Burnout, the mind and body afflicted by depletion, defeat, unresolvable stress, defines Peter van Agtmael’s unsettling photographs taken over the last 16 years. It starts with illusion – seen as a child in ersatz army fatigues playing with his father, he recalls his juvenile fascination with the weaponry of war – but descends into disillusion after experiencing his country’s post-9/11 wars embedded with American, Iraqi and Afghan militaries.
A soldier sitting in an Iraqi family’s front room after a night raid, the home decor rendering him incongruous and redundant, is emblematic of van Agtmael’s own sense of being out of place. Another domestic scene, a bedroom in Corinth, Mississippi, with a mother waking her child from a nap before the funeral of his dad killed on his fifth deployment, registers the cost of military conflicts. He traces the origins of this cost in the violence that started “with slavery and the extermination of the native population” and his more recent work captures faultlines on the home front with images as arresting as they are disorientating.
Within the limits of a photograph’s frame, finding a commensurate and coherent form for dislocation and dissonance in the body politic has been van Agtmael’s challenge and his achievement. His shot of Cup Foods, where George Floyd was killed by police, is messy but necessarily so; his picture of a Trump rally in Pennsylvania is layered to excess – a green forest, private jet, a muddled crowd of baseball caps and raised arms, half of an upside-down poster, the staring face of one individual at the front – but it is an excess constitutive of the subject matter.
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His pictures can be complicated in fertile ways but they can also hone in on something singular that becomes representative, as in the bare hand clutching the top of a wall of the US Capitol in 2021. Warned off by thuggish participants, van Agtmael took a breather a few blocks away where people “were walking their dogs and sipping giant coffees as if nothing was happening”.
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There are well over a hundred photographs in the book, accompanied by van Agtmael’s personal comments, and their truth fuels their sorrow.
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