Caught My Eye: War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things
From missiles to shackles, baby chicks to alien troopers — cameras have found war in every corner, and it's metastasizing.
The title stems from the 1960s anti-war poster. But this is Trump's America, where venom becomes policy, chaos is the goal, and war — personal, institutional, and increasingly deadly — is the outcome. I spend a lot of time with images that don’t make the front page — or do, briefly, before the next crisis buries them. This week, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of what I was seeing was, at its root, the same story: war by every other name.
Have you seen this scene, or one of its many versions? The hardware is in sharp focus. The child isn’t. Beyond witnessing, it’s a testament to incalculable trauma.
Fully Militarized
In the old days, kilts and bagpipes would have been enough. But today, Kyo H. Nam’s blur and eye for uniforms are the right devices for the moment — framing a St. Patrick’s Day parade in the fascist era. (The full series.)
Immigration War
A pregnant 22-year-old asylum seeker from El Salvador surrendered herself at the border, claiming she was fleeing threats to her life. When she told agents about her brother being killed and expressed fear for her safety, they laughed, dismissing her story as one they hear often. As she fell ill and started bleeding, they offered no medical help. Six days into her detention at Otay Mesa, she lost her baby.
The photo is part of Greg Constantine’s 7 Doors Immigration Detention project. His work, An American Gulag, maps the U.S. detention system — an expanding network of prison-like facilities, state prisons, and county jails.
The image hides her identity while highlighting her invisibility. What remains is a so-called “bracelet” — or, more accurately, a shackle, a leash. And those Chucks —scuffed black-and-white, the shoes of punk rebellion, of freedom, of refusal —contradict the monitor completely.
Iran War
Don’t get me started on the military sourcing photos to news agencies. This one — with its body language, its flexible posture — is the perfect example. As Fareed Zakaria puts it:
“For the world, there is no longer any such thing as American credibility, just a strange reality television show in which the main actor swerves, bobs, and weaves his way through crises, hoping that what he says today will solve the crisis caused by what he said yesterday.”
As Trump’s off-ramps for exiting Iran close, it’s in his interest for the war to fade into ambience.
Yes, Trump got the downed airman back. But the loss of the fighter plane shot down by Iran foiled Trump’s latest war escape plan. Which, according to New York Mag, is to simply ignore it.
Iran has other ideas.
The billboard is perfect — a public taunt of ensnared American aircraft, not just for the whole city to walk past, but a hook so vivid it won the lede on the New York Times front page. That’s not just propaganda. It’s Iran demonstrating exactly how to get under Trump’s skin. Make him the spectacle. Even a paper cut, properly magnified, is enough to keep him entangled.
War on Cuba
Wars are not just about countries. Natalie Keyssar’s photographs from this Cuba update are a love letter to the people of the embattled island—a deliberate pairing of two worlds. On one side, ordinary moments: a vendor holding out a chick for sale. On the other, the ruins of infrastructure, the visible signs of economic devastation.
Gender War
Martin Cherry shot from above, and the angle is the whole argument.
Heather Mae was removed for singing. Those wide-brimmed hats — six of them, closing in — read less like law enforcement than alien bots asserting control. She’s the only human face in the frame, the only color. This is manhandling, in every sense — a fitting image for the state of gender freedom and bodily autonomy in the same week the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy.
War on Climate
Trump and his EPA have made fossil fuels great again — and policy, propaganda, and his genius for distraction have all but vanquished concern for the climate emergency. Inattention is no excuse. From the melting ice caps to the environmental wreckage of the Iran War to last month’s heat wave in the Western U.S. — temperatures not 5-10 but an astonishing 30-40 degrees above normal — the disaster is escalating on every front. Bartkowski’s photo renders Angelenos as shadow creatures, huddled under umbrellas in a city once synonymous with sun. The guy in full sun looks like he’s regretting his choices.
Dear Leader
When I first saw this photo of Trump with the woman’s face obscured by the press mic, it reminded me of so many Epstein committee photographs with young women’s faces redacted. Then he fired Pam Bondi — his hyper-loyal Attorney General — not for disloyalty, but reportedly for failing to make Trump’s own Epstein connections disappear. Erasure is at the heart of this presidency. And I’m pretty sure she is the person who’s been erased here.
Doug Mills caught Trump in full oracle mode — the all-knowing president who couldn’t imagine this war going wrong, when everyone who studies Iran already knew all the ways it could.
...Or, maybe that’s just Teflon exploding.
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Thank you for highlighting this work. Greg Constantine’s "7 Doors" is a monumental project that I reference often, and @NatalieKeyssar's Cuba update is a poignant reminder of what often gets left out in coverage of conflict.