In the course of the twentieth century reality also became a matter of individual perception. In this regard the individual point of view was greatly aided and abetted by photography which invited people to see the truth for themselves. Unlike the great pictorial battle panoramas of the past, the photographs that came out of the front line did not show the big picture, or illustrate a single theme.
Instead of showing stirring landscapes of battle, they showed war in its most brutal form. Photographic technique helped in that transformation. Diagonal angles, suppressed horizons, bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, serial portraits and close-ups were relatively commonplace by the 1930s. Low camera angles, out of focus foregrounds, subjects caught unawares mid-gesture; juxtapositions of two unrelated
images that drew the viewer into complicity with the photographer and editor against the subjects depicted – an ironic understanding shared by all but the subjects themselves – made life even more relative than ever.
Americans were at the forefront of these developments. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) Robert Capa was the first photographer to apply these techniques widely to war. In doing so he made the photographer for ever a participant in the game. His insistence upon personalising war through close-ups of individual faces, his use of juxtapositions to create a sense of war’s’ irony, his low-angle, line-of-fire battle pictures all stress the photojournalist’s essentially priestly role (later taken over by the television
cameraman): both witness all for us, and in so doing enable us to make our own judgements about the cruelty of war.
But the main impact of photography was that it devalued the future in the name of the present. The chief reference point of modern societies was either the past or the future. The point of reference for our societies today is the present. The young in particular live in the present tense and the revolt of youth against the Vietnam War marked a historic caesura in the history of the United States. Of the two million young men who were called up to serve, an unprecedented 139,000 refused to be drafted.
The main reason for this was that historical metaphors such as manifest destiny which had mobilised the nation in the past had begun to lose their imaginative appeal. Instead, the war saw the emergence of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls ‘a social surge of individualisation’. Faced with the disintegration of some of the certainties of industrial society, individuals tend to invent new certainties for themselves.
Biographies are self – not socially – produced. People are compelled to put themselves, not society, at the centre of life. In Vietnam they were encouraged to put the present first because they found the Vietnam War to be historically incoherent.
They could not locate themselves within history. The war offered no single theme or story; it was incoherent and even meaningless. This was a war without direction, a story without a plot. The fighting itself was not shaped by specific events. Even the set-piece battles like the siege of Khe Sahn, the centre
piece of Michael Herr’s account Dispatches, did not fit into the wider campaign; they did not signal final victory or defeat. There was no momentum to the war. Because they were unable to locate the war in the past, or project it into the future, the soldiers located it in the present, in their own ‘time’.
