WARTIME PORTRAITS
“I simply wanted to look in the face of someone who’d seen something unforgettable,” the photographer Suzanne Opton says of the extraordinary portraits she made of American soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Opton asked her subjects, all of whom were stationed at New York’s Fort Drum between tours of duty in 2004 and 2005, to rest their heads on a table, and she photographed their horizontal faces up close, so that they nearly fill the frame. The posture is vulnerable and startlingly intimate, as if these young men and women were facing someone in bed or on a stretcher, and the results are riveting. Opton catches soldiers both on guard and off, looking out and looking inward simultaneously, and we can only imagine what they’re thinking, what they’ve done, and what they dread. The group of large color prints that go up at Peter Hay Halpert’s new Chelsea gallery next week give these heads a monumental, sculptural presence, but they never feel bombastic or preachy, only heartbreaking. Dispensing with theatrics, Opton finds genuine drama. If these people have seen something unforgettable, so have we.
