The Image of Hope - Artist's Pages - Ted Engelmann - Brief Article

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Ted Engelmann

September 11,2001...images flood the mind...visions of a commercial jetliner slicing into a tall office building like hot butter, belching fire and debris out the other side. Office workers and passengers died instantly as the jet punctured the building windows and jet fuel flashed through the tower floor in a rage of fire.

For the past week, these images of disaster have been played out across the TV screens of America. Parents are being told by the American Red Cross to turn off the TV and limit the amount of visual stimulation kids are receiving, for fear of children being retraumatized.

I wonder about the overload of information coupled with the emotional exhaustion of the event. At one time, five different sources of information played on the TV screen: the background image of the repeated crashes and tower collapse, the background voice of the reporter, and three lines of information at the bottom of the screen. This is TMI--Too Much Information. Media also selects which images to put before us. Foreign media are showing a very different sort of visual, and Americans have no idea how our nation is being viewed by the rest of the world. We are visually isolated.

A traumatic event has come to our nation, leaving images and words stuck in our minds forever. That is how we are going to remember, know and understand the experience. I doubt Osama bin Laden could walk down any street in the U.S. today without being identified--his face is now too well-known.

The events of the past week make me know my work from a previous traumatic experience has merit and can provide solace for many Americans. I spent 1968-69 in Viet Nam as an Air Force sergeant. I was stationed north of Saigon at Lai Khe for seven months as a member of a Forward Air Control team, directing air strikes in support of the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division. I spent five months in Rach Gia, a Mekong Delta village, doing similar work. During my tour of duty, I made slides of my life and that of the Vietnamese culture, land and people.

For many years, little existed in the way of educational materials for American schools to discuss the conflict in Viet Nam. I started making photos of the public rituals of healing throughout the U.S. I returned to Viet Nam and made photos of the same locations where I lived 20 and 30 years earlier. I documented the activities of veterans in Australia and South Korea, our two major allies during the conflict. A collection of more than thirty-thousand images led me to create a book of about 55 images, along with text for each, explaining the events and issues from the eyes of four cultures as they heal from the same traumatic event.

A psychological condition that many veterans and others experience after a life-threatening trauma is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD manifests itself as flashbacks of the original trauma, sleep disturbances, nightmares, hyper-vigilance and many more traits.

As a result of the Viet Nam conflict America as a nation also suffered from another type of PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Denial, a process to collectively put away the feelings and issues surrounding the most traumatic event this nation has experienced since the Civil War. The images that most Americans identify with the Viet Nam conflict are of a little Vietnamese girl running down the road, naked and burned from napalm; or a girl showing a cry of anguish, bending over a student shot at Kent State University; or a Vietnamese general putting a bullet into the head of a captured Viet Cong during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

Myths are built around images. Consider the image of people being led up a ladder to a waiting helicopter on a rooftop to evacuate them during the fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975. The myth is that this evacuation is from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. In truth, it is the roof of the Deputy CIA Station Chief's house several blocks away from the Embassy.

My art-photographic images, combined with the therapeutic process of bringing the subject from the past to the present, attempts to explain the situation of fear: that was then, this is now. Time and conditions have both changed.

The past cannot be forgotten, but we live in the present, and we look forward to the future. If images bind us to the past, we can get mired in thinking and feeling only in terms of what was, not what is, or can be. In depression, there is little hope for the future. I offer these images of the Vietnamese people and their land, the monuments, parades and public rituals of healing in the U.S., South Korea and Australia, to help Americans realize others have felt pain and suffered from the same trauma. They just show it differently. There is hope.

Most Americans have no idea about the history and involvement of other countries in the Viet Nam war. To help Americans recognize the pain and suffering of others does not diminish anyone, but provides an appreciation for what others, like ourselves, have experienced. We see that the pain was not focused toward one person or country, but experienced and felt by many.