Chapter I of Suzanne Opton's photographic series ‘Soldier’ is at first glance an arresting commentary on the effects of military service in Iraq on individual US soldiers. Shot in varying degrees of close-up, the series is composed of nine individual head and neck shots photographed in color, evoking traditional portraiture. Or, at least these images might evoke traditional portraiture if each were turned ninety degrees counterclockwise. For each head appears sideways in the frame, lying on a piece of parchment paper and at a slightly different height to the other heads in the series. The shots are predominantly lit from the top, so that the top half of each soldier's head is illuminated while the bottom half is more in shadow. The background is completely dark. Each shot is captioned with the word ‘Soldier:’, followed by the soldier's surname.

There is nothing about these photographs that resembles the images of soldiers viewers regularly consume as portraits – uniformed, upright bodies, standing at attention in front of a flag, and looking directly into the camera. Laid side by side in a sequence, Opton's photographs might be the heads of fallen soldiers littering a battlefield or on gurneys in a veterans’ hospital, but only because we know these photographs are of ‘soldiers’. Read without their captions, the images in Chapter I of Opton's project might as easily be photographs of any individuals. For neither flags or uniforms are found in any of these frames. All that might suggest some of these individuals are soldiers are the occasionally closely cropped haircuts and 1000 yard stares emblematic of modern military photography.

Opton's aesthetic set-up in Chapter I takes viewers back and forth across a series of paired terms, just as the viewer's eyes move back and forth across the two differently lit sides of each soldier's face. These dichotomies include safety/danger, passive/active, dead/deadening, and bodily/disembodied. The viewer cannot rest either their eyes or their minds on either side because both sides are so strongly represented at the same time. So viewers are left to wonder if each soldier is trustingly resting their weary heads after a hard tour of duty on a parchment pillow (safety) or if each soldier is sticking their neck out onto a chopping block, with the parchment evoking the idea of the sacrificial lamb (danger). What are viewers to make of stationary heads (passive) with eyes that actively return or refuse to return the gaze of the camera (active)? Are these images meant to conjure up the censored photographs of dead bodies of US soldiers returned from Iraq (the dead) or do they offer a glimpse of how war deadens the living not only because of the horrors of war but also because of the estrangement soldiers experience upon their return ‘home’ (remember, these photographs were taken of US soldiers returned from Iraq)? As portraits, these photographs re-present (a part of) the body, but they also very much beg the question, ‘Where are these soldier's bodies, and what might they be doing?’ For as Opton shoots them, what is unseen in these portraits is every bit as interesting as what is seen.

This last question is suggested in another chapter in Opton's Soldier series.Footnote ¹ In Chapter III, soldiers are not pictured individually. Instead, soldiers' heads are cradled and supported by someone else's hands, those of loved ones or other soldiers. The effect of the work in this chapter is to suggest another pairing of terms – individual/collective – that are again conflated. For each individual returned soldier seems to require either propping up or soothing by a collective body, presumably the family or the corps. What remains unrepresented here, though, is any wider collective beyond these now intimate, private spheres. What is missing, in other words, is some US public sphere.

This private/public divide is again echoed by how the photographs are lit, with one side of the soldier's face their private face and the other their public face. While what is private is usually what is in shadow and more difficult to access, Opton's photographs seem to reverse this. For what they illuminate is the private pain of individual soldiers. As Opton puts it, ‘I wanted to see beyond the uniform and make vulnerable portraits of individual soldiers’.Footnote ² What is less illuminated, then, is the public face of these soldiers and what these soldiers officially represent – some collective US body politic. This is what these symbolically ‘cut off’ soldiers' heads seem to be violently cut off from.

Playing with these ideas of the public/private and the connected/disconnected, the Light Work gallery in Syracuse, New York, which first exhibited Opton's Soldier series placed these images not just in their gallery but in the wider community. Billboards and banners of Opton's soldiers could be found in car parks, on street corners, etc. The effect of placing these images in public spaces was not just to connect the pain and suffering of the disconnected soldierly body back to a wider (albeit local) US body politic. The effect was also to provoke a wider meditation on how some US body politic engages (and disengages) with the war on terror, specifically through its engagement (or lack of engagement) with corporality, the corps, military men and women. The overall effect for this viewer at least is to transform Opton's individual portraits of individual US soldiers into a commentary on the warring US state, specifically about how the realities of war come ‘home’ to ‘rest’. This is a very powerful ‘portrait’ to draw of the US at this particularly moment in history.

If I have one criticism of Opton's series it is how she has either directed or at least selected some images in which the gazes of her subjects conjure up well-worn stereotypes of race and gender. Jefferson, the black male soldier ever so slightly aggressively looks directly into the camera in line with racial stereotypes. Morris, the white female soldier, averts her eyes downward in line with feminine stereotypes. And Pry, the white male soldier shown in this special issue, closes his eyes which may allow him to serve as the white universal icon of the returned soldier peacefully at rest (one way or another, despite some viewer's concerns about his continued vulnerability). Whether Opton chose these particularly images to reproduce or to question these stereotypes, I do not know. Maybe it was just to make the images that much more accessible to a general US public.

This criticism notwithstanding, I commend Opton for what is by far one of the most powerful reinventions of the war photography genre at a time when war itself is again so brutally being reinvented. Her work is a testimony to the political power of aesthetics to make us take notice of what can be so very difficult to look at – the pain and suffering we inflict on both ourselves (a general US public at home) and on others (US soldiers sent abroad to fight for us but also Iraqi citizens caught up in this fighting; see Opton's photographic series ‘Citizen’ about displaced Iraqi citizens).Footnote ³