Peter van Agtmael’s Decoding of American Violence

On the eve of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, I rode the train from New York to Washington, D.C., with a book tucked in my bag like a private salve. The volume—a new photo collection by Peter van Agtmael, called “Buzzing at the Sill”—doesn’t radiate comfort in any obvious sense. Its cover is ominous: a copper image of a buzzard with its wings outstretched; we learn, from the book’s text, that the bird banged at the window of a U.S. military hospital in Texas, where soldiers, badly burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, struggled to recuperate. The book’s title, too, is grim. It draws from a Theodore Roethke poem that opens with the line “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” But therein lies the salve. In seventy-two photographs shot across the span of a decade, van Agtmael’s book delivers new ways of seeing American violence and fortitude, at a moment when the country’s divisions feel otherwise inscrutable.

The fallout of September 11, 2001, has long been a preoccupation of van Agtmael’s work. In his first book, “2nd Tour Hope I Don’t Die,” he examined the carnage of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: raw images of a suicide bombing’s aftermath, brutal night raids by U.S. forces, and blood-soaked scenes of medical operations to save lives across both conflicts. (Van Agtmael and I have, for years, collaborated on stories for The New Yorker, including coverage from both war zones.) His second book, “Disco Night Sept 11,” also followed these stories home, tracing the conflicts’ aftermaths for service members and civilians alike, and searching out the meanings of nationalism everywhere from Fleet Week to funerals. With this new book, we take another step closer, to see American violence in even more subtle, less studied forms; these images could be layered over van Agtmael’s past work like a decoder ring. There are multiple photographs of children with weapons: a boy, in Kentucky, who presses a toy pistol to his throat on a quiet porch; two brothers with BB guns, in Louisiana, who trek across a gorgeous landscape, hunting rabbits. The book ends with an image of toy soldiers and plastic pistols from van Agtmael’s own boyhood bedroom, where he first cultivated his obsession with war.

Alongside the intimate origins of conflict, “Buzzing at the Sill” explores a related theme: racial and class-based traumas, and how they leave their marks on both landscapes and bodies. We see the tattered vestiges of a Choctaw allotment in Hugo, Oklahoma, after the tribe was forcibly expelled along the Trail of Tears. We find a young black man in Atlanta who works hard to pursue a master’s degree in African studies, even as student debt confines him to a ramshackle boarding house with six other men in states of transience. Many miles away, on a South Dakota reservation where the unemployment rate nears eighty per cent, another young man is shown being placed under arrest. At a K.K.K. rally in Maryland, in 2015, van Agtmael reveals in his text, Klansmen decried ISIS training camps that they said were created by the United Nations and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, and referred to the President only as “Barry Soetoro,” the surname of Obama’s stepfather.

Whiteness is up for unusual examination here.  To be “white” has never been a coherent conceit, and “Buzzing at the Sill” catalogues its many American permutations. One mesmerizing photo comes from the annual Kentucky Derby festivities, where a crew of well-manicured white youths looks scornfully at the photographer, as he attempts to capture their drunken revelries. In his text, van Agtmael writes of growing up in a mostly white, upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., where he was “surrounded by people who benefited from the American dream,” and acknowledges that he “didn’t particularly question it.” He recalls watching the verdict of the O. J. Simpson trial in high school, and the cheers that erupted from a small handful of black students when “not guilty” came across the screen. “When a few white students began grousing that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice,” he writes, “a black student replied, ‘Like the past four hundred years of our history.’ ”

As much as he highlights divisions, van Agtmael also catches the surreal ways in which disparate Americas get stitched together: one nation, indivisible. Sometimes, he does this through juxtaposition, evoking, in quick succession, a slightly more cynical version of Whitman’s multitudes. We see carnival workers in Portland, Oregon; beach-bathers in Miami, Florida; armed ranchers near Arivaca, Arizona; cozy siblings in Brooklyn, New York. Other times, divergent worlds live within a single frame. On a quiet stretch of the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, a lone girl reclines on her horse, far from it all; yet she is rendered bright beneath a tall tree by the neon-pink of her Justin Bieber pajamas.

In 2012, van Agtmael took the photos for a piece I wrote that included the story of Treasure Hilliard, a Detroit teen-ager who was murdered after being coerced by police into dangerous work as a confidential informant. Afterward, van Agtmael continued to spend time with Hilliard’s family; his acts of witness often persist long after an assignment is done. In 2015, the family experienced further tragedy: Treasure’s sixteen-year-old brother Daemion took his own life. “Buzzing at the Sill” includes one of the last images taken of him; he appears poised and graceful in a grassy yard, homemade bow and arrow in hand.

Van Atgmael’s ability to find dignity and tenderness, even amid persistent violence and virulence, permeates “Buzzing at the Sill.” There is, for one, plenty of dancing—two-stepping and slow-grinding and back-bending. There are cowboy-hat-wearing lovers pressed close at a Latino rodeo in Oregon, and images of small girls twirling on the glittery stage of a wedding between a Syrian and an Iraqi refugee in Illinois. One of the most striking photos in the collection captures a young black man on a shimmering white horse at a New Orleans second-line parade; another, of a strong man twisting a fellow-reveller in the air, is a scene from a Carnival street party in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Van Agtmael doesn’t separate conventional “reportage” from photos of dear friends in quiet moments, and his own family appears throughout the book. One image shows his father, gently buckling van Agtmael’s grandfather into the passenger seat of a car after his grandmother’s funeral. He writes of his Aunt Marie-Louise, who grew angry when she learned, in 2005, that van Agtmael was planning to fly off to cover the war in Iraq; she had been married to a man who covered conflicts as a cameraman, and it had taken “a huge toll on the family and the marriage.” When van Agtmael’s revelation reached her, she huffed her way through a supermarket, shouting, “Stupid! Asshole! Fucking selfish shithead!” Even her tirade, in context, feels fiercely tender.

The book’s final balm is the land itself. In van Agtmael’s images, nature doesn’t just hold myriad histories and human shames but subsumes and outlives them. There are lush green forests, vast blue aerial visions, and the astonishingly quiet sheen of an ice-crusted Lake Huron at peak winter. At a moment when America looks a bit like an open wound, or at least like a dysfunctional family writ large, “Buzzing at the Sill” can feel uncomfortably timely. But it also belongs to a large-scale body of work that van Agtmael is building to last. He presses our noses against a two-way pane—looking backward and forward at the same time—to examine what we’ve done to each other, the blood left on the ground, and the means we’ve sought to mend.