Heroic imagery

In November, Activision software released "Call of Duty: Black Ops II," the ninth annual installment of the immensely popular and profitable military-themed video game franchise. The games feature a single player in an action-movie narrative of globe-hopping combat scenarios loosely based on real geopolitical situations, and a multiplayer mode that pits players against each other in real-time Internet warfare.

This latest version of "CoD" earned half a billion dollars in the first 24 hours of its release. At about $60 per unit, that’s roughly 6.7 million purchases. That approaches the total population of New York City. Though the game is rated "17+ M for mature" for violence, gore, language and sexual references, I have met at least a dozen of the millions of underage "veterans" of Activision’s virtual wars.

Our digital child soldiers have amassed thousands of "kills" and joined online "bands of brothers" with fearsome reputations. They need to see "Courage and Strength," under adult supervision, of course. Not because they confuse actual warfare with video games, but because they need to understand exactly how deeply warfare informs contemporary American life. This is what strong art offers.

The photographs of Nina Berman, Peter Hapak, the late Tim Hetherington, Ashley Gilbertson and Suzanne Opton serve an unambiguous purpose: They add another layer to the representation of war-fighters in a contradictory era when our understanding is fragmented by cable news, blogs, government information control and YouTube uploads from soldiers themselves.

Some work, like that of Hetherington, represents the prize-winning "on the front lines" school; his sleeping soldiers may have just come from a firefight, or been bored out of their minds waiting for one. Meanwhile, Opton’s subtly theatrical images cover more meditative territory. Her large-format horizontal portraits of soldiers taken from the neck up stare through and beyond us, and read like heads on a chopping block. Both artists put us in the uncomfortable first-person perspective of voyeurs, judges and possibly executioners.

Young people should see these types of images because they are larger than life and painfully realistic without sacrificing intimacy. They need to study Ashley Gilbertson’s documentation of fallen soldiers’ bedrooms: monuments in thousands of houses across the nation, frozen in the states their former occupants left them in. Soldiers come from among us, and in the things left behind there is a lot for us to find in common: collections of ceramic angels, war toys and posters of models and popular bands. These images invite us to personally bridge the chasm between a young person’s everyday life and the decision to join the military, and maybe even consider the empty bedrooms of the "enemy."

The digital generation needs to meditate on the scars, amputations, disfigurations and lead-heavy gazes; on the walking cemeteries of memorial body art, and the prayers of protection and defiance written directly into the flesh. They need to see that women are on the front lines, and what killers and witnesses of death of all ethnicities and backgrounds really look like. They need to carefully measure this work against an entertainment medium that simulates everything about war except the aftereffects that are on display here.

"Courage and Strength" reminds us how close we actually are to the veterans of our current and recent wars. Though photography is no more "real" than video games, this show gets at deeper issues of representation and strives to balance pity, compassion, aesthetics and ego for us in a way that is neither memorial nor news summary.

These are, after all, veterans who have agreed to be sampled: a distinct minority among the millions who haven’t been given outlets for their stories.

Honolulu Museum of Art is to be commended for carving out this opportunity.