the title of another photo-essay, belatedly focusing on the impact of the war on the Vietnamese, as Philip Jones Griffiths had done throughout his time there. By then Burrows said the faces all over Vietnam were ‘more tired’ and ‘dazed’ than he had ever known. In Roger Mattingly’s well-known 1971 portrait that fatigue can be seen in Burrows’ own face. He looks exactly like one of the combat-numbed grunts he had so often pictured: a sign of how the gap between photographer and his subjects was shrinking, lethally. This is suggested still more powerfully by Henri Huet’s picture in Requiem of Burrows helping to carry a wounded soldier, whipped back by a chopper’s downdraught. Burrows’ thick-framed spectacles make him instantly recognisable, which is slightly odd given that the photo is so like one by him, thereby forcing the viewer to concede that a Burrows image is not as instantly recognisable as is often claimed. Indeed, to this observer, Huet’s images and Burrows’ are often almost interchangeable. Since the two photographers died together on that helicopter flight on the Laos border this is not inappropriate. But the images in the pages of Vietnam also have much in common with those in Page’s Nam (1983). Page was spectacularly high on the ‘glamour’ of war; according to his epitaph in Life, on the other hand, when Burrows looked at war ‘what he saw was people’. Except, it turns out, his coverage of ‘The Air War’ shows Burrows to be just as intoxicated by the psychedelic technology of American fire-power as Page was. Two almost identically framed shots, taken at the same moment, in 1969, in Cholon – one in colour by Burrows, the other in black-and-white by Griffiths – of a blood-drenched woman with a soldier kneeling over her, staring nine hundred yards into the distance, crop up in both Vietnam and Vietnam Inc. (the Welshman’s camera can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner of Burrows’ picture).*
This is not to diminish Burrows’ individual talent or achievement. It is simply to recognise the accuracy of Sontag’s judgement from the ’70s, namely that ‘the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographer’s work from another, except insofar as he or she has monopolised a particular subject’ – and in Vietnam they were all shooting the same subject. Similarly, Burrows has always been praised for his humanity and compassion when, if you think about it, what would really set a photographer apart would be the ability to photograph injury, suffering and death with a lack of compassion, even, possibly, with a touch of glee. No, Burrows is a great photographer less because of what distinguishes him as an artist than because of what he has in common with his colleagues and subjects. And I think that those trademark spectacles of his enable us to view his legend (in the cartographic sense) more clearly.
It’s a classic sixth-form debate: whether to take photographs of the injured or to try to help them. Burrows repeatedly took photographs of wounded men being helped by their comrades, even when they were themselves wounded. He was drawn to such scenes because they dramatised that ethical dilemma so clearly as to simultaneously resolve it. Looking at photos like this it is striking how often one or more of the people doing the helping are wearing spectacles like Burrows’. Maybe it’s just a coincidence (though that in itself is almost meaningless in a medium that is about visual coincidences) but it is difficult not to regard these bespectacled helpers as the active representatives of Burrows’s own seared conviction: that showing the wound was also a way of tending to it.
2002
*Actually, they are even more similar than I thought: although Jones Griffiths’ image is printed in black-and-white in Vietnam Inc., it was shot in colour.
Turns out they could be wrong about suffering after all, the Old Masters. As famously evoked by W. H. Auden, everyone ‘turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’ of the boy falling out of the sky in Brueghel’s Icarus. As recorded by Enrique Metinides such incidents attract crowds of spectators whose faces reflect our own shocked fascination with carnage.
For almost half a century Enrique Metinides photographed death and disaster in and around his native Mexico City. Stabbings, shootings, suicides, drownings, fires, freak accidents (‘A high voltage cable snaps loose and hits a man walking along Tacuba Street …’), natural and unnatural disasters – Metinides’ work is a crash-course in the diverse ways people get mangled and killed. If something terrible happened, Metinides was there with his camera, recording not just the wreckage but the way such incidents became sites of instant pilgrimage. He spent most of his career working for the mass-circulation Mexican tabloid La Prensa. To that extent he pandered to an atrocious appetite for calamity and mishap; such is the single-mindedness with which he pursued this line of work, however, that it does not seem inappropriate to speak of his devotion to the subject.
Metinides was born in 1934 and began taking pictures of car accidents when he was twelve. (At the same age, in France, in the early 1900s, another prodigy, Jacques Henri Lartigue, had taken photographs of the idyllic dawn of the automobile era.) The cops let this precocious kid – El Nino, they called him – hang around the precinct, allowed him to take pictures of prisoners in custody, the injured, the dead. The first photographs he’d ever taken were of moments from his favourite movies – snapped while they were being projected on screen – and what happened next was like something from the film City of God: while Metinides was photographing a car crash the crime photographer of La Prensa approached the boy and hired him as his assistant. Still in his early teens Metinides began to learn his trade in earnest, honing his technique and becoming a regular at the hospitals, crime scenes, morgues and crash sites that would be his stamping ground for the next forty years. Like Weegee, Metinides became a part of the scenes he depicted, especially when – again like Weegee – he began using shortwave radios (up to four at a time) to tune in to police and ambulance frequencies so that he would arrive at the incident alongside the emergency services.
Metinides has continued to keep abreast of the technological potential for tracking disaster. Since 1997, when he stopped taking photographs, he has turned his attention to the moving image, monitoring catastrophes on a bank of TVs in his apartment, compiling the kind of taxonomy of ‘crash sequences’ itemised by DeLillo in White Noise: ‘Cars with cars. Cars with trucks. Trucks with buses. Motorcycles with cars. Cars with helicopters. Trucks with trucks.’
To say that his interest in such things is sensationalist or exploitative is to utter a banality along the lines of ‘Pain hurts.’ But by implicating us in the reciprocity of gawp – onlookers stare blankly at the camera; we stare back, our eyes flicking from them to the mangled cyclist in the foreground – the pictures exempt themselves (and us) from the hypocrisy mercilessly exposed by Thomas Bernhard in his final novel Extinction. The narrator’s parents have been killed in a car wreck and he is appalled by the ‘ruthless cruelty’ of the tabloid press and their ‘abominable pictures’ of the death-scene.
They even printed a large photograph of my mother’s headless body. I gazed at this picture for a long time, though all this time was naturally afraid that someone might come into the kitchen and catch me at it … Each paper felt obliged to outdo the next in vulgarity. Family wiped out, screamed one headline, under which I read, Three concert-goers mutilated beyond recognition. Full report and pictures centre pages. I at once searched for the centre pages, shamelessly leafing through the paper to find the illustrated report promised on the front page and simultaneously keeping my eye on the kitchen door, fearful of being caught in the act. I mustn’t immerse myself entirely in these reports of the accident, I told myself, as I may not notice if someone comes into the kitchen and catches me at it.
Egged on by Bernhard one might as well concede that there is an absurd and,
