Small Wars

"Thom : It’s a kind of photographic version of Tim O’Brien’s book. She was evacuated to America during the war and grew up there. A lot of the formative years of her life and her memories of Vietnam are not very strong. A huge part of her understanding of Vietnam is through American newsreels or movies: America dealing with Vietnam, mythologising it. She’s in this strange situation; half on one side, and half on the other. She goes back to Vietnam to photograph with her mind loaded up with these images. She wanders around the landscape and because of all that mythology in her mind, and all those triggers that she’s seen in America, she views the landscape as this mythological landscape of war. She sees photographs where you wouldn’t see them: a fire on a farm, burning stubble, becomes like a bombing raid. It’s a book about how mythology affects what you see and how you interpret a landscape. “Baudrillard talks about ‘the death of the real’; we feed ourselves endless images of violence in the form of entertainment” Beth: The Vietnam war was really important in terms of photography. It was full of war photographers. It was a highly aestheticised war. There were a large number of incredible images that came out of it that changed the way people understood the war and added to the anti-war feeling of that time. So for her to go back with her head full of all of those images, with that as her main understanding of her original country is really incredible. She went back and she found resonances. It was a dialogue between her memory, her expectations of what Vietnam would be like according to an American, and the reality of life there. It’s a really fascinating book because she finds the resonances and they say so much. It’s also a beautiful book, a photo book, we wanted to have a photo books on the list. Beth: Jean Baudrillard talks about hyperreality or ‘the death of the real’; the idea that we feed ourselves endless images of destruction and violence in the form of entertainment. So when, for example, 9/11 happened, we were so used to consuming those images in blockbuster action movies, that we had become accustomed to them—we had already seen it happen so it was strangely, horribly familiar. Darien Leader’s amazing book The New Black , which is all about mourning and melancholia, talks about cinema being this really powerful space for experiencing death in Western culture, where we’re very removed from death and its visceral, abject side. We make it all clean and nice and the cinema is a place we go together to experience it. It’s a space for coming to terms with mortality and violence and death. I think when people say “it’s just like a film” they’re right, because we’ve already made films about it. How many films have we seen about terrorist attacks? When we watch them they look the same, and terrorists watch these films too. We produce the culture that we desire."