The veteran American photojournalist has documented the US’s foreign wars and its divisions at home. He talks about his new book, which brings the two together with ambiguous and often disturbing results
Peter van Agtmael was nine years old in August 1990 when America went to war with Iraq for the first time. Mesmerised by the wave of patriotic fervour that ensued, he cut out and cherished a newspaper diagram showing the array of technological weaponry deployed by the US military. In the introduction to his new photo book, Look at the USA: A Diary of War and Home, he writes: “This was very exciting stuff for an impressionable kid who felt like a weirdo outcast with a lot of time to dream.”
Van Agtmael, who was born in Washington DC, grew up “middle-class” in Bethesda, Maryland and has a degree in history from Yale, is now a seasoned war photographer and photojournalist with the Magnum photo agency. He is also a deep thinker who, he tells me at one point, often feels “stuck inside my own head”. He describes the book, which juxtaposes his reportage from Iraq and Afghanistan with unsettling images of everyday American life, as “a collection of fragments from the post-9/11 era”. Threaded through with often deeply personal, self-questioning reflections, it is also a fraught conversation with himself about the nature and thorny ethics of his vocation.
