Look at the USA by Peter van Agtmael

Look at the U.S.A.: A Diary of War and Home

By Peter van Agtmael

Thames and Hudson, 2024

Give me a book by a person who’s lucky to be alive. After studying history at Yale, Peter van Agtmael went to Iraq to photograph the war. After that he was embedded in Afghanistan, where people close to him were killed. Covering the revolution in Egypt, he was badly beaten by a mob. He was in Syria during the rise of ISIS. He tracked refugees risking their lives to escape Mideast violence. In the journal entries van Agtmael includes with his war photographs, he was always thinking about the U.S.A., its role, whether direct or indirect, in the suffering and death he was witnessing.

True to his title, van Agtmael also shot his homeland, its reactions to wars abroad and its homegrown disturbances—the war on drugs, the war against refugees, the George Floyd demonstrations, the mass death of COVID, the January 6 insurrection. I thought I remembered enough about recent American history until I saw van Agtmael’s photographs that combine the best qualities of the documentary image and the art photo. He puts himself in places few documentarians go and then manages unique framing and imaginative composition in his sudden shots. Van Agtmael did not get wounded multiple times as that famous combat photographer James Nachtwey did, but his photographs seem, if not an influence on, then a precursor of van Agtmael’s intense work.

Near the end of Look at the U.S.A., van Agtmael includes a sly reference to Look Magazine that indicates the kind of photos in his book. Look and Life were popular, oversized magazines in the 1960s that published dramatic color photographs tied to news of the day. Van Agtmael’s pages are about the size of those magazine pages, and very often his images take up both facing pages for extra pop. These double wides are often panoramic shots, but sometimes their subjects are much more narrow—the photographer suggesting with extreme magnification that viewers need to get very close to the details of recent history to really remember it.

The cover photo represents two contrasting elements of the book: the close focus and splashy color of van Agtmael’s images and, with the cover’s two modest black and white strips, his minimalistic prose that accompanies the photos. The writing has various functions—to place the photograph in time and space, to sometimes narrate an event that was too horrible to photograph, and to often tell van Agtmael’s backstory: his family’s military history, his early excitement as a war correspondent, tempered idealism, a “six-year freeze in emotional development,” and eventual recovery with a late marriage.

Fortunately, van Agtmael is a much better photographer than he is a writer. He is no Duane Michals; few photographers who use personal text are. Perhaps van Agtmael’s typed entries would have been less clichéd and pedestrian if this record of twenty years were a substantial autobiography—such as war correspondent Lynsey Addario’s It’s What I Do—rather than a “diary.” But then we would probably have been deprived of page after page after page of the gut-punching, head-shaking visual excesses in Look at the U.S.A.

Rage and empathy are van Agtmael’s emotional signatures. Though his photographs are often sophisticated in their perspectives and cropping, van Agtmael has little use for subtlety. He includes two-page photographs of Bush, Obama, and Trump speaking on television. The grainy shots of the screen suggest unreality or propaganda, but all of the presidents were one way or another involved in the deaths that van Agtmael records. He also periodically includes graffiti by soldiers who express their fears in the simplest of terms. But van Agtmael’s empathy is most often reserved for victims—innocent bystanders wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, refugees trying to escape violence before they too are bloody, funeral directors overwhelmed by COVID corpses. Sometimes these photos are placed in close proximity to celebratory Americana (like the cover photo). The juxtaposition makes clear the implicit admonition of van Agmaet’s title: “Look, just look Americans at what we have done outside the U.S.A. and what we have become inside our land, a people who would try to ignore the world outside.”

And ignore lives inside the U.S.A. Van Agmaet alternates photographs of high-tech arms bazaars, political galas, and Kentucky Derby wealth with images of families living in one room, veterans living on the street, ethnic and racial minorities scrabbling to survive. Of the many wars that van Agmaet documents, the war on poverty in the U.S.A. was definitely lost.

Although humble and rather passive in his prose, in his photographs van Agmaet can seem hectoring, a word that comes to us from the Trojan warrior Hector. I kept reminding myself that van Agmaet has earned the passion of in-your-face photography. He was with warriors; he is lucky to be alive. The first twenty or so pages of Look at the U.S.A. are pervaded by night and blackness, as if the scenes are the underworld from which the photographer has returned to tell us all. At the end of the book, with its photographs of ascendant Taliban and Americans training for war, pages of night and black return—now as a warning for the future.

The following photograph illustrates van Agmaet’s sometimes painful awareness of the constraints on the photographer. He can light the refugees’ plight but cannot lead them from the dark:

The next photo in the book alludes more explicitly to the photographer’s limitations. Against two half pages of pure black background, Trump directs his ire at an unseen audience while a photographer in the far right of the frame can record only the look on Trump’s face, not the message he is spewing. The documentarian’s responsibility here and elsewhere in Look at the U.S.A. is to report darkness as best he can.

The photography critic James Elkins has said it may be “a good time to say goodbye to photographs of people.” I often feel the same way because—just as People followed Look and Life—many professional photographers (not just selfie snappers) cannot seem to do without viewers’ automatic interest in sapiens like (or preferably unlike) themselves. So I give van Agtmael extra credit for overcoming my predilection for still life. There are very few quiet scenes for me in Look at the U.S.A., even few individuals. The frames are crammed with crowds and action that van Agtmael arrests, suggesting, it seems to me, “You have watched tape minute after minute, hour after hour, of these events. Now the action has stopped and you can look, look hard, and think, think hard, about the country where you reside.”

“Thank you for your service,” we say to survivors of the military. Thank you, too, to Peter van Agtmael.

Tom LeClair’s most recent book, Passing Again, is a hybrid work of memoir and fiction that includes fifty photographs.