You can’t just flip through James Hill’s new book, “Somewhere Between War and Peace,” for a quick survey of his 20-years-and-counting career. Not only because the images are stark and demanding — but you’re also physically prevented. The pages are cut to different lengths, and the shorter pages carry Mr. Hill’s stories behind the photos. Thumb through, and you’ll land solely on those pictureless, text-only pages.
To view, much less appreciate, his pictures, you must take your time and pick apart those pages. He asks readers not merely to view, but also to contemplate and absorb. That it’s a tactile experience makes sense. He describes this project in feely terms.
“I think journalists and photojournalists experience a lot of raw emotion when they work,” he said. “Going back to those emotions is not so simple because the feelings themselves are not so simple.”
Mr. Hill began his career in 1991 after deciding not to follow his father into corporate finance. He took a year to travel — with a camera he would fall in love with — and “find himself.” He was accepted into a photography program in London. “I immediately went out and bought some black clothes,” he wrote.
His book begins and ends with black-and-white pictures of particular personal significance. The first is of a military retiree donning a bowler hat who reminded him of his ex-parachutist World War II veteran father; the last, an image of sublimity — his wife floating in a pool outside Rome, utterly tranquil.
In between, there is gorgeous full color, yet even those pictures exude a certain grayness. Ambiguity can confound any project tackling conflict, whether it’s the justness of the American wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or the seemingly endless fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia, Azerbaijan and other former Soviet republics. Or the moral grayness of charming an arms dealer into sitting for a portrait. Mr. Hill has seen some terrible things and made them beautiful. Each of these images, especially his war coverage, refuses to release Mr. Hill from its grip.
“I think a lot of photographers find it’s difficult to digest what they’ve been through,” he said. “It’s painful for those who have witnessed this violence to relive those moments, and understand also the fine line between being the observer and being the participant in these things.”
Yet bearing witness was why photography appealed to him. When it felt right to compile a book, Mr. Hill scoured through thousands of photos, looking for pictures that meant the most to him, regardless of the historic occasion or whether he even knew the subject. “The idea wasn’t to do a greatest hits,” he said. And the text in this project – which took two years to write — was as integral as the images, expanding on the moment or meaning of any given picture.
“The stories aren’t that long,” he said, “but in fact it was much harder than I imagined to be precise with my feelings.”
He drew from his diaries, yet there were occasions when long-ago pictures triggered an elusive memory, where image was sharp but the context hazy. The photo of the young man asleep after the Russian Orthodox Easter stumped Mr. Hill. His diaries didn’t help and the contact sheets got him only so far. Still, the mystery itself is important.
“His identity remains a mystery, but it does not matter,” Mr. Hill wrote. “Sometimes a photograph is only a hint, a souvenir of a forgotten moment — one of the thousands making up the jigsaw of our lives.”
In his introduction, Mr. Hill described his life as a photographer as occupying an emotional limbo, where he uneasily tries for a balance between living life in the present and living with the past. “I am caught between the duty to remember and the desire to erase,” he wrote.
“Between War and Peace” is full of such divisions, and all the explorations in between. “I talk, in the book, about the reality you experience in war: That it’s this fine edge — it’s a difficult one to walk on because the pain sits in front of you,” he said.
Recalling that first image of the man in the hat, Mr. Hill expanded on how that photo spoke to him, how much the man meant to him even though he was a stranger in a crowd, and about his father’s completely opposite reaction to trying to make sense of conflict.
“It’s funny, my father always found it impossible to talk to me about his military career and his generation,” Mr. Hill said. “I know he saw a lot of action but something in him always found it too painful or too difficult to talk about with me, and I felt he had a different role. He was a combatant and I was a photographer,” yet they both went into their situations with a sense of duty, and both saw unimaginable horrors.
“I respect and understand that it was hard to do this, and that my father was someone very different from me — yet I found a lot more in common with him than I thought,” Mr. Hill said. “We’re not so far away as we think in this — we’re all much more closer in our experiences and together than we imagine.”
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