers_my_lai.html (as of November 2, 2011). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  71. Ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  72. See Evelyn Theiss, \u201cMy Lai Photographer Ron Haeberle Admits He Destroyed Pictures of Soldiers in the Act of Killing,\u201d Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/em>, November 20, 2009, at http:\/\/blog.cleveland.com\/pdextra\/2009\/11\/post_25.html (as of November 2, 2011). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  73. See Anderson interview. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  74. David Quigg, \u201cPart Expos\u00e9, Part Cover-Up: 1968\u2019s My Lai Massacre Photos Have Big Lessons for Citizen Journalists,\u201d Huffington Post<\/em>, November 24, 2009, at www.huffingtonpost.com\/david-quigg\/part-expos-part-cover-up_b_368685.html (as of November 2, 2011). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  75. Haeberle quoted in Anderson interview. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  76. Stott, 61. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  77. Following suit, an individual photographer\u2019s relation to the scene photographed has turned out not to implicate those overseeing the atrocity pictured, but primarily those captured by the camera. Consider the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, where those pictured (Lynndie England, Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick, and Sabrina Harman) and the persons behind the camera (Harman and Frederick in particular) took the brunt of public blame. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  78. Harrell Fletcher, The American War<\/em> (Atlanta: J&L Books, 2007); excerpts are online at www.harrellfletcher.com\/theamericanwar\/ (as of November 9, 2011). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  79. The American War <\/em>also existed as an exhibition that toured the United States 2005\u20137. I first saw the project during its run at LAX-ART in Los Angeles, January 30\u2013March 3, 2007. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Chris Balaschak<\/p>\n

    In 1969 Winogrand published The Animals<\/em> alongside an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). Though it has never been seen as such, it was a timely project, and represents a satire of American society during the height of a war \u201cunassimilable\u201d by popular culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3335,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}