Posts Tagged ‘Military’
Your Eyes Deceive You: Claire Beckett at the Wadsworth Atheneum
August 7, 2012 | by Drew Johnson
Marine Lance Corporal Nicole Camala Veen Playing the Role of an Iraqi Nurse, Wadi Al-Sahara, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, CA, 2008
In Hartford overnight for reasons that would take too long to explain, my wife and I visited the Wadsworth Atheneum, the city’s art museum, where she had interned a number of years before. Hartford is one of those midsize American cities, like Cincinnati or Worcester, dominated by Chris Ware cityscapes.
The Atheneum is a small, good museum and interesting in that way that Hartford is interesting: on a comparatively small stage the choices are more evident, the collections more particular. Things that would be pushed into the storeroom at another museum are given fascinating pride of place. What is less well known is not so consistently edged out by what is too well known.
We walked past the museum’s two Balthuses into a room full of photos of men in headdresses, dusty streets, namelessly Middle Eastern scenes. A man fiddling with a bomb. Something was off, however: there was too much unfinished plywood and the people staring into the camera were clearly … what?
We slowed down, read wall text. This woman is a Marine lance corporal.
Hiding in Plain Sight
June 5, 2012 | by Alex Carp
Hanna Shell in camo.
Why do so many American soldiers look, as one Brooklynite at the office of Cabinet magazine put it on a recent Friday, like they are trying to blend in to computer screens? The question was directed at Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker, and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, who had come to New York to talk about Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. Cabinet had arranged to host a reading and sound performance, which promised “camouflage paraphernalia galore.”
We soon found out the answer. It seems the pixelated, “digitized” designs have been standard issue across the branches for a decade, while the iconic, splotchy pattern of green, brown, olive, and black seen in episodes of G.I. Joe and the military-themed action movies of the 1980s is no longer predominant. Officially known as the Woodland pattern of the Army’s M81 battle dress uniform, the older, iconic camo was initially designed, Shell found, to mimic the environment of a region in the Soviet Union where military researchers thought the Cold War would turn hot. Though no longer used to hide soldiers, close approximations of this earlier version can be found today on cargo shorts and Louis Vuitton luggage. It’s been replaced with a series of tiny squares and “micropatterns” that mimic a digital photograph with poor resolution, with the idea that the new uniforms would be more difficult to detect in images produced by contemporary digital surveillance. Also, as a military camouflage expert admitted, “the boys think it looks cool.” Read More »
