‘They have had more exposure to combat than soldiers’
A new book of essays by a Toronto neuropsychiatrist explores the trauma-laced travels of some of the world’s top war photographers
What does it take for front-line combat photographers to focus upon the chaos of conflict, year after year, decade after decade? And what does it take out of them? University of Toronto neuropsy- chiatrist Anthony Feinstein, after more than 20 groundbreaking years studying the effects of war on journalists, is back in book form with Shooting War — 18 intimate essays that unpack the traumalaced travels of some of the world’s most dedicated war photographers. The in- terview has been edited and condensed. Caution: this story contains baggage.
Q. You open the book with brief reference to your own compulsory military service in the (apartheid-era) South African army — and describe how cameras, though banned by the military, were nevertheless commonplace in soldiers’ hands. Tell us more of that experience, and is that what first sparked your interest in war reporting?
A. I didn’t say a lot about it because I didn’t want to make the focus on me. This is a book about the men and women who take the photographs. But I do think my early experiences undoubtedly got me interested in war. I got conscripted — very much against my will; I was not a supporter of the
regime in any way — I was living in Paris, but the army tracks you down. And then you had this very uncomfortable choice of “Do I go back or do I stay?” It was an era where if you never went back you basically become a refugee. I didn’t have the resources to live abroad so I went back and I got sent to this war in Namibia and Angola as a medical officer.
The first thought is I would manage cases of psychiatric triage — so to triage people close to the front line, assess individuals and put in place treatment with the expectation they go back to the front lines. I did that for a while but I wasn’t that busy and so the army, in their wisdom, sent me to a very small group of men doing counterinsurgency. And that’s where it became very, very dangerous because we were ambushed, there were firefights, etc. And I shifted from being a psychiatric medical officer to basically a combat medic, treating people who needed immediate first aid.
I didn’t know at the time but what I was witnessing would essentially guide one whole area of my future research.
Interestingly enough, during my time in the war zone I kept a diary but also did some research — I documented the responses of the men I was with to combat. Because I saw some very prominent post-traumatic stress disorder amongst them. I published it in the American Journal of Psychiatry, this rather unique report of psychiatry on the front lines because that’s not where psychiatry normally is. That got me interested in mental health and PTSD research. The memories of that time in Namibia and so 20 years back, here at Sunnybrook, when I had as a patient someone who was a front-line journalist, it kind of rekindled my interest in conflict and started me on a whole avenue of research, which I still do.
One of the things you make clear in the book is that when we use the phrase “combat photographer” it doesn’t necessarily mean for life. One of the 18 photographers you have chosen to profile more or less stumbled into it from such unlikely beginnings as working at the World Bank. Others find themselves drifting away, basically self-exiling from the craft in midstream to do something entirely different, perhaps because of the sheer weight of what they’ve witnessed. How do you see these particular men and women fitting together under the title?
I think what’s remarkable about this group is that they have done this work for a very long time. I think it takes a certain individual who can go back to war year after year after year. If you look at some of these photographers — in fact, the majority of them — they have had more exposure to combat than soldiers. These are individuals who willingly go back to conflict year after year.
Someone who walked away from it at the height of her career — at the height of her success — was Corinne Dufka. She did it I think because of something called “moral injury.” She was a most remarkable photographer but prior to that she’d trained as a social worker, so she got into combat photography through doing social work in Central America. From the beginning, she had a very strong humanistic drive to her work. She won a great many awards. And then came the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where she arrived late to the story.
She missed the scoop. And she was very angry, “Why did I miss this?” And then she started wondering, “Why am I angry? Why am I doing this work?” She had a kind of epiphany, sitting in her hotel room, asking herself “Am I doing this to win awards or am I doing it to tell the story of people who’ve been traumatized by conflict?” She felt she’d lost her way, that somehow her moral compass had slipped. That’s moral injury. She felt she somehow wasn’t doing justice to what from the very beginning for her was more than the great photography — it was finding the humanistic element. And then she had the remarkable fortitude to walk away from it and say, “I’ve lost my way, I’m going to do something different.” And so she went and did human rights work.
That touches one of the least savoury dimensions of the craft of journalism — the craven temptation to think first about what you might take from the story, rather than what you can bring to it. That it would arise — and in fact actually change the entire career path of someone this accomplished — is a powerful element in the book.
Yeah, I think the photographers in this book, while obviously they all have their ambitions, that’s not the primarily motivation for their work. What makes them great photographers in part is this ability to tell the story with their camera. I’d like to think this is a group that’s cut from a different cloth.
One of the most powerful stories in the book is that of Ashley Gilbertson, who, upon learning that the taboo of never firing upon a mosque had been broken by U.S. forces in Falluja, Iraq, sought permission during a military embed to circle back on his own and photograph the body of the dead insurgent at the top of a minaret — and instead was forced, for his own safety, to go back with an armed escort. The American soldier who led the way up the stairs of the tower was killed, leaving Ashley with massive survivor’s guilt. In this chapter, you mention this idea of “moral luck” — that tendency to labour under the illusion that we have any sort of control under inherently chaotic circumstances that defy rational control. Can you talk about how that played out in Ashley’s case?
In many ways Ashley recognizes from an intellectual level that his guilt was misplaced. He had gone to war to photograph war. As an embedded photographer, the military would not let him go off on his own without an escort, he had no say in that. I think he would probably have gone to the minaret by himself had they let him — but they didn’t. The commanding officer said, ‘No, these are the rules.’ He would have been the first up those steps, had they let him — and he wished he had been, showing the level of his guilt. These were variables he could not control.
For me, one of the most powerful photographs in this book is not a photograph of war, it’s Ashley’s photograph from his series on the Bedrooms of the Fallen, which he captured after his experience in Falluja. Here’s the bedroom kept unchanged by parents in mourning, years later. Instead of mementoes of a warrior on the walls of the room you see how the parents have kept all the mementos of childhood … It’s very poignant. It is remarkable and part of his healing process as well. An atonement. To his credit, he speaks quite openly about it now and rather than keep it to himself he has become a powerful advocate for looking after your mental health in difficult situations like that.
I was struck by your description of how much more difficult Ashley found it to go into those bedrooms, compared to the difficulty of going into a mosque in Falluja in the middle of chaos.
That’s spot on. Because going into those bedrooms, he’s confronting his own emotions. Which in many ways are far more difficult than confronting danger.
From a viewpoint of therapy, can that only be healthy? Or is there a penitent aspect to it, where the guilt takes over.
As part of therapy, you have to be very careful of misplaced guilt. The guilt is generating a whole gamut of emotions. But the guilt is misplaced. One has to get a clear idea of where the guilt is coming from. It’s one of the cornerstones of a particular therapy called cognitive behaviour therapy, where you identify what we called cognitive distortions — a distorted way of thinking — and if you can correct that then one of the benefits is that your mood starts improving and your anxiety gets less. But once again there’s an element of moral injury – the guilt and the shame and the feeling that somehow I’ve lost my way and I’ve made a mistake. But in Ashley’s case he didn’t! He followed the rules, he did exactly what an embedded photographer needed to do. The variable that he couldn’t control is war. And the uncertainty of war. And the fact that it can just take the smallest little fraction — a millimetre here, a millimetre there — that changes a life.
You’ve included one photographer in this collection — Sebastiao Salgado — who showed no demonstrable signs of PTSD, yet was consumed with a deep sadness, sadness for humanity, almost. Until he abandoned photography altogether and found another outlet for his creativity. What drew you to his story?
Well, the photographs are so remarkable. But also the fact that he had put himself in a very difficult situation. In the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda he’s by himself, he’s not embedded, he’s in many ways in the world’s worst place, extremely dangerous and he’s working solo not for a few weeks but for a very long period. And he is a witness, repeatedly, to the most unbelievable suffering. The photograph in the book is Salgado’s image of mother and child in the first wave of displacement of Rwandan refugees at a makeshift came in Tanzania. But as the story continues, he goes back and follows the tide of human movement to Goma and then beyond. And so he witnesses, I think it was a quartermillion refugees started out on that march and …
And a fraction came out the forest on the other side. And he’s witnessing this — this starvation, desperation. But he’s also witnessing this remarkable human resilience, which he speaks about, how people set up a barbershop or a money exchange in the middle of this entire trauma.
But yes, I think the effect on him — and he speaks about it quite openly — is that he found it absolutely exhausting. Physically and emotionally exhausting. And after doing this for a prolonged period of time and witnessing enormous human suffering, he just ran out of resources. His body started to shut down, physiologically he become unwell. He had to put his camera down and literally step away from a career that he loves.
You talk about the physiological roots of PTSD. How is what he experienced not in some way that, if his body was breaking down as you describe?
Post-traumatic stress disorder is very clearly defined. The American Psychiatric Association has an approach to mental illness which is, ‘We’re going to define criteria very tightly — you have to have four of that group of indicators and three of this group’ etc. So when you use that, he doesn’t — it’s just not there. I think what Salgado had was overwhelming exhaustion. He found regeneration through the land — going back and restoring the abandoned family home and farming the soil and replanting forests. He undertook to do the most wonderfully creative antithesis of war, getting the earth to bloom again.
The other thing — he doesn’t call himself a war photographer. He told me that he had to get out of the Congo very, very quickly because news came to him that he was going to be killed for his possessions. This wasn’t classical war photography but it was very, very dangerous work — no minders, no security, working alone in the aftermath of genocide under threat of death.
You’ve spent a large part of your career trying to figure how what makes these people tick. How would you characterize individuals who will go to that sort of extreme for the work?
I think all of this group, when you look at their ability to manage risk, is extraordinary. Because what they do the majority of people run away from. I come back to the point I made earlier — they’re not just doing it for one war. I’ve studied front-line journalists for 20 years. I’ve seen a number of journalists think, ‘Oh I think I’ll go do war reporting, it’ll be good for my career’ and they get one sniff of the battlefield and they just can’t take it and never want to go back. And you’ve got this group, almost like an outlier, because they go back not just year after year but decade after decade. I believe it’s hard-wired. It takes a rare physiology that allows you to do this because it is such hard work. And one of the messages that I really wanted to put across in the book — really, in many ways, the central message — is that we look at these remarkable images and we marvel at them, but we don’t think about the men and women who take them and the cost that comes with this image. Every single photographer in this book — at a physical level or at a psychological level or both — has paid a very heavy price for doing this work.