By MICHAEL KAMBER
The New York Times
"Basetrack is a Web-based reporting initiative with the photographers Teru Kuwayama, Balazs Gardi and Tivadar Domaniczky. Its “forward crew” is embedded with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines in Afghanistan. The rest of the team tracks regional news and relevant information, adding it to material transmitted from Afghanistan. Michael Kamber spoke with Mr. Kuwayama last month. Their conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q.
So this is your way of reaching around the mass media?
A.
I guess so. We’re releasing the system as an open-source download that anybody could replicate, say, with another military unit or some reporting project totally unrelated to war. In a lot of ways, I don’t need to work around the conventional media. Conventional media’s on its way out.
Q.
Why is this?
A.
Everything was put in the context of: what does the consumer want? I hate the term “consumer.” I hate the term “consumption of news.” Consuming, to me, seems like something that happens with Big Macs. By and large, the conventional media followed this approach of targeting the lowest common denominator. And here we are.
Q.
How does Basetrack work? How did you approach the U.S. military with it? How did you get the money for it?
A.
Actually, I didn’t approach them. They approached me. Six years ago, I was embedded with a company of Marines. Balasz Gardi was with me. For six weeks to two months, in the mountains, we dodged the same bullets and lived in the same foxholes, developing a relationship. Six years later, the captain of that company called me out of the blue. He’s now a major and the executive officer of a battalion. He asked if I was interested in coming to Afghanistan again with his battalion and recording their deployment from start to finish, which I thought was a really interesting idea. This was when Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal was beginning to implement the counterinsurgency. Since I have a kid now, I also was looking to see how I could pull this off without being in Afghanistan for seven or nine months straight.
I saw a possibility for pulling in remarkable and talented people who were being misused by the conventional media. I was trying to give them the opportunity to do it their way, to do it right. I applied for funding from theKnight Foundation. I proposed the concept to the Marines. I had no expectations that either side would sign off. It was almost more like an academic exercise. Then, to my surprise, both sides did.
Q.
Tell me what the mechanics are.
A.
Our Web site is a WordPress-based blogging system. It exists essentially as a staging base. We push out into the social networking world — Facebook, primarily.
When this Marine officer asked me, “Will you be with us for this whole tour?” my first instinct was, yeah, that’s fascinating. But my second was: yeah, I’ve been doing this for I don’t know how many years and I don’t even honestly know who’s going to care. What do these pictures actually accomplish? Who cares about 1,000 Marines?
You can pinpoint a cluster of people who care. We create a pipeline between 1,000 Marines working in very austere, isolated conditions in southern Afghanistan and connect them to their mothers, their fathers, their wives, their girlfriends, their husbands and their kids. Nobody has more authenticity to talk about this war, its costs, its consequences, and maybe even offer some analysis about how this could be done better. That’s effectively what the project is. The stream of photographs we send out is embedded with news articles, bits of analysis, facts, figures. And it is going out onFacebook.com/basetrack.
Q.
So people can access it through Facebook and leave comments?
A.
There’s a wall they can write on. This is actually the most interesting thing to me. We don’t have an unlimited budget to run a satellite transmitter and send out pictures every day, so we’ve actually uploaded very little content. What is happening pretty fast is that the mothers, girlfriends, husbands, etc., started searching for pictures of the Marines and then posted them on the Web site. So the site generates its own content now.
Q.
Is this the new journalism?
A.
This is a question of how you define journalism. You constantly hear these lamentations about the death of journalism. It doesn’t look like that to me. It looks like the birth of journalism. If, 10 or 15 years ago, someone told you that in the near future everybody will keep a journal to write their most intimate thoughts and make their journals public for anyone to read — you’d think that’s crazy. But that’s the world we live in. This constant question of: what is journalism, what’s proper, what’s real? How do we do this? Facebook came up with a simple solution, a tiny box that says, “What’s on your mind?” and it basically answered that question.
Q.
But then you’re also saying there’s been a dumbing down. There’s a very real difference between Walter Cronkite and a girl I went to high school with telling me on Facebook that she’s going to the mall to buy pet food.
A.
Just because you didn’t study journalism under the same rules that have been followed for decades doesn’t disqualify you as a genuine voice. Just because you’re publishing in the blogosphere or on the Internet — versus print on paper — why does that make you different?
Q.
There are standards. I still believe that there’s a big difference between someone who went to journalism school and some blogger. I’m sorry, but people don’t even understand the concept of objectivity.
A.
There’s a difference between opinion journalism and report journalism: reportage. It’s easy for people to comment and put thoughts and ideas out there in a very casual, offhand way. But how much appetite do we have for the longer form, complex stories?
I think that’s ultimately the solution: everybody becomes a journalist.
For a previous generation of photographers, their job was to simply record the events of the world, and then hand those pictures over to their publications, their agencies. Those pictures would be shown to the world and some unspecified third party would take action and do the rest.
I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t think it’s enough to make photographs.
As I spent a lot of time photographing people in dire circumstances, it felt impossible to reconcile this self-indulgent pursuit with what it was drawn from. I started doing a lot of organizing on the side. If I was photographing some group, I would exhibit prints or sell prints as a fund-raiser to send money to those people or some aid organization. It felt like I had to do something more concrete than saying that this happened, or that these people were there. It didn’t feel like I could rely on some kind of vague media apparatus that was going to translate that into social action on a large scale.
When I’m asked what I do — especially now because I’ve been doing so much with the military — I think of what I do in their language. It’s information operations. It’s influence operations. It’s psy-ops, basically. But usually I don’t write that on my landing cards when I’m getting off the plane. The I.N.S. tends to frown on that.
Q.
You’re teaming up with the U.S. military, or working through the U.S. military to get your point of view out, and it may not be a point of view that is in accord with what the U.S. military wants to get out. Or maybe it is.
A.
There’s a lot of stereotypes on both sides. A lot of people in the military assume that journalists are tree-hugging liberals. There are similar stereotypes about people in the military. A lot of people assume they’re bloodthirsty goons who cannot wait to go out and shoot someone. Neither of those perceptions is very accurate.
One of the real successes of the embedding system is that it’s penetrated some of those stereotypes. It actually created relationships between people in the military and people in the media. And, ultimately, I think, those relationships are really crucial.
Q.
Have these wars, particularly Afghanistan, defined the last decade for you?
A.
I went to Afghanistan in 2002, in the springtime. At that point, the war in Afghanistan was considered over. It was such an incredibly optimistic time. It really felt at that moment — and I think a lot of us had the same experience in Baghdad a few years later — there was this window, this moment of hope and opportunity.
That, to me, feels like the most acute tragedy of both of these wars: that we just blew that moment. Regardless of what people think about whether or not we should have gone in, there was a moment of opportunity. And in the years that followed, we managed to make Iraqis and Afghans nostalgic for Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar. You really have to screw up pretty badly to achieve that. I don’t know the words to describe how badly we squandered a moment there.
Q.
Do you feel that the media had a role in that squandering?
A.
I have very few kind things to say about our media. In covering those wars, it tries to operate as a business. You’ve got a real problem when you are trying to sell a product that most people instinctively do not want, which is bad news; the stuff that is really unpleasant to think about; the stuff that isn’t going to be easy to deal with but is really important for you to grapple with.
Q.
Are there specific faults that you remember, or do you just feel like you weren’t seeing the reality you were experiencing portrayed on television or in print?
A.
I would say the empirical truth of the dysfunction of our current system of journalism is the fact that we’ve been at war in Afghanistan for almost a decade and almost no American I’ve ever met has the vaguest idea what we’re attempting to achieve, who we’re fighting or what our timeline is. That would seem like a pretty clear indication that somebody hasn’t done a very good job of explaining. Among other people, that’s us.
It wasn’t just the military that was discouraging us from making meaningful pictures. The magazines we worked for — or gave our pictures to — clearly didn’t want them, either. We would come back from an embed, where we’d been in the fight of our lives, and we would get these absurd reasons about how that wasn’t interesting enough to publish or wasn’t right for that week.
Q.
You began to travel in and out of Afghanistan in 2002?
A.
I was thinking I’d be there for a couple of weeks. But I had a connection with Afghanistan that was very intense. I still don’t know how to explain it. A lot of us wander the earth, going to all the places that most normal people don’t want to go. I don’t know what we’re looking for, but Afghanistan was the first time I felt like I found it. The closest I can explain to what I felt like I found is home. I felt like, “This is where I came from, this is my country.” Not in a nationalistic sense. Afghans are not like other people, you know. Iraq actually felt like a very modern, cosmopolitan, fairly Western place. Afghans are from a different place. At least in the early years, the time I spent there was really a completely humbling and inspiring experience. From the first time I was there, all I could do was think, “When can I come back?”
Teru Kuwayama is a freelance photographer based in New York City. His photographs have been published in Life, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic and Outside magazine. Since 2001, he has focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. He is the co-founder of Lightstalkers. For Basetrack, he uses an iPhone and the Hipstamatic app.
Balazs Gardi is a Hungarian photographer who studied journalism and photography in Budapest and at the University of Wales. He focuses on marginalized communities in desperate situations and has traveled regularly to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is working on a long-term project, “Facing Water Crisis.” For Basetrack, he uses an iPhone and Hipstamatic.
Tivadar Domaniczky is a freelance photojournalist from Budapest. For five years, he worked for Hungary’s most influential political daily. In 2007, he started to follow how worldwide events shape the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He is a member of the VII Network. For Basetrack, he mostly used a Kodak Playsport camcorder."
