ABSTRACT
The photograph teaches us to look at a person as if at an object. This chapter examines how people look at images of the face and how photographers work to organise the look. It considers a collection of images where the artist has chosen to capture the faces of those who are presumed to have experienced horror: US soldiers returning from combat. The chapter discusses two collections of images that are more ambiguous than the soldier photographs, and deliberately so: one evoking the Rwandan genocide and another Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge. Photographer Suzanne Optons portraits of soldiers between tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan present the faces of young men and women close up and in detail. In a book of photographs of combat veterans, by Laura Browder, When Janey Comes Marching Home, the portraits themselves, in contrast with Optons images, are fairly traditional pictures of figures in uniform.
