Afterword to the Special Issue on Tim Hetherington

The camera and the conflict zone have long been entwined in what has often been a troubled history, dating from the beginnings of the medium of photography to the present day. Indeed, a remarkable continuity can be sensed in the photographic history of war: the grim ‘harvests of death’ photographs of the American Civil War, taken over 150 years ago, still echo in images of conflict from wars in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, a striking example of genre memory. As first theorized by Bakhtin, genres ‘remember the past,’ and make their resources available for new uses in the present (Emerson and Morson 1990). In the work of Tim Hetherington, however, the typical focus on war’s carnage and the explicit depiction of war’s violence recedes, to some extent, in favour of an exploration of a more subtle set of representations. As his images from Afghanistan and his written words make plain, the gallery of earlier images of war and soldiers in war that modern soldiers carry around in memory and imagination profoundly influences their modes of self-presentation and the cultures of soldiery they adopt, an influence that Hetherington called a ‘feedback loop’ – a term and concept that several of the essays in this special issue address. Although the young soldiers depicted in the film Restrepo and in the book of photographs Infidel clearly derive their war personas, their styles of gesture, and their modes of camaraderie from earlier representations, the photographer and filmmaker Hetherington, along with his collaborator, the writer Sebastian Junger, introduce several new themes and variations. Casetti’s (2020) provocative assertion – that when a camera is in the war zone, it becomes not a war-scape but a media-scape, that the presence of the camera changes the battlefield itself – is demonstrably evident in Restrepo and Infidel.

As the essays in this volume attest, Hetherington’s work as an embedded photographer, filmmaker, and video artist both continues this genre lineage and attempts to interrupt it, to trouble it. I believe Hetherington’s subtle subversion of the ‘feedback loop’ constitutes the most original and effective contribution of his work to the growing cultural image bank of war. The contrast in the film Restrepo, for example, between the muscled, adrenalized style of masculinity adopted by the soldiers when together in the Outpost, and the emotional, wrenching, individual interviews he conducts with them after their deployment is one such interruption. Another is his extensive photo series, included in Infidel, and later developed into a video essay of soldiers sleeping. As Hetherington said, ‘You never see them like this. They always look so tough … but when they’re asleep, they look like little boys. They look the way their mothers probably remember them … you can see their youth and vulnerability’ (quoted by Junger 2010, p. 15). Here, the feedback loop, what Whissel (2002, p. 158) has called the ‘rhetoric of soldiery,’ has clearly been put on pause. Conflict photography as practiced by Hetherington comes to us less as a set of visual documents of an under-represented war than as a field of questions and contradictions.

Where this short-circuiting of the feedback loop is most powerfully manifest, however, is in two scenes from Restrepo that occur in the field, not in the Outpost or at base camp. At first glance, the two sequences appear to be distinct and unrelated. The first scene follows a mass helicopter attack on a mountain village in the Korengal; the second is the scene depicting the disastrous operation called Rock Avalanche, in which the top soldier Sergeant Rougle is killed. In these scenes, the feedback loop of masculine soldiery is interrupted not by sleep or by the painful memory of fellow soldiers lost in the campaign but by another image track, a parallel track of cinematic and photographic representations etched into cultural memory. That parallel track is the image of the child in war, in particular, the wounded, traumatized or dead child. Although the track I describe here is not something the soldiers edit into their own self-presentation, it registers with the viewer as an interruption, a short-circuiting of the soldiers’ manufactured self-image.

As the men of Battle Company move through the tiny village after the helicopter attack, they discover that the assault has killed five tribal Afghans and has wounded several women and children. The camera observes the wreckage of a family home, a demolished kitchen, a woman lying quietly on a bed surrounded by her children, and then quickly notices the covered body of an Afghan man. The film focuses at length, and in close-up, however, on the faces of a crying infant and two little girls, one with serious injuries, her eyes bloodied and swollen, and another with dried blood on her face. The crying infant, held closely by an Afghan man, is also spattered with blood.

The resonance of genre memory is invoked in this scene, bringing into view the full symbolic and emotional power of the image of the child in war, a silent commentary using one of the oldest of cinematic and photographic tropes. The scene recalls the indelible photograph of a young Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm attack, as well as a long cinematic tradition depicting wounded and victimized children, including scenes in Battleship Potemkin, Apocalypse Now, and Schindler’s List. As Restrepo unfolds, however, what is especially poignant – and troubling – is the way the image of the child in war comes to accent the portrayals of the young US soldiers themselves. Several of the soldiers in Hetherington and Junger’s film are teenagers, here seen in moments of high tension and vulnerability. With the death of Sergeant Rougle, in particular, a very different register of soldier behaviour comes into view. One young man, told by the sergeant in charge that it is Rougle, cannot contain himself, breaking into open weeping, his voice high pitched and anxious as he repeatedly exclaims that it can’t be Rougle. Another soldier must be quietly assured, several times, that the sergeant died instantly. The film provides medium close-ups of their faces, and large close-ups of certain details, fixing on the dead man’s boots, on the blood-soaked back and pants of another soldier, on the bloodied hands of a soldier aiming a weapon.

The film’s earlier concentration on the faces of the wounded and traumatized children of war is subtly reconfigured here in images that underscore the youth of the soldiers themselves: the pathos of the wounded child is reabsorbed into the drama of the US soldiers confronting the loss of their comrade. The inherited discourse of masculine performance, the ‘feedback loop’ that Hetherington explores elsewhere, gives way to a confessional mode of vulnerable youth, lost, as the song goes, in a wilderness of pain.

Hetherington short-circuits the performative masculinity so expressly conveyed in scenes in the Outpost by introducing another loop of images that evoke cinematic and photographic memories. The essays in this special issue bring the subject of the ‘feedback loop’ into relief. With this Afterword, I wish to highlight Hetherington’s rerouting of this loop, his troubling of the bravura performative style of young men in violence, young men in war. To my mind, this is a signal accomplishment, one that adds a complex new element to a set of tropes and images that have been relatively constant since the beginnings of war photography and war cinema.

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Robert Burgoyne

Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centers on the representation ofhistory in film. He is the author/editor of seven books, including the recent The New American War Film. He wasformerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews, and Professor of English at Wayne State University.