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.)

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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.