'Eye of the Storm: War Through the Lens of American Combat' at Reform Gallery
Military combat photojournalists provide a view from the front lines.
IN JUNE 2003, Air Force Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall was new to Iraq, and she still got a rush from the "combat entry" landing, as the pilot hurtled the plane into a downward spiral in darkness to outmaneuver enemy fire.
Baghdad international airport was the Wild West. But Pearsall wasn't coming to shoot Iraqis -- though she would eventually shoot at them. She was there to shoot pictures.
The rosy dawn looked like fire on that hot morning, and Pearsall worried that daylight would make her medical mission a target as they waited for a badly wounded young man. As they loaded him onto the plane, Pearsall snapped away. The man was likely to be a double amputee and was concerned about how he would cope.
Military photographs: An article in today's Calendar section about an exhibition of works by military photojournalists incorrectly says the 1st Combat Camera Squadron is based in Charlotte, N.C. The squadron, including Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall, who is quoted in the piece, is based at Charleston Air Force Base, S.C.
"I remember the anguish on his face," said Pearsall, who, at 28, has won numerous awards. "When you take pictures like that it's etched in your mind forever."
Pearsall is one of nine military combat photojournalists whose work will appear in "Eye of the Storm: War Through the Lens of American Combat Photographers" at the Reform Gallery at West Hollywood. Pearsall will attend Saturday's opening, which is timed to coincide with Memorial Day weekend and will benefit the Wounded Warrior Project.
At a time when the Iraq war is ubiquitous yet strangely remote, this exhibition brings home the conflict from the point of view of the military waging it. This war lacks the triumphant lyricism of liberated concentration camps or flags over Iwo Jima. Iraq imagery is as viral as the digital cameras that made the abuse at Abu Ghraib, photographed by troops, one of the war's most enduring visual symbols. But this conflict, set in dramatic high relief against an austere biblical desert, is dangerous to photograph. Danger means distance.
The military photographers run with the troops, and their immersion can be as intimate as Marine Cpl. Samuel Corum's shot of the guys camping on cots in their skivvies. Wounded Warrior Project.
These photographers are uniformed and always armed in combat, said Pearsall, a member of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Air Force 1st Combat Camera Squadron. They're targets and sometimes combatants. "I have fired back at the enemy, but whether I hurt, wounded or killed I do not know," Pearsall said. "That's the trade-off. It's soldier first."
