Public/private, connected/disconnected

Abstract

Chapter I of Suzanne Opton's photographic series 'Soldier' is at first glance an arresting commentary on the effects of military service in Iraq on individual US soldiers. Shot in varying degrees of close-up, the series is composed of nine individual head and neck shots photographed in color, evoking traditional portraiture. Or, at least these images might evoke traditional portraiture if each were turned ninety degrees counterclockwise. For each head appears sideways in the frame, lying on a piece of parchment paper and at a slightly different height to the other heads in the series. The shots are predominantly lit from the top, so that the top half of each soldier's head is illuminated while the bottom half is more in shadow. The background is completely dark. Each shot is captioned with the word 'Soldier:', followed by the soldier's surname. There is nothing about these photographs that resembles the images of soldiers viewers regularly consume as portraits uniformed, upright bodies, standing at attention in front of a flag, and looking directly into the camera. Laid side by side in a sequence, Opton's photographs might be the heads of fallen soldiers littering a battlefield or on gurneys in a veterans' hospital, but only because we know these photographs are of 'soldiers'. Read without their captions, the images in Chapter I of Opton's project might as easily be photographs of any individuals. For neither flags or uniforms are found in any of these frames. All that might suggest some of these individuals are soldiers are the occasionally closely cropped haircuts and 1000 yard stares emblematic of modern military photography. Opton's aesthetic set-up in Chapter I takes viewers back and forth across a series of paired terms, just as the viewer's eyes move back and forth across the two differently lit sides of each soldier's face. These dichotomies include safety/danger, passive/active, dead/deadening, and bodily/disembodied. The viewer cannot rest either their eyes or their minds on either side because both sides are so strongly represented at the same time. So viewers are left to wonder if each soldier is trustingly resting their weary heads after a hard tour of duty on a parchment pillow (safety) or if each soldier is sticking their neck out onto a chopping block, with the parchment evoking the idea of the sacrificial lamb (danger). What are viewers to make of stationary heads (passive) with eyes that actively return or refuse to return the gaze of the camera (active)? Are these images meant to conjure up the censored photographs of dead bodies of US soldiers returned from Iraq (the dead) or do they offer a glimpse of how war deadens the living not only because of the horrors of war but also because of the estrangement soldiers experience upon their return 'home' (remember, these photographs were taken of US soldiers returned from Iraq)? As portraits, these photographs re-present (a part of) the body, but they also very much beg the question, 'Where are these soldier's bodies, and what might they be doing?' For as Opton shoots them, what is unseen in these portraits is every bit as interesting as what is seen. This last question is suggested in another chapter in Opton's Soldier series.1 In Chapter III, soldiers are not pictured individually. Instead, soldiers' heads are