Lisa Barnard: Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden

Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden

The project is a study of what Barnard calls an unholy alliance: the military, the entertainment industry and technology, and their coalescence around modern warfare. Its starting point is the screen — the surface through which remote conflict is planned, executed, rehearsed and sold, and the thing that makes the virtual and the real difficult to separate in practice as well as in theory.

The two halves of the title carry the argument. The machines in the garden denote the dialectical tension between the American pastoral ideal and machine technology. The hyenas of the battlefield are the technology-driven corporations that keep US personnel in the loop but off the ground — the infrastructure of a model of warfare in which no more American soldiers die on a battlefield.

Geographically the work moves between places that look unrelated and are not: Las Vegas to Pakistan, Waziristan to Hollywood, by way of Washington. That structure is also a question about photojournalism's truth claims, which the series raises rather than resolves. Everything in the publication was researched, filmed and photographed by Barnard herself, including recorded interviews with military clinical psychologists and US Air Force pilots; all images were made in either the United States or Pakistan.

Funding, essays and publication

The publication was made possible by the Albert Renger-Patzsch Award 2012 through the Dietrich Oppenberg Foundation in Essen, together with Arts Council England — a two-source structure that is typical of how research-heavy documentary of this scale actually gets paid for.

It was published in October 2014 by GOST in an edition of 750, with essays by Julian Stallabrass and Eugénie Shinkle. Barnard's previous book, Chateau Despair, was published by GOST in 2013.

A documentary practice about materiality and conflict

Barnard's photographic and film practice sits within contemporary documentary. She works with real events while employing complex visual strategies, combining traditional documentary technique with more contemporary forms of representation, and connects an interest in aesthetics and in current debates around photographic materiality with the existing political climate.

Her recurring subject is the relationship between the military-industrial complex, new technology and the psychological consequences of conflict — which is why the interviews with clinical psychologists sit in the work alongside the landscapes rather than in a separate essay. She receives regular funding, exhibits frequently in the UK and internationally, and her work is featured in contemporary photographic publications. At the time of the feature she was senior lecturer in documentary photography at the University of South Wales.

The scale of the research is worth stating plainly, because it is the part that cannot be improvised. A project moving between Nevada, Pakistan, Waziristan, California and Washington, incorporating on-the-record interviews with serving Air Force pilots and with military clinical psychologists, requires access negotiated over months and a budget that anticipates permissions, travel and translation rather than discovering them.

That is the practical reason a project of this kind lives or dies on funding rather than on commissioning, and why an award and an arts council grant appear in its credits instead of a magazine.

There is also a formal lesson in how the book handles evidence. Remote warfare is a subject with almost no conventional pictures — the event happens on a screen in Nevada and a hillside in Waziristan simultaneously, and neither location looks like war. Barnard's answer is to photograph the apparatus and the aftermath rather than the act: the training environments, the trade shows, the landscapes under the flight paths, the people whose job is to manage the psychological residue. The interviews then do the work that a single decisive image cannot. It is a structure other photographers working on distributed, screen-mediated subjects have since had to reinvent for themselves, and Hyenas of the Battlefield remains one of the clearest early demonstrations that documentary can hold a subject it cannot directly witness.