Photographs of war

Photographer displays photos at Culver Academy

By JENNIFER OCHSTEIN
Tribune Staff Writer

CULVER -- Fred Clarke has seen war. He's been face to face with it.

And Clarke, a subcontractor of the International Committee of the Red Cross who takes photographs to document humanitarian issues, tends to joke about what he's seen.

But his quips are a cover, laughing to hide the emotion of being confronted with suffering that most Americans never see on nightly news broadcasts.

"We make jokes, and we drink lots of beer. No. I'm just kidding. Don't write that," he said after describing a group of photographs he took in 2002 in the Caucasus -- Russia, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorny Karabagh.

Clarke's photographs are currently on display at the Huffington Library at Culver Academy. They are part of a greater exhibit called the Faces of the Caucasus that will be traveling the world this year. The group of photos at the Huffington Library will be on display for the next two months.

"I'm really affected by this. I go home from (photography assignments with the ICRC) emotionally drained," he said while looking toward his photograph of a boy standing in a hospital hallway, cradling what's left of his right leg and black pant leg in his arms. The boy leans against the hospital wall, his arms wrapped through a pair of crutches as he holds his leg.

"That's collateral damage," Clarke said, while describing the photographs.

The teenage boy in the photo, sewn up from an incident that happened on July 9, 2002, when he stepped out of the front door of his home and onto a land mine, looks toward Clarke's camera with a look that says, "I've been there."

Clarke, a 1973 graduate of Culver Academy, wearing a black beret that covers a graying head of hair wrapped up in a pony tail, said he goes through a process after a stint of photographing civilians in war-torn countries.

He and the delegates with the ICRC talk about what they've seen and talk about how they might be able to change what they've seen.

"I keep a sense of ... I have an optimism," he said.

Clarke's optimism isn't naive, though. He knows these wars will go on and that innocents will get caught in the middle.

"My hope is that people will see the need to be kind to each other."

"She's dead. Dead, dead, dead," Clarke said, coming upon a photograph of a woman flanked by her two children.

He flicked the photo's frame with his thumb and forefinger each time he said the word dead.

He's not laughing now. His voice is matter-of-fact.

The woman was ill, and her children, who did not go to school because the family did not have enough money to send them, took care of her.

Home was a housing complex that at one point held 32,000 people, but now is home to 2,200. In the woman's particular building, three families lived. Hers is on the very top floor -- a hazard because artillery is shot over the building.

"We tried to get her to move down," he said, deadpan. "Don't write that. We're always making jokes."

Clarke said he went back to see the woman and her children six months later only to find them gone -- the woman dead from her unknown illness, her children in orphanages.

The Cleveland native with a military school upbringing points to his last photo hanging up in Huffington Library.

It's of a girl of about 10 or so and her grandmother standing in front of their shack home, pock-marked with war, clothesline crisscrossing the yard. A dirty pink pair of pants is thrown over the line.

The woman and child are identified, like so many others in Clarke's photos, only by the words, "internally displaced person," or IDP.

"That girl made such an impact on me. She was a great kid."

In the caption accompanying the photo, Clarke wrote that he was taken with the girl's sense of wanting more out of life despite what she'd seen.

After six months away from her, he said he went back to see her. Clarke bought her a trinket necklace as a gift.

"I can't give you anything else," he said to her at the time.

He explained Thursday that giving money or extra food to those suffering could get them killed by others who want what they have.

"But I hope this reminds you there's someone who lives a long way from here that cares about you," he told her.

Clarke said by the end of the conversation, he, the girl, her grandmother and the interpreter were crying.

"If I adopt you, I have to adopt the grandmother, and what am I going to do with a grandmother," Clarke said with a laugh Thursday. "I was just kidding. Don't put that in there."

But he has to laugh. If he didn't, he, like anyone else, could never survive the war.