So, Riley was using the camera as a kind of to record events his memory had suppressed.
If he was using it this way in combat, the camera, what could be the roles or what were
the roles for him of these resulting photos now that he was at home?
You know, what were they for him and what could they be for me and what could they be
for the rest of us and should they?
So these were the kinds of questions I was exploring and got to explore with Riley.
So I'm trained as a photographer but here I was more interested in dealing with the
materials that already exist that people already have made and learning about them together.
Photos provide the chain of events that lead your mind into a state where it is okay to
kill somebody.
If you don't remember the sequence of events that took you there, you can believe you were
a monster.
So this is a picture that Riley took when he was in part of a convoy going underneath
this overpass and what he's looking at in this picture when he took it and talks about
it is the truck that's up on the bridge.
And you know, when he looks at the photo, he's like, okay, we were like, who is this?
What do we do?
Do you shoot him?
Do you not?
You know, everybody thought about it and I've got a camera in one hand and I've got a gun
in the other hand and you know, I don't really know what to do so I guess I'll just take a
picture and so that's in this particular case, that's what he did.
And so for me, I'm thinking about the different ways people use the camera and in here I think
one way is that it's used as a kind of a way to find, have some sort of power or have some
sort of control in a situation where he felt powerless and you know, Susan Sontag writes
about this in on photography, she's talking in particular about tourists in this case
where they use the camera as a way to do something.
You know, when you're not doing anything, when you can't do anything, at least you can
do something and I think that's one way it happens here.
Another thing of course that struck me when we talked about this photo and other people
talk about similar photos is the kind of the arbitrary or the quickness with which people
have to make and do make these kinds of decisions.
So someone's life is ended, you know, or it's not and in this case the person who was on
top of the bridge was an ally.
Of course the conflicts today are the most photographed and being used in a lot of ways
that we can talk about if you'd like that are important and interesting and at the same
time people have been, soldiers have been taking pictures in combat for a long time.
This is a photo of my grandfather's that I found when I was a little girl and he was
a World War II veteran and was one of the first tanks to kind of roll into the concentration
camp Nordhauser in Germany, which is now, which became East Germany in Turing.
So the back says April 14, 1945, Nordhauser, Germany, workers burying concentration camp
victims, Polish and Russian victims.
I saw this and it's the I saw this that I feel today.
It's the simple statement and as if he were trying to prove it to himself or just the
simple fact that this was, that it was, that it existed and I think at some level is one
of the most primary parts of a photographic act to say that this happened.
Even if history is rewritten, it can't be refuted or at least to say that my experience,
this is my experience that happened, that part can't be refuted.
