Shots in the Dark

In Part 3 of this three-part interview with Nina Berman, I spoke to the photographer about why print journalists largely ignored “Marine Wedding”—and how the blogosphere wasn’t afraid to publish something print journalists wouldn’t.

Richard Bradley: So the photos of Ty and Renee were published in People in November…

Nina Berman: Not [Marine Wedding].

Why not?

I never asked—it was pointless. Editor’s choice. The story was published around the world, but if you look at the spreads that everyone ran, no one published that picture. They all published the fairy tale story.

So which photos were printed in People?

The picture that People ran is from the photo studio, but it’s a horizontal portrait. You see the bridesmaids and some other people from the groom’s side. It looks like some typical high school or college wedding—and then something’s a little off.

Were any of them published elsewhere?

Paris Match and Stern published another one—Ty and Renee coming out of the high school right after their wedding. We see the back of the high school and Marines standing at attention, and Ty and Renee smiling.

I like the image of them alone better because it conveys the idea that when the party’s over, they’re going to have some heavy stuff to deal with.

Of course. But this is the failure of journalism. [Magazines] want to go for the narrative that they constructed before they sent me out on the story. They want to go for the fairy tale.

Which tells you what?

That in war people look for fairy tale endings. “See? Everything’s fine. You can blow a guy’s face apart, take off his limbs, rip his brain out, but he’s fine. Right?”

How did Marine Wedding get such exposure on the Internet then?

Then only reason why that picture got published is because I entered two pictures from that series in World Press [Photo Contest].

What is World Press?

It’s the main photography competition. They get 70,000 entries around the world in different categories. I entered two pictures from that series, and Marine Wedding won in the portrait category. After that, it became this Internet sensation. That’s why the picture became known. It just went insane over the blogosphere.

So bloggers responded to it more than the print press did.

Yeah. Absolutely. It shows the lack of imagination of photo editors.

Or the fear that this was a picture people didn’t want to see.

Or the fear. Or that they’re so trained in their ways.

Tell me about the reaction.

Some guy wrote me: “I usually get 12 hits a day on my site, and then I posted your picture and I got 40, 000.”

(Sarcastically) Great—thank you.

For a few days, my site was getting about 30,000 hits a day. I was besieged with requests from journalists around the world who wanted to visit the couple. I had seen this process before, this kind of media frenzy where some story becomes a fetish story. And so I basically became a gateway. Ty’s mom would call me up—“Who are these people, what is this, should I do it, should I not do it?”

That must have put you in an awkward position.

I wanted to be done with the story. I liked the picture, but I wanted to be done with it. I liked that it finally brought the war home to people, and when I exhibited it, I got amazing responses from people.

For example?

The one I remember the most, which was incredible, was at a little gallery downtown. One evening I gave a talk, and this one girl stuck around for the longest time after—she was a black girl around 21—and I say this because of the identification that she had with this picture even though she wasn’t white.

She said, “I have to ask you”—in this quiet voice—“did she love him?”

I said “Yeah, I think she did love him.”

She said, “Because she reminds me of my mother. My father was a Vietnam veteran and my mom wished she’d never married him.”

Wished she had never married him—which means, never made her.

So the picture raised lots of issues for people, and that was good.

Did you ever see Ty after 2007?

Everyone said, “Why don’t you go back?”

But are so many other people like this, it was like, Why go back? It was the typical thing: After my book came out, when [other reporters] were filming my pictures, I was like, “Go film your own. There’s plenty of [wounded vets]. I saw them. There’s plenty of people who look like that.”

But then in 2008 the Sunday Times of London said, “Look we’re going to back with you or without you.”

And?

I went back. I ‘m glad I did.

Why?

I was able to talk to Ty more. I really like his mom—we’ve stayed close. So I was glad to see his mom. And the writer was a friend of mine and I really liked her story. They gave it some space and they picked apart this fairy tale thing.

Plus, I made some good pictures. When I saw them all together at the Whitney, I liked the new pictures.

I wanted to ask about the Whitney, which is one of the things I blogged about.

You don’t like that it’s at the Whitney.

Seeing them there threw me.

Why is that?

I appreciate the importance of seeing the pictures collectively, but I was disturbed by the idea of presenting these images as part of a show of new art.

Because your idea of art is…?

Not that.

Not that. Well, that’s really the more important thing to get down to, right? (Laughs)

It’s more about my idea of journalism. I thought that it trivialized these powerful and important pictures to be classified as modern art and theorized about and deconstructed and intellectualized.

Well, I think it’s a useful conversation. I hope it becomes more in the open—what’s art, what is the place for journalism.

But in my view, I need the Whitney. The only place that that photograph got published was because an art critic wrote about it, and because it won a competition.

And because of bloggers.

And bloggers. But not magazine editors.

So how do you explain that?

The photo editors that really understood pictures have lost their jobs. There are a few left, but they’re either operating under unbearable constraints or they’ve given up—they’re afraid to take chances. They keep their heads down. So those of us doing work that doesn’t fit in a certain box—where else are we going to go?

The Whitney?

What’s interesting is that, from all accounts, the room at the Whitney that the wedding pictures are in is its most visited, crowded room. So I think it says more about the state of what museums are showing than whether my pictures belong there or not. Maybe museums need to show more work like that. That people can more directly engage with and not have a whole playbook or MFA to understand what they’re seeing.

Looking back, are you satisfied with how the whole story came out? Do you feel what the photograph accomplished what you wanted it to?

I still think it’s a great photograph. I’m oddly protective of it. I’m not sure why. Because I know it’s—(Berman pauses for a good 10 to 15 seonds)—I’m not sure the couple understood what they were in for when they agreed to have a magazine look at their life. They became very public. They went on TV. Did talks. They were at all these events.

Maybe I’m just projecting my own things on them, but—I am oddly protective of it.

For more information on Nina Berman, visit NinaBerman.com.

The Awl reports that the standards editor at the New York Times has banned the word “Tweet” from its pages.

Wrote NYT editor Phil Corbett,

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

…One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

I think I have a man-crush on Mr. Corbett.

Funnily enough, the move comes just as TIME has won a “Mirror Award” (yeah, I don’t know it either) from the Syracuse journalism school for Steven Johnson’s article, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.”

This happened even though the answer to that thesis appears to be, “Not in the slightest…”

I wonder if the fact that the Syracuse j-school, which is probably in desperate need of cash, is honoring Twitter founder Biz Stone at the awards luncheon might have had anything to do with the pick?

These awards are always ridiculous, of course. Case in point: They were presented by Katie Couric and Arianna Huffington, both of whom have many things going for them but neither of whom is, well, a print journalist…..

A contradiction in terms, you say? For selfish reasons, I hope not.

In any case, I am informed by Yale (hmmm—they must not have heard the news) that there are still tickets available a night of the Ivy League speed dating…but, weirdly, only for men!

The women’s tix are all sold out. (Make of that what you will.)

The first part of my interview with photojournalist Nina Berman discussed the ethical issues surrounding bloggers’ use of other people’s work and how the digital transmission of photographs has affected the professions of journalism and photography.

Today’s second part deals with the story behind Berman’s now-famous photograph “Marine Wedding,” an image from the wedding day of high school sweethearts Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline. (See below, reprinted with permission of Nina Berman.)

Here’s what Holland Cotter of the New York Times had to say about Marine Wedding.

The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.

Ziegel and Kline met in high school in Metamora, Illinois, a village about 1.4 miles square with a population of 2,700 and per capita income of $20, 200.

When Ziegel was 21, he proposed to Kline, then 18, before heading to Iraq as a Marine. Kline said yes.

Ziegel’s wound came while he was riding in a truck and a suicide bomber detonated himself. Ziegel was trapped in the burning truck; as Cotter puts it, “the flesh melted off his face.”

He returned to the Brook Army Medical Center in Texas for reconstructive surgery and therapy. In October 2006, Ziegel and Kline were married; their wedding day was declared a state holiday.

They divorced in January 2008.

Richard Bradley: Tell me how you came to photograph Ty Ziegel, the wounded and disfigured soldier, and his wife Renee Kline?

Nina Berman: I knew a writer whose son was in the Marine Corps. And I said, “We should do something at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center], because there’s really a great story there, and maybe they would let people in [to report].” Walter Reed wouldn’t. And then I just kind of forgot about it.

A year or two later People called me up and said, “We’re finally going to do a story and we have this great couple in Texas, a high school sweetheart kind of story, and we want you to go and visit them there while they’re at Brooke Army Medical Center and then visit them at home a couple of times and photograph their wedding.”

I said okay.

People didn’t tell you anything more about the circumstances of the couple?

They said that he was severely wounded but was known in Brooke Army as being very upbeat. And they said they were high school sweethearts from a little town, like a fairly tale.

So I went to Texas for a few days and met them. Ty had been there 18 months. Renee had been staying with him; his mom had also been there. None of this was paid for by the military. The military pays two weeks. An organization called Fisher House provided the funds for Ty’s mother and Renee to live there with him. I think it’s doubtful that he would have recovered otherwise.

Why?

Psychologically. He said to me later on, “Renee saved my life by being there.” Eighteen months! Not everyone recovers from those injuries. You have to have psychological will and strength. It’s not just what the doctors do.

What was your first meeting like?

When I first met Ty, I didn’t see any expressions. I’d seen lots of wounded people before—burn victims—but he was probably the worst-looking, and also the least expressive. Not that he was brain-damaged. He had chunks of his brain taken out [in surgery], but he wasn’t brain-damaged like other people I had met. He could follow conversations, he could talk to you, he knew exactly what was going on.

What was his voice like?

Like the voice of someone who, if you closed your eyes, you would feel he was a completely healthy person. He just didn’t say much. Or sometimes he would be very hostile to his mother and girlfriend. I was surprised by it; they said it was normal.

His lack of expressiveness must have been a challenge for you as a photographer.

My difficulty in getting to know him was that I didn’t know who he was before the injury. I didn’t know how much of what I was looking at, in terms of his psychological profile, was new. In any case, there wasn’t anything super-unusual about the shoot for me other than I wanted to make sure I didn’t make him look gruesome.

How so?

You can light people in certain ways, you can photograph people in certain ways, so that he would look even more gruesome. And I remember when I first met him, I thought,”Why did People magazine, after all this time, when they finally decide to invest the resources in this story, pick someone that’s going to be so physically a turnoff?”

Did People know what Ty looked like?

I don’t think they had a picture. But after I saw him for about five minutes my shock passed and I wasn’t turned off or repelled by him.

What was his reaction to you?

He was the least self-conscious person maybe I’ve ever met, in terms of being photographed. He never, ever said, “Don’t take a picture.” Or when he saw a camera, turned away.

I thought it was a little surprising, but maybe it was the way I was photographing. It wasn’t a formal situation, I was just photographing in kind of a reportage style. I don’t take that many pictures. But I knew that part of the story had to be how people look at him.

You have that shot of Ty and a little girl in a market…

I had other moments too. But I think that I was hired to do the job because they figured that I was already well acquainted with the stories and wouldn’t get freaked out.

Why did Ty agree to be photographed?

I have no idea. I don’t know why anybody agrees to have their story in a magazine, frankly.

Maybe he thought it’d be good for the hospital.

Sure. And Ty’s is an amazing story of survival. The hospital did great for him. The medical staff, the therapists, were incredible—they came to his wedding. The bonds were very deep.

So you attended the wedding as well.

Yeah. I spent three days in Texas, then I spent three days with Ty and Renee about six weeks after they got home [to Metamora], and then I went back for the weekend of the wedding. It went May-August-October.

In Marine Wedding, Renee has this expression that looks like numbness.

For me, she looked shellshocked. Other people have their own interpretations.

Was her expression reflective of some consistent emotion that you observed in her?

Yeah. I believe it’s totally valid and honest. And maybe that’s a hard thing for people to hear. But I wouldn’t have put that picture out there if I saw that this [relationship] was always super-passionate and happy. I would have felt like it was not a true moment. To me, it was a true moment. And I look at my pictures from before [the wedding] and there was the same vibe.

So what did you feel like when you were taking the picture?

I was like, Finally, a moment where all of the elements have come together. In a way that was to me what the story was all about.

Meaning what?

You have just the two of them. He’s in his uniform so you know this is something that has to do with the military—he’s not a burn victim from a car crash. They’re together. But the situation of this day that should be everyone’s dream day has been so radically altered. And they were powerless.

I think many observers would say, “Of course this won’t last— look at him.”

I’ve heard this response and I feel guilty that somehow I contributed to such a lame way of thinking, that that’s all they could get from that photograph. So when I give talks about this picture and that comes up, I’ll say, “Well, if you love someone and you’re married to someone and they were in a car crash and they were terribly burned, would you just throw them out the door?”

This gets back to something you mentioned before, which is that after five minutes you stopped having a visceral reaction to Ty. Was part of that being a photographer and looking at things with a different eye? Because for many people, it’d take considerably longer than five minutes to get over Ty’s disfigurement.

I think it’s because I’d photographed so many wounded people before. If he were the first one…

So maybe the reaction you’re lamenting is from people who lack that kind of experience.

I gave a talk to about 300 people recently, and I talked about this, and a woman came up to me and said, “We’re not horrified, we’re purists.” She said, “It’s not that we’re horrified by his appearance, we’re horrified by what happened to him, and that shock is so huge that it takes us a while to get through it. “

I was pleased by that reaction.

Part of the power of the image is that it’s not just Ty that’s disfigured, but also Ty and Renee’s wedding day.

One reason why that picture resonates with so many people is because people have fantasies of their own wedding day. It’s a really big thing in our culture—the party and the dress and all this. And the wedding portrait as a trope—it’s this exaggerated happiness. The light is always the same, the colors are usually the same, there’s an aesthetic to it.

Which Marine Wedding both parallels—if you just glance at it, you might mistake it for a typical wedding portrait—and subverts. In a way, nothing about this wedding is typical.

This picture takes that trope and flips it upside down, and that is shocking. That picture, more than some of my other pictures of wounded soldiers, hits people like, “Oh my God, what if that was me?” Finally there was some identification. The picture was very successful in that way.

Part of the power of that picture to me was, well, a marriage is supposed to be a permanent thing. So the picture is very forward-looking. And there’s a sense in Marine Wedding that this terrible wound isn’t going to change—they’re tying themselves together, and Ty’s going to look the way he’s going to look, for the rest of their lives together.

That’s right. Not only that, it’s like they’re together in the frame, they’re together in their situation—but they’re not together emotionally.

Now his [own] wedding picture would be really fascinating—totally different picture. That picture was in a portrait studio. There were all these people around. The wedding photographer had lights set up. My picture’s not shot with any lights—it’s just the natural light in the room. When the wedding photographer shot, all these strobes went off, so all the colors changed. And Ty and Renee are totally looking in the camera with that forced smile.

I think it’s a scarier picture.

Tomorrow: How Marine Wedding became an international sensation—despite the fact that no one wanted to print it.

My apologies: Preparing my interview with Nina Berman for publication took more time than expected, and right now, I don’t have an excess of free time.

Enough excuses. On with the work.

Shots in the Dark readers will remember that last week I published a post titled “Art, Theft and Shots in the Dark.” That post detailed how I received a threatening letters from lawyers at the New York Times demanding that I take down a photograph, “Marine Wedding,” taken by New York-based photographer Nina Berman. It’s a picture of former Marine Ty Ziegel, wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, with his high school sweetheart and bride Renee Kline.

When I responded pleading my case, Berman herself wrote me back, insisting that I had no legal ground to stand on and should remove Marine Wedding from my site.

Here’s Berman’s picture, by the way, so you know what we’re talking about. (Reprinted with her permission.)

(You can see all the photos in this series by Berman here.)

Not wanting more guff from the Times’ fatcat lawyers, I already had taken down the pic—but I found Berman’s email compelling and wanted to turn what had been a testy exchange into something more positive. I asked the photographer if she would sit down with me for an interview about her work and the issues our correspondence had raised. She graciously agreed. We met twice, in the small garden next to St. John the Divine cathedral and in the Hungarian coffeeshop (good coffee, inedible pastries) across Amsterdam Avenue.

A few biographical words about Ms. Berman before I roll the transcript. The paragraph below comes from her website, NinaBerman.com.

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her work has been extensively published, exhibited and collected, receiving awards in art and journalism from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation and the Open Society Institute documentary photography fund among others. Her images of wounded veterans from the Iraq war have been exhibited worldwide at galleries, universities, community centers and museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the author of two monographs, Homeland and Purple Hearts-Back from Iraq, both published by Trolley. She has received editorial commissions from Harpers, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, German Geo, Fortune, Colors, TIME, Newsweek, and others. She is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. In 2009, she joined the NOOR photo collective based in Amsterdam.

What can I add to that? That Berman is a native New Yorker who attended the University of Chicago and the Columbia School of Journalism. She is smart, intense, passionate—old-school. She’s fiercely independent and unafraid to speak her mind. I liked and admired her a lot. Journalism would be better off if more journalists were like Nina Berman—and because of her work, the country, I think, might be a little wiser and a little humbler. I think.

This interview will be published in three parts over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It’s not short, especially by blog standards. I hope you’ll stick with it; it’s worth the trouble.

Richard Bradley: How did you find me? Was it you or the Times?

Nina Berman: I found you. I have a Google alert for my name. Just to track down…

..but I wrote the post about Marine Wedding years ago, in 2007.

When I saw what Google was up to [with Google image search] and decided to pull the photos off the Times, I became really afraid about protecting my copyright. I did a search and started looking particularly at who used the Times crop, because the Times cropped the picture.

And after I told the Times that I wanted to take it down from their site, they said, “You know, we go after people who pull from our site, so if you find someone, let us know.”

Well, I found you and said, “Oh, he’s in publishing, he should know better.” And I wanted to test the Times. To see if they really would do something.

They did. But my instinctive reaction when I get demands from lawyers is to say “screw you.” But that appeal coming from you—totally different.

Normally I would do it. But I wanted to test this Times promise.

Tell me why you feel so strongly about people posting your photos on blogs.

For bloggers, exposure is the endgame—the only endgame.

But for photographers , not all exposure is necessarily good or beneficial to the person who’s creating the image. I’m putting out pictures that are really difficult to look at. They’re sensitive to people’s lives. I don’t know how those images are going to be tossed around. Maybe I want to limit that conversation, and that’s my right.

Do you have some concern that use like mine will make it more difficult for you to take pictures in the future—that potential subjects might say, “Hey, I trust you, but who knows what happens when the pictures are on the Internet?”

I’ve never thought about that but it’s a good question.

It’s like that famous, not very sophisticated quote—you know pornography when you see it? I know what’s wrong use when I see it. If you had just written to me first, and said, ‘Hey, I was really moved by these pictures, I’d like to post one on my blog and maybe generate a conversation,” I would look and see who you were, what you talk about, and 99% likely I would have said “sure.”

But people just assume that once it’s on the Web, or even worse, once it’s on Google images, that it’s a fair-use picture. So this has been a huge fight.

For example?

Someone took that picture of Ty and Renee—I don’t know how they got it, if they got it off the Web or scanned it from a magazine—but they blew it up, cut out the girl’s face and put a white piece of paper on it. And wrote, “Be a hero—marry a hero.” And put it in the national gallery in Prague.

Who was behind that?

The artist was unnamed. I only found out because a graduate student in France who was writing a paper on my work wrote me and said, “Hey, I’m curious to know about this collaboration between you and them.”

I was like, “What the hell?”

Now someone may say, “Look, that’s fair use. He took your picture. He transformed it in some way. That’s an artist’s right.” And if we went to court, who knows who would win? The likelihood is that I would because the picture wasn’t transformed enough. But still….

That’s also a lot of time and money to spend protecting your work.

As long as I do have some laws protecting me, I can at least talk to people and say, “Hey, you like the work because it provoked something in you, you want to be sensitive to it, then be sensitive to the dissemination.”

The argument that all exposure is a good thing is ultimately a financial argument—that exposure leads to money for the content creator.

No it doesn’t.

Why not?

It leads to money for bloggers if they’re selling ads. It doesn’t lead to any money for me.

Doesn’t the dissemination of the photos provoke interest in them and therefore elevate your value?

No way. I have yet to see that happen. Absolutely not.

Are your photos more valuable if they’re scarce—if it’s harder to see them?

I don’t know. But I do know that many people have made money off that picture by posting it on their site because of the number of hits they’ve gotten.

Regardless of whether the financial argument is true, it certainly ignores your argument about the context in which the art is presented.

Recently a guy from the Huffington Post went to the Whitney [Biennial], saw the work, and wanted to write about it—I guess it affected him very personally. There was a press picture, but he wanted to use some other ones. He wrote me, we had a conversation, and I gave him two pictures and said you can only leave them up for a week. Because I thought it might bring more people to the Whitney, which would be great.

Now, I don’t get any money from the Whitney. I don’t get any money to produce the show, to frame the pictures, when people go to the Whitney. But it allows people who wouldn’t normally see it to see it in a place where many of the pictures are together and they’re not surrounded by a lot of other stuff that maybe I dislike. And so that’s good.

You’ve obviously given a lot of thought to these issues.

I’m on a little chat group with other photographers and we talk about them. My issues with this work are not quite the same as the rest of the group—I’m not upset because I’m worried about losing licensing fees. But people are terrified about the prospect of all magazines becoming entirely Web-based, because licensing fees are much lower on the Web. And people who’ve spent decades, careers, creating their archives are seeing them plummet in value. They’re furious, and rightfully so.

What you’re getting at sounds again like the blogger argument that everything should be free because all exposure is good.

Exactly. The New York Times is a good case. They have this “Lens” blog.

There are three kinds of photographers up there. There are [Times] staffers, who are paid anyway. There are pictures from what we used to call the wires—AP, maybe Getty. The Times pays a fee for those. But most of the pictures come from freelancers who give them material. The Times doesn’t pay for it.

So why shouldn’t all the pictures the Times uses one day just come from Lens? They wouldn’t have to pay anybody.

Then there’s the issue of what happens with the pictures once they’re online.

My concern—and I’ve expressed this to people at the Times—is that you may say these pictures are not the New York Times’ property, they’re the property of the copyright owner. But let’s say someone buys the Times in the future. And that person says, “Hey, man, this is in our archive, this in our system. This is ours.” What about Carlos Slim coming and saying, “Look at this archive…”

You can’t tell me that I’m going to be able to fight that.

So what do you do?

One solution is to put time limits on how long images can be posted. But what we [photographers] really want is for some terrific geek to make a self-destruct code.

I’m a little surprised someone hasn’t already done that.

Someone should, but they haven’t. So you have people like me pushing back.

I’m sure many people don’t have the time.

They don’t have the time or they don’t know. A new photographer coming u wouldn’t know [all his rights]. They don’t know. So they’re going to be working at even more slave wages.

Since they’re early in their careers, they may feel they’re not in a position where they can insist upon getting paid for all the uses of their images.

Exactly. But I know people who have achieved the highest honors accorded in my profession who also feel they can’t afford it anymore. They’re afraid that maybe they won’t get a job. We’re already working at day rates that I worked at in 1990.

So what are the consequences of these economic pressures?

The changes in people’s ability to make a living and the changes in the market and in distribution have put a lot of pressure on photographers—the amount of time you’re allowed to produce a story has shrunk while the pressure on a photographer to get these great pictures has actually increased. So people will start to create them. You’re going to find more examples of suspicious pictures.

The viewer may not know the difference, though.

Actually, I think people are growing suspicious of a lot of photos they see in the media. I recently saw a cover of Entertainment Weekly featuring the four women of Sex in the City, and the image was so Photoshopped they looked like college coeds.

I hate to be in the position of some moral dinosaur, but if you still believe that photographs have some reference to reality, or that there’s an expectation of a reference to reality, then you should care about this.

I want to ask you some questions about yourself. You grew up in New York?

I grew up first in the Bronx, then in New Jersey.

Was photography in your family?

No. My mother was a social worker, my father was a periodontist.

And you went to the University of Chicago?

Yeah. I went to U of C, stuck around after for two years. I was a political organizer during the election of Harold Washington as [Chicago’s] first black mayor, and then I wrote and photographed for left-wing newspapers.

So why journalism school at Columbia?

I wanted to leave Chicago, and j-school seemed like a good way to do that. At that point, it was kind of a ticket to a job.

And at Columbia you decided that writing wasn’t tfor you?

They had a photo class in still photography, and I really liked it. The joke around campus was, “Does she even know how to write?”

When I graduated, I got a writing job at the Bergen Record. But I hated sitting still at a desk. I looked at the photographers going out and I said, “I want to do that.” I would take vacations and do projects. I worked in Nicaragua and shot a story. For the paper, I went to Vietnam in 1987 with a bunch of vets. I think that is the basis for a lot of this current work.

How so?

It was interesting to me to see the difference in the resolution with the war. The Vietnamese people, it appeared to me, had moved on, while some of the vets couldn’t get it out of their heads. I learned from that experience that my interest in war was not about the battlefield. It was all the stuff afterwards.

I was following one vet in particular. [After we got back to the U.S.,] he was calling me up at 2 in the morning—30 years later, from his little apartment—totally living the war. And so that was all very interesting to me.

Judging from the images in Homeland, you started becoming concerned about the direction of the country after 9/11.

Oh, yeah. I wasn’t here for 9/11. If I had been, maybe I wouldn’t have made those photographs. I might have been too emotionally connected to the events.

Where were you?

In rural Oregon doing a story about migrant farm workers. I was up at 5 in the morning West Coast time following them to the fields. I heard on the radio about the planes, and I spent the day with people who couldn’t have given a shit about it. What they cared about was feeding their families.

I came back to New York a few days later and the first thing I noticed was cops in weird places. I remember cops saying to me, “You can’t take our picture unless you get written approval from the New York Police Department.

I was like, “You have no power to protect us but now you want power over who takes your picture?”

Did you go to Iraq when that war started?

I had no interest in going to Iraq.

Why not?

If I see other people doing a story, I don’t want to do it. I think, what can I offer that they aren’t offering? I’m just going to be part of the show. I don’t want that. People can do what they want and jump on the bandwagon, but I don’t see any reason other for it than ego gratification.

Ego gratification? That seems kind of harsh.

At the end of 2002, I was in [Washington] D.C. for some reason—I forget what I was covering, but I was in the White House press room and all the TV people were gearing up for the war, and gleefully. I mean…gleeful. “What kind of flak jacket are you going to get?” Blah-blah-blah.

So then I saw the TV coverage—the graphics, the promotion. “21 days to Bagdad!” The rescue of Jessica Lynch—that narrative was so predictable: “We need a white girl who’s going to be raped and we need to rescue her.”

Of course it was all fake. The “freedom fries,” the gorgeous shots of bombs of Baghdad. Never any shots of what those bombs did. No pictures of dead people. No pictures of wounded people. Nothing.

I was beside myself with anger. So I said, okay, people are getting wounded. What does that look like in this war? And I went out looking for them.

One of my reactions when I saw your photos was, “How come she’s the only one doing this?”

Good question.

What’s the answer?

Well, what was hilarious—maybe not so hilarious, but mystifying—so I did these Purple Hearts pictures in 2003, 2004. I approached some long-term clients, but no one wanted to touch the story. Finally Time gave me some funding, but never published anything. They had it laid out in a nice spread, and then I was told there was a [space] conflict: Russell Crowe had a new movie out.

Hard to believe that’s the real reason.

I think it was.

So I approached the New York Times Magazine first in July, said I want to do this. They sat on the idea for six weeks then said, no, not for us. I went to Time—nothing. I asked Newsweek, they said no but you can use our name if it will help you get in.

So I found three great soldiers, went off on my own money and did these portraits and interviews. I had no one helping me. Showed them to Newsweek—no. These publications, I am sorry to say, were completely bought. Not literally, but…invested in the progress of the war. It was disgusting. I’ve had rejections in the past, every journalist has. I have never had this experience that I had with this story that was so obviously going to be a big story and people just wouldn’t touch it.

What happened next?

Time comes to me in October. Nina, we’re going to do a story, three guys, all lost their legs, same attack in Fallujah. You can go to Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] for one day. Two of them are there. The other guy’s in Colorado but we can’t send you there because that would cost too much.

I go to Walter Reed, take these two pictures of these two guys, I say to Time, you want to see what else I’ve been doing? I show them the [Purple Hearts] pictures. They go, “Wow.”

I give them the names, I give them the stories—all of which I found myself. No help from anybody. I just spent like a million hours on Google looking for newspaper stories. So they laid out this big spread and then they cut it because of Russell Crowe. And ran something this big. [Berman holds two fingers about the distance apart of a postage stamp.]

That must have been incredibly disappointing.

It was the best thing that happened to me ever in the world, because if it [the full story] had run, I probably would have said, “Okay, I’m satisfied.” But I was really motivated. And the art department at Time was like, “The pictures are really strong, you should keep doing it.”

So no one was interested in this story until Mother Jones comes along and does a big spread. March 2004. And then CBS News calls me up. “Oh, let’s do a story about this photographer photographing veterans.” So they do a little story.

And what consistently happened [after] was that I publish this book and it becomes, “Let’s not report on wounded veterans because that would be anti-American, let’s do a story a about this odd little journalist in New York.” [The media] had to spend no money. They had visuals created already. They’re not invested in it politically.

And I kept saying, “Why? Go find your own people. Go find your own.”

And so at some point things changed and people started doing their own stories, I think when they started to realize that the war wasn’t going to be so squeaky clean. And when they realized that, hey, all these people are surviving—“Hmm…what are we going to do about this?”

End, Part I.

Coming Thursday in Part II of Shots in the Dark’s interview with Nina Berman: the story of Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline.

“God baby, look at it. Isn’t it beautiful?'”

—Tennessee hiker Bethany Lott, seconds before she was struck and killed by lightning. Her boyfriend, who was about to propose to her, says he is not mad at God.

The Huffington Post reports that Harvard has a contract with Barclays to sell student information for credit card solicitation…alumni info too.

At Harvard, the alumni association is supposed to provide a subsidiary of Barclays PLC with “as complete a list as possible of all Harvard alumni and students,” according to the association’s affinity contract. But Harvard spokesman Kevin Galvin said the card was never marketed to students. “We view this card as a service to alumni,” he said.

The practice is apparently commonplace among universities.

Hard to tell from that response if Harvard turned over the information or not…

Here’s a new ad McDonald’s is running in France. Kinda interesting. Imagine how ballistic the Tea Party People would go if the company ran it here….

Blogging for the Times, legal reporter (and Harvard overseer) Linda Greenhouse writes about Douglas Souter’s speech at Harvard commencement.

…it was with a mixture of relief and something close to joy that I listened last week to David Souter’s commencement address at Harvard, his undergraduate and law school alma mater, which awarded him an honorary degree.

…for those who care about the Supreme Court, Justice Souter served up some rich fare: his own vision of the craft of constitutional interpretation and a defense of the need for judges to go beyond the plain text — what he called the “fair-reading model” — and make choices among the competing values embedded in the Constitution. Doing this was neither judicial activism nor “making up the law,” he said; rather, it was the unavoidable “stuff of judging,” and to suppose otherwise was to “egregiously” miss the point of what constitutional law is about.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports on how Harvard’s next Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, was shaped by her Clinton-era battles with tobacco companies.

In Kagan’s trajectory to become President Obama‘s Supreme Court nominee, the tobacco battle of the 1990s proved formative for someone who had little exposure to the messy realities of policymaking. In forging a deal that could satisfy Congress, public health advocates, states and tobacco companies, Kagan was for the first time in a high-profile role where she would hone the characteristics she has become known for: finding compromise in pursuit of a daunting goal and using her command of complex issues to win over powerful people with outsize egos.

The coverage of Kagan has shifted from whether she’ll be confirmed to what kind of judge she’ll be…..

And the brilliance of Steven Colbert.

(Thanks to Mexican bull Drug Violence for sending this to me.)

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