In 2014, Peter van Agtmael published Disco Night Sept 11, a thoughtful photobook about war and its fallout. Van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer based in New York, had covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his images often bearing witness to the kind of horrors that do not tend to make it into the mainstream press. In its merging of photographs from the conflict zones with shots of the more sombre, confused America that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, Disco Nights Sept 11 marked a shift in tone towards a kind of retrospective reflection.
Buzzing at the Sill sustains and deepens that mood, but here, Van Agtmael concentrates solely on America. It is a book filled with darkly poetic images that suggest the peculiar tensions of race, politics, power and discontent that, of late, have made his homeland seem like a place riven beyond repair. Van Agtmael punctuates the book with personal reflections. He writes about how he spent time in the Centre for the Intrepid in San Antonio, Texas, a rehabilitation ward for badly burnt soldiers (“The room was a sanctuary from the surreptitious stares of outsiders not acquainted with the scars of the new wars”). He describes how he hung out and partied with teenagers on the Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and how his bonhomie turned to shame as an older sister castigated him for encouraging the alcoholism that is rife among Native Americans there.
The book’s geographical and emotional terrain is vast and often extreme. He encounters refugees from the wars trying to settle in a land that is wary of them, Ku Klux Klan members who burn a UN flag, and punters at a juke joint in rural Louisiana attending a monthly “white night” hosted by the black owners for an all-white audience. Throughout, there are glimpses of an everyday America of familiar rituals and gatherings – the Kentucky Derby, a carnival parade in New Orleans, a Dolly Parton theme park – but the abiding tone is a mixture of melancholy and unease.
Van Agtmael writes evocatively about his encounters, often locating them in colourful childhood memories or personal anecdotes, but his images are often startling or sinister: a caption such as “The remnants of Choctaw allotment after the forced expulsion to Oklahoma” only hints at the grimness of the photograph of tattered clothes hanging in a dismal room. His night photographs often look like stills from a noir film and possess an unreal undertow that is heightened by his formal skill. In one, a man shines his headlights on a bullet-riddled car on his land, which sits in the busiest drug and human smuggling corridor in the US. In another, a dead black bear lies face down across a table in the yard of a taxidermy shop in Morganville, New Jersey. These are images that linger in the head like half- remembered dreams.
One of the most memorable scenes in the book is described in prose rather than photographs: his aunt’s outburst of sudden, volcanic anger at his decision to go to Iraq to cover the war (“Stupid! Asshole! Fucking selfish shithead! Why would you do this?”). Still, like his uncle before him, he goes. The reverberations of that decision are palpable in this book, too. Buzzing at the Sill is a compact, deftly designed book that takes its mysterious title from a Theodore Roethke poem, In a Dark Time (“My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill”). In confronting America, one senses, van Agtmael is also confronting himself: his fear and uncertainty about a future that seems defined above all by the sense of collective helplessness that lies beneath the simmering anger.
• Buzzing at the Sill by Peter van Agtmael is published by Kehrer Verlag (£32)
