On Sunday afternoon I accompanied my daughter and her pal E to the supermarket and the cake shop where they bought presents for Mother’s Day. It was a beautiful sunny day and as usual it was a lot of fun pottering around with these two young ladies.
On the way back to the house the sinister shapes in the photo appeared over the houses and trees and koinobori of our sleepy little town: Apache attack helicopters. I live under a flight path for military helicopters and unfortunately Apaches, Black Hawks and Chinooks are a regular sight. Often they come over in small flights as above. Sometimes you get a huge mobilisation; convoys in the sky with all three types plus small scouts mixed together — my, how those Chinooks shake the ground!
These aircraft have become iconic from the war in Iraq. When they appear over my neighbourhood they are merely annoying. In Iraq or Afghanistan, of course, they mean death, mutilation, destruction.
When taking the photo I was struck by the beauty of the sky and the glorious green of the tree in juxtaposition to the menace in the shape and purpose of these war machines. There is no way the viewer can tell, but the tree in the photo is growing in the grounds of our venerable Tatsuta Taisha shrine. Nature, veneration and death. I found this quite powerful.
I am also interested in the way that the nature of the photo blurs the distinctions in location. The image could easily have come from war-torn Iraq. It didn’t. It comes from peace-loving Nara. It assaults our comfort and complacency. There but for the grace of iPod …
I have deliberately cropped the picture to maintain a sense of distance, which seemed to accentuate the menace. With the high resolution on this camera, it is possible to crop an image that shows the helicopters in more detail but this composition seemed more effective.
I wish I could could have caught them overflying the nearby koinobori. That would have been dead spooky.
