Suzanne Opton's ‘Soldiers’ consists of seventeen black and white and twelve large-scale colour portraits of serving US military personnel. Each soldier has recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan and is on leave, awaiting redeployment, at the Fort Drum Military Base near the New York-Canada border. The photographs reproduced here are of Soldier Pry (‘210 days in Afghanistan’, 2005), Soldier Morris (‘100 days in Iraq’, 2005) and Soldier Jefferson (details unknown).

In an interview about the series, Opton talks about her difficulty accessing the soldiers at the base: ‘They asked, “Is this a political project?” I said, “No, this is art”’.Footnote ¹ Elsewhere, she writes: ‘We all experience strategic moments when we feel most alive. These are the moments we will always remember, be they transcendent or horrific. After all, what are we if not our collection of memories? In making these portraits of soldiers, I simply wanted to look in the face of someone who'd seen something unforgettable’.Footnote ² However, despite the apparent simplicity of her stated aims and the distinction she draws between art and politics, Opton's series inevitably raises many difficult ethical-political questions about war photography and subjectivity as well as post-9/11 US military adventurism.

According to Susan Sontag, war photography has typically focused on ‘the ruin of faces […]: the faces of horribly disfigured World War One veterans who survived the inferno of the trenches; the faces melted and thickened with scar tissue of survivors of the American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the faces cleft by machete blows of Tutsi survivors of the genocidal rampage launched by the Hutus in Rwanda’.Footnote ³ If Opton's aim is to grapple with the transformative experiences of war then it is interesting that she should choose such ordinary and visibly unscarred faces that could be almost anyone: ‘the everyman soldier’.Footnote ⁴ Other than the men's cropped hair and some glimpses of Soldier Pry's standard-issue green US army t-shirt, there is little to suggest that these are serving members of the armed forces. Indeed, the absence of weapons, uniforms and other military regalia challenges conventional images of soldiers as portrayed in both the stiff formalism of official mug-shots and action heroism of field journalism.

On the one hand, this move could be criticised for sanitising warfare by rendering invisible the pain and suffering of those caught up in conflict in whatever capacity. On the other hand, by refusing rote ways of drawing attention to and provoking discussion about war, the affective impact of Opton's series is arguably more hard-hitting. Indeed, if Sontag's claim that the ‘mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture’ has led to a desensitisation of war imagery among populations is correct, then perhaps the power of Opton's work lies in its deliberately understated and thought-provoking approach.Footnote ⁵

Although Opton wants ‘the public to see the impact of war on a young person's face’, ‘Soldiers’ nevertheless refuses a single narrative or coherent message: the expressions of her subjects do not clearly convey a particular story either individually or collectively.Footnote ⁶ Rather, we are left questioning: What have they seen? How have they been affected? Is Soldier Morris staring down because she is ashamed, remorseful or simply bored? Are Soldier Pry's eyes closed because he is at peace or playing dead? Does Soldier Jefferson's gaze reflect vengefulness or sadness or both? Moreover, the unusual horizontal positioning of each head extends and further complicates the range of possible interpretations: ‘From this vantage point’, Opton comments, ‘the head becomes a single object. I meant the head to be isolated and vulnerable, and for the soldiers to forget that a camera was trained on them’.Footnote ⁷ Here the reference to vulnerability is potentially helpful: the pictures achieve a sense of nudity and expose faces otherwise concealed beneath head-gear. We share an unusual degree of intimacy with these soldiers because from this angle, one that is reminiscent of lying in bed next to someone, their guard is down.

Yet, at the same time, what makes this perspective also somewhat disturbing is the implicit reference to injury and even death: literally the portrayal of a ‘fallen soldier’ in the case of Pry whose complexion and expression is corpse-like. Again, an array of diverse, even contradictory, readings can be identified: Is this simply a sentimental and patriotic ‘remember our boys (and girls)’ campaign? Or, alternatively, could it act as a reminder of our own proximity to and complicity in the sanctioning of warfare? Whilst it is ultimately unclear what specific response ‘Soldiers’ seeks to mobilise, it is a series that nevertheless demands us to stop and examine our own consciences about the consequences of war on individuals' lives. In this way the photographs are confrontational and, despite Opton's commentary, profoundly politicising: her exposure of the vulnerable faces of soldiers lays bare the human foundations and consequences of conflict. Our own responses elicited by these faces become the centre of attention and it is at this point that the distinction between art and politics breaks down.