During the war, he would take pictures of the dead Iraqis. He would find them lying on the graham cracker ground, their bodies flayed open by bullets and shrapnel or worse, and he would position his camera over the subject – because that it was what it was, a subject – and he would take the picture. After half a dozen times of this, his teammates began to call him Psycho. He didn’t mind it, and after a while it had no impact at all. He went about the business of war with the same efficient, expedient expertise that he had always had, and at the end of the engagement he went home.
He burned the pictures of the Iraqis. Throughout the late ‘90s he worked as a photographer, and he went to every war zone he could find. He didn’t focus on the dead bodies the way he had in Iraq, but none of his pictures held any kind of hope in them. He liked to say they were pictures of reality. This is what reality looks like; it is buildings now rubble, stricken mothers, bombed out delis. His photos were found in books and in magazines, and in 2000 he won a Pulitzer for a series of pictures of the refugee camps in Rwanda.
This is reality: genocide and death.
In 2001, his mother died and he went home to New Orleans where his family had an ancient white crumbling wedding cake of a mansion in the Garden District. He had never liked the home; he’d never liked New Orleans. Even so, he didn’t really have a home anywhere else. He traveled so much, to Africa, to Lebanon, to Iran, to Columbia, that he never really needed one. And here, back at the house, he felt itchy and tired. His mother had given him the house, which was not a surprise, but he found himself unable to imagine what to do with it. Sell it, maybe. But he couldn’t make a decision about it, not now. Maybe not ever.
His mother was buried in the family crypt in one of the above-ground vaults, about a ten minute walk from the house on First Street. At the funeral he had placed a dozen red roses on the vault, and cringed as he did so. They looked vulgar against the white marble: silly, showy. He was sure she would hate them but he could not remove them – that would be even more vulgar – and so he left the roses there, and hoped they would quickly blow away in the rain.