thedrifter
11-10-07, 06:42 AM
These memorials are more than skin-deep
By Lynell George, Los Angeles Times | November 10, 2007
LOS ANGELES - It's a canvas of sorts, one threaded with blue veins, bruises, and hatch-marks that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be scars. It's skin - but that's just one layer of a story.
Across the spread of a back is an elaborate tattoo: A gun sunk into earth, a helmet resting on top, empty boots alongside. Dog tags dangle from the sides, spelling out "Never forget."
Lining the bottom of the image, the lower back, still red from the artist's needles, are 10 empty ammunition casings with surnames - Martinez, Stevens, Watson - drifting out from the top, like spirits, or smoke.
It's easy to wince at the rawness. But it engraves itself on your mind, especially when you learn that the tattoo is just one of many coming out of the tattoo parlors in Twentynine Palms, memorials to lost friends and family members often done before a second tour in Iraq or a third.
Artist Mary Beth Heffernan spent three months in Twentynine Palms photographing the Marines and their homage to the dead. She haunted tattoo parlors, gaining the trust of tattoo artists and then the Marines who would be back in Iraq before the ink was dry.
A selection of Heffernan's photographs is collected in an exhibit, "The Soldier's Skin: An Endless Edition," currently on view at Pasadena City College Art Gallery.
"It was a very intense, physically close experience," she says, "like a cross between being in the exam room during a doctor's visit or a close moment between two friends."
Heffernan says she steered her conversation away from hot-button topics, asking instead about family, where the Marines were from, how they knew their friends. The subject sometimes turned to what they had seen.
"They really resent almost being pimped for information like that. I assumed that they maybe killed somebody in the act of duty. I assumed that they saw gruesome things."
Before he shipped out, Owen McNamara, the Marine with "Never forget" on his back, had it inked around shrapnel from the blast that killed his 10 friends but not him. McNamara says he began thinking about the tattoo from the moment his friends were killed. He designed it the next day.
"I was close with all of them," he says. "I'd spent the previous 2 1/2 years, day in, day out, with them. The main reason I got it done was respect for what they did. I was close to not making it home. These were the ones that didn't."
Heffernan, an assistant professor of art, sculpture and photography, art history, and visual arts at Occidental College in the Los Angeles area, never saw her project as a "war memorial," a term that suggests something static and removed.
"Rather than universalizing" the experience of war, she says, "this is about the particular."
Long before this project, Heffernan, a former military wife, had indelible memories of Twentynine Palms. She had moved to California with her then-husband, a Navy flight surgeon who had been sent to Twentynine Palms for combat maneuver training.
"The Soldier's Skin" is the fruit of Heffernan's return. Over three months, she broke down barriers and got to know the land and the people. She pitched her tent in the desert because she couldn't afford to stay in a hotel for such a protracted period. But she knew being a constant presence was the only way that she could build rapport with the tattoo artists and, ultimately, the Marines.
In time, she was able to form close relationships with about 10 of the parlors and the artists who worked in them.
Instead of her usual camera, she decided to use a small-format digital one that would appear less intimidating.
Often she was struck by her subjects' silence. "I think they are really conscious of the fact that this was painful, but it was being offered up as a spiritual sacrifice in honor of a dead friend," she says. "So they saw it as a small sacrifice."
Ellie
By Lynell George, Los Angeles Times | November 10, 2007
LOS ANGELES - It's a canvas of sorts, one threaded with blue veins, bruises, and hatch-marks that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be scars. It's skin - but that's just one layer of a story.
Across the spread of a back is an elaborate tattoo: A gun sunk into earth, a helmet resting on top, empty boots alongside. Dog tags dangle from the sides, spelling out "Never forget."
Lining the bottom of the image, the lower back, still red from the artist's needles, are 10 empty ammunition casings with surnames - Martinez, Stevens, Watson - drifting out from the top, like spirits, or smoke.
It's easy to wince at the rawness. But it engraves itself on your mind, especially when you learn that the tattoo is just one of many coming out of the tattoo parlors in Twentynine Palms, memorials to lost friends and family members often done before a second tour in Iraq or a third.
Artist Mary Beth Heffernan spent three months in Twentynine Palms photographing the Marines and their homage to the dead. She haunted tattoo parlors, gaining the trust of tattoo artists and then the Marines who would be back in Iraq before the ink was dry.
A selection of Heffernan's photographs is collected in an exhibit, "The Soldier's Skin: An Endless Edition," currently on view at Pasadena City College Art Gallery.
"It was a very intense, physically close experience," she says, "like a cross between being in the exam room during a doctor's visit or a close moment between two friends."
Heffernan says she steered her conversation away from hot-button topics, asking instead about family, where the Marines were from, how they knew their friends. The subject sometimes turned to what they had seen.
"They really resent almost being pimped for information like that. I assumed that they maybe killed somebody in the act of duty. I assumed that they saw gruesome things."
Before he shipped out, Owen McNamara, the Marine with "Never forget" on his back, had it inked around shrapnel from the blast that killed his 10 friends but not him. McNamara says he began thinking about the tattoo from the moment his friends were killed. He designed it the next day.
"I was close with all of them," he says. "I'd spent the previous 2 1/2 years, day in, day out, with them. The main reason I got it done was respect for what they did. I was close to not making it home. These were the ones that didn't."
Heffernan, an assistant professor of art, sculpture and photography, art history, and visual arts at Occidental College in the Los Angeles area, never saw her project as a "war memorial," a term that suggests something static and removed.
"Rather than universalizing" the experience of war, she says, "this is about the particular."
Long before this project, Heffernan, a former military wife, had indelible memories of Twentynine Palms. She had moved to California with her then-husband, a Navy flight surgeon who had been sent to Twentynine Palms for combat maneuver training.
"The Soldier's Skin" is the fruit of Heffernan's return. Over three months, she broke down barriers and got to know the land and the people. She pitched her tent in the desert because she couldn't afford to stay in a hotel for such a protracted period. But she knew being a constant presence was the only way that she could build rapport with the tattoo artists and, ultimately, the Marines.
In time, she was able to form close relationships with about 10 of the parlors and the artists who worked in them.
Instead of her usual camera, she decided to use a small-format digital one that would appear less intimidating.
Often she was struck by her subjects' silence. "I think they are really conscious of the fact that this was painful, but it was being offered up as a spiritual sacrifice in honor of a dead friend," she says. "So they saw it as a small sacrifice."
Ellie