By Bill Zeeble, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Bill Zeeble, KERA 90.1 reporter: Within hours of last September's terrorists attacks, Tom Pennington and a news photographer friend headed out on an adrenaline-fueled, nonstop drive to New York City. For two weeks, Pennington then fed digital shots to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and other Knight-Ridder papers around the world.
Tom Pennington, photographer, Fort Worth Star Telegram: I knew what the story tasted like, what it smelled like. Other than just short of rotten death, I don't know how else to describe it. But even after that, I wanted to continue following the story.
Zeeble: So Pennington asked to cover Afghanistan.
Pennington: I'd always dreamed of conflict coverage. I guess part of it was the risk, part of it is just it's history. Photographs don't lie. You get to see what really goes on in the middle of a conflict.
Zeeble: Now, in 41 highly detailed large color shots - many never published - we can, too. Pennington's favorite picture focuses on a corpse. Pennington says the 15-year-old boy, whose toes are tied in a traditional manner for burial, died when an anti-aircraft round the teen was playing with, blew up. The landscape, says Pennington, is strewn with live ammunition children pick up as toys. The photographer was at the hospital when the boy was brought in Christmas day.
Pennington: The doctors couldn't save him. I ended up leaving the hospital with the family to go and bury him. There are two images. One with the toes, and one with the family actually burying him, where the grave is lit up by the head lights of a truck.
Zeeble: There were other shocking photos taken during Pennington's four-month Afghanistan visit. Like one of a traditionally-dressed drug addict, caught preparing a fix in a dim cave, peering over his left shoulder, eyes and mouth open in surprise at having his picture taken. But there's humor here, too. Pennington shot a hand-printed real estate sign stuck in the ground, reading "FRONT LINE PROPERTY FOR SALE - CALL THE MARINES." The photos are un-posed, in keeping with journalistic rules of objectivity. But gallery coordinator John Frost, who runs the space on the Southeast campus of Tarrant County College, says the shots are more than just news photos.
John Frost, gallery coordinator, Tarrant County College, Southeast Campus: Once you can see the emotional power of them, and the content, and what's going on, I can look at many of these for the compositional integrity and aesthetic quality. I can go, man, this is art.
Zeeble: These works carry another attribute of art. They make people - like doctor Hamid Madani - think. The Tarrant County College political science professor grew up in Afghanistan's capital of Kabul.
Hamid Madani, TCC Political Science Professor: What I see from these photos is that war is not the solution to problems of humanity. The only way to solve the problems is through peaceful resolution of conflicts. But unfortunately that didn't happen.
Zeeble: Tom Pennington wants to find out if some peaceful resolution will prevail. And then go back and take more pictures. Meanwhile, he's fascinated by the trip's impact on his own thoughts. In Texas, for example, he says we're complacently distant from the daily life-and-death struggles of Kandahar and Kabul. At the same time, Pennington adds troops are fighting in Afghanistan to defend our way of life that's often apathetic, and even self-absorbed. He says these photos are a good reality check. For KERA 90.1, I'm Bill Zeeble.
Tom Pennington's show of photos, "Afghanistan: A War-Torn Land," runs from September 5th through October 11th in the Art Corridor of Tarrant County College's Southeast Campus.
To contact Bill Zeeble, please send emails to bzeeble@kera.org.