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| Craig J. Barber, "Hope Is All There Was," 1997. |
Award-winning photojournalist Louie Palu, whose photographic collection Zhari-Panjwai: Dispatches from Afghanistan is on display at the ±«Óătv Art Gallery, resides in Washington, DC. The weather in Washington, he says, is stiflingly hot. The fact that the American heat bothers him at all comes as a surprise. Mr. Palu just spent three months in Afghanistan, and he will return to the war-torn country in two weeks. Surely the weather there will be much warmer?
âItâll be a hundred degrees,â Mr. Palu agrees. âItâll be really, really hot⊠hot and dry and brutal. Itâs an extremely unforgiving landscape⊠Canadians are almost suited to it,â he adds â in terms not of warmth, but sheer extremity of temperature.
Afghanistanâs weather is not its most dangerous feature. âWith the troops, I was received very well,â Mr. Palu says. â(Other) people shot at me. I would say they were people who did not receive me as well.â He discusses his close shaves with surreal cool. âIâm not the only journalist to ever get shot at⊠If there were 20 Taliban, and one was a journalist, and a firefight startedâŠÂ I donât think anyone would say, âHey, that guyâs a journalist. Donât shoot him.ââ
What are some of these elusive pieces? âDifferent tribes, different languages, money, road-building⊠thereâs not even one road that connects the whole country.â Mr. Paluâs photographs are displayed with an accompanying audio track of battle in Siah Choi. Between gunshots on the track, people yell, gasping breaths, speaking â in different languages â the lingua franca of fear.
Craig Barber was an 18-year-old Marine when he first stepped on Vietnamese soil. He returned to Vietnam as a photographer, in 1995â30 years later. âMy return allowed me to understand who I was, and appreciate who I have become,â he says. âI was able to learn many aspects about the Vietnamese people⊠that I knew nothing of while there (previously). It was an incredibly cathartic experience.â Mr. Barber has platinum-printed his suite of pinhole photographs. Invented in 1873, platinum-printingâuncommon in modern photographyâproduces images which are extraordinarily long-lasting.
His photographs are cryptically named â in âThe Old Man Served Teaâ (1997), for instance, there is no old man and no tea. âMy titles usually reflect what was happening at the moment of the photo,â says Mr. Barber, âbut also speak to memories of my time there during the war.â
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| Craig Barber embraces Louie Palu, as curator Alison Devine Nordstrom looks on. (Bruce Bottomley Photo) |
The human figures in Mr. Barberâs work are ghostlike, blurred (âAlways Curiousâ 1995) or double-exposed (The Gatherersâ 1998) into transparency. âWith colour, you state, and with black and white, you suggest,â he says. âI feel my work leaves more to the imagination than it would if it were in colour⊠I appreciate my audienceâs intelligence, and anticipate their bringing that intelligence into the gallery and their desire to understand the mood of my work.â His Vietnam is a Pacific dreamscape, radiating a tropical beauty shattered by broken village kilns (âThe Kilns of Vinh Longâ 1998) and abandoned hotels (âSapa Hotelâ 1997).Â
Craig Barberâs collection from Vietnam, in contrast with the immediacy of Mr. Paluâs work, is black-and-white, ethereal, and haunting. Yet what the two collections document is similar: the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan have much in common. âEach fought against a determined insurgency, each destroying the lives of a young generation on both sides of the conflict,â says Mr. Barber, âand each fought against a culture and a people that we do not understand or are attempting to understand⊠Wars are brutal. Vietnam was, Afghanistan is, you name it⊠War is just not pleasant.â
âIâm not so much dealing with a message⊠as with documenting reality,â says Mr. Palu. âIâm not trying to show exactly the way Afghanistan is⊠War for me is all in one box. When someone is shot and dying in front of you, itâs pretty much the same thing.â
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