By Victor Greto
Usually, it’s exactly the way it was on Friday: routine snapshots of an awards ceremony, a graduation and a low-key retirement, complete with cake, punch, vegetable plate and a choked-up retiring technical sergeant thanking family and friends.
But two weeks ago, the work a handful of Delawareans had done as official photographers at Dover Air Force Base helped focus more attention on American soldiers killed during the war in Iraq.
The images they took more than a year ago of the flag-draped remains of the first Iraq war dead to arrive at the base were published on the Internet and reproduced in newspapers throughout the country, including The News Journal.
“I was shocked when I saw my photo on the front page of The Washington Post,” said Roland Balik, 45, a base photographer, graphic artist and 22-year Dover resident.
It was shocking because taking images of remains is less than one percent of what the photographers record each week at the base. The photographers are not officially at Dover Air Force Base to chronicle its history. Their job is to take photos, efficiently and often artistically, upon request from base officials and airmen.
Although surprised at the photo’s newly won prominence, Balik, a former C-5 maintenance crew chief who retired from the military three years ago, is proud of his shot of an airman bending over flag-draped remains. He placed the newspaper on a bulletin board over his desk in one of the three rooms that house the base’s Visual Information Services department.
The news media got the picture from the Internet Web site www.thememoryhole.org, headed by Russ Kick, who obtained 361 photos of remains taken by base photographers through a Freedom of Information Act request. The photos on his Web site include 288 of Iraq war dead and 73 of the remains of the space shuttle Columbia astronauts.
Since the Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon has banned the news media from taking photographs of remains returned to the United States. Officials have said the policy protects family and friends of the dead.
Pentagon officials have since called the release of the images to Kick’s site a mistake and said that no other requests for photos of remains would be granted.
But John Sidoriak, head of Visual Information Services, said even if there are more requests for images of remains coming into Dover, there are none to give. No pictures of remains have been taken by base photographers since March 27, 2003. “If it is happening, it would be unauthorized,” he said.
Security in force
There are really no innocent pictures on base, said Sidoriak, 34, who heads the six-member team of photographers and graphic artists for Fisher-Cal Industries, which has taken official photographs for the base since 1999, when the company was awarded the contract. The team also produces brochures, posters and the majority of the photos for the base newspaper, The Airlifter. The company’s contract, which officials said is not a public record, is up for renewal this fall. “People often don’t realize how much you can get from an image,” he said. “Even a picture of a building may tell you something.”
For all its importance, the photographic process is relatively simple, Sidoriak said. A photographer snaps a series of digital images of an event, which are downloaded into a computer and edited, either by adjusting the image’s lighting or color. The technically bad photos are erased, and each remaining image is saved as a file and put into a virtual folder on a computer.
Photographers create in-house Web sites for base events and post the pictures so airmen may see them. Only the military has access to the sites.
According to air base records, nearly 30,000 images were taken by the Fisher-Cal photographers during the past budget year. They primarily include studio shots of beaming airmen recently promoted, those who have retired or those who received awards. They also show aircraft, emergency and training drills and occasional distinguished visitors, from President Bush to singer Kenny Rogers.
But it was the hundreds of pictures of remains that have elicited the most discussion, provoking a storm of analysis and debate about why the pictures were not released to the public and their long-term effect on the public’s morale and support of the war.
An oasis of color
The contrast between the colorful rooms where the photographers work and the outside base couldn’t be more stark.
Everything at Dover Air Force Base seems dipped in a drab, inoffensive beige, from the buildings, including the mammoth Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs, to the nearly completed stone wall that lines Atlantic Avenue, the main road through the base. The wall is being built, in part, to protect the flight line of lumbering gray C-5 airplanes built two generations ago to transport troops and equipment into battle.
But in the beige building that holds Visual Information Services, several rooms explode into rainbows of color. Collages of photos, including green-tinted night-vision shots of special operations units, firefighters battling flames and smoke, the frenzy of intramural sports and NASCAR racing, and planes streaking through the sky or kissing the runway, cover much of the walls.
Base photographers don’t take pictures of everything that happens on the base, said Bill Plate, 29, a photographer there for nearly five years.
Lt. Alison Tedesco, Dover Air Force Base public affairs officer, said Sidoriak’s team is not charged with recording any “history” at the base, except what a Defense Department employee requests.
It’s up to each Air Force base to decide whether to contract out photography or have its own photographers, said Jackie Hampton, U.S. Air Force spokeswoman. “We have more in-house photography than we do contracted photography,” she said.
Plate has photographed most of the remains that have gone through the base in the past few years, he said, including the remains of those who died in the 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole; those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, Pentagon attack; the remains of the astronauts who died in the space shuttle Columbia in 2003; and the first remains from the Iraq war in March 2003, taken on two separate days, March 25 and 27.
Sidoriak said he gets emotional when he’s taking photos of the remains. “They’re so respectful and meticulous,” he said of the airmen and officers who accompany them. “People pick up a piece of dust from the flag. I get goosebumps from it.”
On the job
Jason Minto, who was hired by Sidoriak only a month ago, was the photographer assigned to the awards ceremony for the Communications Squadron on Friday morning. The Visual Information Services unit is technically a part of the squadron.
As with any other event he covers on base, Minto, 25, was at the center of the action, snapping pictures of airmen shaking hands with superior officers while mugging for the camera.
But near the end of the ceremony, Minto received kudos from Maj. David Schilling, 436th Communications Squadron commander, for the job he and his fellow photographers do.
“You guys do awesome work every day,” he said. Rarely the center of attention, Minto blushed as he stood and accepted the applause of nearly 100 airmen.
It was the only picture he didn’t get that morning.