Anonymous passages through one another's lives.

 This morning we listened to a piece on National Public Radio about an exhibit of photographs from conflicts in 28 countries that is now on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  These are pictures of war.

What grabbed my attention was the comments of one the photographers.  Here is a bit of that story:

"The more you've seen of death and inhumanity, the more it turns you into someone who really can't stand the sight of war," says photojournalist David Burnett who took this picture.

You can't take your eyes off the beautiful young soldier with the chiseled cheeks and dirty clothes in a photograph taken in Vietnam in 1971. Resting for a moment, the man sits on the broken track of an armored personnel carrier he's repairing. With long, soiled fingers he holds a clipping from some weekly livestock report. He stares into space.

He almost has what they used to call the thousand-yard stare," Burnett says. "He's thinking. I don't know what he's thinking. He's reading a letter from home and it's just a picture that kind of captures him in this moment of pondering what the rest of his life was like when he wasn't being a combat soldier."

Burnett didn't get the soldier's name, or age, or hometown, and he regrets that.

"Every time I walk into a diner now and I'll see a couple of Vietnam vets sitting around talking I'll just wonder, could this be the guy from my picture? I would love to be able to find him before one of us passes away," he says.

David Burnett/Contact Press Images

Now here is a phrase that got my attention: "Burnett and the young tank repairman made an anonymous passage through one another's lives. And yet that soldier haunts the photographer".



For decades I took thousands of pictures of people in many cultures and places in the world where I lived and traveled in my work, many of them of people living in poverty.  But for some reason in the last ten years of my career I stopped taking pictures.

 Now when I look at many of those images memories of places, people, smells, and even tastes come back to me - I know the context and reality. Sometimes I look at some of those faces and wonder what happened to that person. I wish I had more often stopped to chat, take down a name and make a note - but the reality is that we "had an anonymous passage through one another's lives"'. 

The other day Judy's sister, Jackie, commented on the photo on the cover of my book, "A Spirituality of Service". She really likes the picture of the three children.  Quite a few others have said how that photo grabs their attention and communicates something to them - I'm not sure what. Probably something different for each one. But it is a positive and captivating image, one that invites us to want to know something about them.

Here is a bit about that photo.  It was taken by fellow missionary Bob Engwall about 40 years ago, probably in 1971 - the same year the picture above was taken.  It is set in a village in the Andean mountains of Peru, about two hours distant from Cusco. They are Quechua children but we don't know their names. Nor does Bob remember much about the family though we know that the people in that village lived at subsistence level and the children probably would not have had the opportunity for more than three years of education.

Much better that we tried to take pictures of children such as these than those terrible images of malnourished kids with distended bellies that some organizations publicize for fund raising.

We are tempted to say, "but they were happy, weren't they?"  Yes, in the sense that they were growing up within the traditional Quechua culture with values of sharing, working together, compassion and strong family relationships; they may have been better off than some of their contemporaries who migrated to the great slums of Lima.  But their futures would have meant a life of toil and poverty. They were survivors in a place where perhaps three or four out of ten babies would not have reached their first birthday, and, though they may not look it they were probably malnourished and their growth stunted.

Yet somehow I still see joy in their faces. I want to believe that they had a good life.

What do you see when you look deeply into this picture?