Action Man's Rifle and the Troubles Colin Graham
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Action Man’s Rifle and the Troubles Colin Graham ‘The snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time’.1 Memories coincide with photographs. Sometimes the two become indistinguishable. The square frame of the Polaroid and its white border can become the shape which a memory ends up taking. The Polaroid’s darkening edges, its tendency to emit light from its centre, and then to fade the whole effect over time, can be the palette which a memory adopts. With the widespread use of instant colour photographs in the early 1970s, memories entered into new shapes, new patterns, new hues. In thinking about Sven Augustijnen’s collation of images from TIME and LIFE, I had expected to be mainly concerned with the politics of the weapon, the FN FAL [Fabrique Nationale, Fusil Automatique Léger] assault rifle which is the centre of this work – and to be considering how Augustijnen’s relentless concentration on this one item of military hardware would uncover the politics of photojournalism. This is what his work does, of course, and does systematically and chronologically, so that it never leaves unpicked the fabric of ideas which underpins this complex journalistic mode of representation. And yet, in the room in which the TV footage from the RTÉ archives is shown, something else, something additional, is happening. There is a raw, uncut feeling to these moving images. These sometimes meandering pieces of film are not pure. Certainly they are shaped and politicised in their point of view (inevitably the press tend to point their cameras from within the zones of safety provided by the forces of the state), but they are replete with the incidental and the accidental, with a kind of intrigue of the everyday which exceeds the capacity and interest of the finished journalistic story. In this messy uneditedness there is something to catch hold of. And, as I went back to look at that melancholy unfolding of images from TIME and LIFE, the flickers of recognition in the film footage – of tones of voice, places that I think I know, or knew – gave me a kind of access to that claustrophobically constricted timeline of violence in the pages of the magazines. Now the images of soldiers on the streets of Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s, each striated with the mark of the FN FAL rifle, began to seem more fragile and more open to being seen. Between the flickering night-time footage of British soldiers in the RTÉ reports and the contained rendering of photojournalism’s narratives in the press, a Polaroid memory began to form for me. As someone born in 1967, who lived variously in inner city, north and then east Belfast, I found that the coincidence of what Augustijnen sees as a political narrative and what I, with prompting, recall as a set of visual memories, became powerful. Most pressingly, I think, Augustijnen’s work asks us to look at the history of this weapon as something that is clearly formative of power in our society, and he does so by using its context in photojournalism against itself. While the FAL assault rifle’s ubiquity lets it hide in plain sight, Augustijnen’s constant attention to its presence brings it into the light, and, with that, all it represents – the military-industrial complex, the post-imperialist murderousness of Europe after the war, the violence underlying attempts to create a new world order in the seething chaos of the Cold War. All of this is achieved by a persistent defamiliarising of the image, and a heightening of its context rather than taking it out of that context. And for me something similar happened at the level of personal memory. The FN FAL rifle specifically, and those green-jumper-wearing, bereted soldiers more generally, began to seem familiar in a visual and visceral way. The Polaroid memories had been set in motion, and they gathered around a particular photograph, a version of me at six or so. It’s a night-time shot, all darkness and flash, outdoors. I’m wearing a replica Manchester United kit, and I’m being held in the arms of a British soldier. Smiling, embarrassed. I haven’t seen the actual photograph for years. I don't have it. It is only remembered. The feel of the itchy wool of a green army jumper on my leg is vivid, but is the soldier in the actual photograph wearing such a jumper? This image is quickly followed by another, from a similar time: me, again outside, again in the dark, in Belfast city centre, I think, waiting for a bus, again six or seven years old, holding an Action Man figure. I can't recall if there is a real British soldier in this photograph, or if it’s just the Action Man and the Action Man is standing in for a real soldier in my memory. But the Action Man is dressed as a paratrooper – red beret, that green military jumper with epaulettes and carrying his own little replica of an FN FAL assault rifle. 2 That I was photographed with a real British soldier, especially on a date that is probably in 1972 or 1973, and that my Action Man was dressed as a para, tells its own story of my childhood identity, but that’s not particularly interesting. What is stranger about these two photographs for me is the way in which they have melded together in my mind. Without them in front of me (they are somewhere in my parents’ house in Belfast) I can’t quite distinguish between them, nor be completely sure of the details in each. But there is the FN FAL assault rifle, in miniature, stuck in the gripping hands of Action Man, and haunting my early 1970s childhood, just as, once Sven Augustijnen has drawn repeated attention to it, the same rifle marks and scores and interrupts image after image in TIME and LIFE, a zeitgeist object we never noticed. The memories didn’t stop there though. Augustijnen’s consciously obsessive method of highlighting again and again the wielding of the FAL rifle as a fact and symbol of power had another effect on me. Of course, childhood toys are haptic, sensual memories in themselves; their feel, texture, weight, smell are all things we recall as constitutive of how we will come to inhabit the spaces of the world. But for me there was something more, something overbearing in seeing this particular rifle hundreds of times in a gallery space. Its familiarity was too familiar, almost guilty, as if I too had handled one of these objects. And then I remembered that I had actually owned one of these rifles. Or at least, I was convinced that I had once had a toy rifle which was an exact replica of the FN FAL, and that the replica I had owned (I would have been five years old) had a bayonet and a magazine and that it fired a series of small, plastic, and very realistic bullets. Indeed, I remembered that I had fired those bullets at a reproduction painting on the wall of our house in north Belfast and was told by my mother that I was marking the picture and not to do that again. But in retrospect, surely this can't be true? Toy guns weren’t made so faithfully to the model of the original, were they? Well, they were. Airfix made a children’s FN rifle, with bayonet, magazine and nine bullets, and this was exactly the gun which I had. In Belfast, in 1972. It seems, looking back, like the stupidest toy to get for a child, at that time and in that place. But maybe it was the most obvious toy to get, since toys imitate the world which the child lives in, teaching the child about the world they are to enter in to. The strongest memory I have of that house in north Belfast is leaving the house with my mother to go to primary school and finding that there was a British soldier lying in the garden. He wasn’t injured or in combat. He was on manoeuvres. There was a barracks at the top of the street and the soldiers practised their urban warfare by descending the street through the gardens rather than along the footpath. There he was, lying down, looking along the barrel of his FAL. When I came, years later, to think about photography in Northern Ireland during those years, this memory resonated particularly with Philip Jones Griffith’s well-known image of a black British soldier crouched behind a bush in a suburban garden in Belfast while behind him a woman mows the lawn. And, of course, that soldier is equipped with an FAL assault rifle. Jones Griffith’s photograph is typical of Magnum’s late 1960s and 1970s style – a form of reportage which is close to the action, but avoids instant journalism, and in doing so tries to convince that it sees under and beyond the surface of events. Magnum’s war photography, particularly in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, was pitted against the political orthodoxy which TIME and LIFE were avowedly closer to, but the photographic techniques it used were so similar to TIME’s that the political distinction between the two could get lost. Jones Griffith’s caption to that image of the black soldier plays on the pathos and irony of a complex situation – ‘The incongruities of daily life in the urban war zone’, as the caption has it.3 The effect is to stand back, to be distant from the peculiarities of this war, even while identifying the British as an ‘occupying force’, as the rest of the caption does.