Burned

June 30, 2006 6:39 PM

Burned: a photoset on Flickr "In 2001 I met a burn survivor who allowed me to photograph her. She told me that she wanted to be photographed so that people could stare at her without feeling embarrassed. It was such an extraordinary experience that a few months later I flew to a burn conference and set up a makeshift studio in a hotel room, and asked people to let me know if they would like their portraits made. I was astonished at how many people did. What I learned from this extraordinary experience was that every burn survivor has a tale of courage to tell, and that the burns have their own eerie beauty." Amazing, unsettling, inspiring.
posted by mathowie (48 comments total)

Mathowie making a double post? WTF?
posted by Meatbomb at 6:44 PM on June 30, 2006

You newb, don't you know how to do a search?
posted by Meatbomb at 6:45 PM on June 30, 2006

Wow. Nice pictures. Very interesting how many people agreed to have their pictures taken (but given the quality of the final work, I can see why they would).

I definitely agree with the photographer that after you've spent some time looking at these you stop really seeing the burns, and that they do indeed have their own unique (and not unattractive) effect on the appearances of the survivors. It would be interesting to have a bit more information about the stories of each of the subjects, but then again, it's kind of interesting to just look at the pictures for what they are at face value. Really nice post.
posted by biscotti at 6:49 PM on June 30, 2006

you could be nicer about it, meatbomb.

also, linking to the previous post is the general courtesy.
posted by Hat Maui at 6:49 PM on June 30, 2006

I don't think it's officially a double as it wasn't an FPP but a comment from unSane in FPP.
posted by dobbs at 6:49 PM on June 30, 2006

That is a very moving set of photos. Along similar lines, you may find this helpful group of photographers interesting.

I too, would like more backstory on each of the burn victims. But I understand the limitations of a photoset.
posted by insulglass at 6:50 PM on June 30, 2006

It doesn't come up in a search, doesn't appear that it was ever posted on the front page, so no double. I found it by looking through unsane's profile after checking out his songs on mefi music.
posted by mathowie at 6:51 PM on June 30, 2006

Oops, that should read "in my FPP", obviously.
posted by dobbs at 6:52 PM on June 30, 2006

As for the "tuning out" of the burns, in some ways the burns aren't so different from what some people do voluntarily re: tattooing, piercing, scarification, and so on. Although the burns weren't voluntary you can kind of see in that context how they might almost be seen as an enhancement by some people.
posted by localroger at 6:53 PM on June 30, 2006

Yeah, I remember seeing these from unSane's comment.
Still a good set for anyone who hasn't seen them.

Mathowie making a double post?
/brain explodes
posted by Demogorgon at 6:55 PM on June 30, 2006

Alan rather looks like Bob Denver.
posted by Gator at 6:59 PM on June 30, 2006

somewhat off-topic: i followed some of the portraiture pools on flickr and found this guy's stuff, which has me absolutely floored. just wanted to share.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 7:00 PM on June 30, 2006

When I was a wee child I went to school and was friends with a kid who had full body burns from a fire that his little brother had accidentally set, but his burns were pretty minimal (if full-body 3rd degree burns could ever be minimal) compared to most of the people in those photos, but he was pretty blasé about it the scars and what I assume was a pretty contand state of disomfort.

Those photos are startling and beautiful.
posted by lekvar at 7:01 PM on June 30, 2006

I work in an ER. Out of all the traumatic injuries we see, burns are the ones that are hardest to forget about when I come home at night. I guess as a result I'm having a pretty hard time looking at these photos from an artistic point of view; all I can think of is the horrifying amounts of pain these people must have felt, both from the burns and from their subsequent treatment. Burn debridement and dressing has to be one of the most excruciating things we have to do to another human being; I can't even fathom being on the receiving end of it. I find no beauty in burns, personally, but these people are definitely courageous as hell.
posted by makonan at 7:39 PM on June 30, 2006

A kid in my elementary school had chest burns which created a loop he could tuck his pen into.

I've never been able to share this fact before.
posted by Kickstart70 at 7:40 PM on June 30, 2006

It doesn't come up in a search, doesn't appear that it was ever posted on the front page, so no double.

Oh sure, but my non-double post gets deleted as "previously posted". Who ya gotta fuck round here?
posted by yerfatma at 8:01 PM on June 30, 2006

The last time I got a hot oil burn on my foot (2nd degree 1/4" spot) I cried like a little boy. I can't imagine the pain of having 40% of one's body scorched to the point of scarring. Photos are a great way to look at burn victims, since one of the most disturbing aspects of a recovered burn is the immobility of the scar tissue. I can actually make eye-contact with a photograph , whereas in real life, I'd be hard pressed to.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:14 PM on June 30, 2006

That is a very moving set of photos. Along similar lines, you may find this helpful group of photographers interesting.

Also see my post here.
posted by blaneyphoto at 8:20 PM on June 30, 2006

The photos seem softer in black and white. I think they'd be much more jarring and in-your-face if they were taken in color.
posted by dr_dank at 8:41 PM on June 30, 2006

I did actually do a version of this photoset with details of everyone's stories, but I had some comments from one or two of the subjects that I hadn't gotten the facts absolutely right. I was upset about this, as were they, and have never had the time to go back and re-interview everyone to make sure I had the facts absolutely straight. It was my own fault for attempting to photograph and interview at the same time: it turns out you can only do one of these well.
posted by unSane at 9:24 PM on June 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

Wait. Is this like that chick who steals kids' candy for a reaction? 'Cause if someone's going around torching people just to get a good photo...I just don't know if I can get behind that, art or not.
posted by ColdChef at 9:38 PM on June 30, 2006

makonan : "I find no beauty in burns, personally, but these people are definitely courageous as hell."

That, I can agree with. But, unSane, I have a question regarding this:

"What I learned from this extraordinary experience was that every burn survivor has a tale of courage to tell, and that the burns have their own eerie beauty."

When you say "every burn survivor", do you mean "every burn survivor I shot"? If so, you can disregard the rest of this comment, as it doesn't apply. But if you meant "every burn survivor" in general: Why is it that every survivor has a tale of courage? Are there no cowardly survivors? What happens to cowards that get burns; do they all die from them?

Sorry, that sounds really flippant, but the initial statement just makes little sense to me. It reminds me of the trend of calling everyone killed in 9/11 "heroes", or saying that anyone with mental retardation is "pure of heart". There have to be some cowardly burn victims, right?
posted by Bugbread at 10:11 PM on June 30, 2006

The courage comes in the form of a willingness to continue with the business of living.
posted by econous at 10:31 PM on June 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

Nice quality photos. I think that this dude did a good job on this stuff.
posted by drstein at 10:32 PM on June 30, 2006

No Jacqui?
posted by nonmerci at 10:47 PM on June 30, 2006

Black and white is what allows these images to be so dignified.

do you mean "every burn survivor I shot"? Not everyone survives serious burns - many people die from their injuries, perhaps after struggling for a while. Hence these people are genuinely survivors, and not merely in the overwrought metaphorical sense we so often hear these days.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:01 PM on June 30, 2006

No Jacqui?

I clicked that link and know my weakness. She's got to be a hell of a lot tougher than me...I'm certain I would kill myself if I was subjected to that. Shameful of me - I feel dirty and wrong for saying that.
posted by Kickstart70 at 11:03 PM on June 30, 2006

I_am_joe's_spleen,

What I wrote was unclear. I'm cool with the use of "survivor". My question was about the "tale of courage". The sentence "every survivor I took a picture of had a tale of courage" makes sense to me, but "every survivor of burns that exists has a tale of courage" doesn't. That's why I was trying to clarify what he meant by "every survivor". The possibly overwrought metaphorical wording I was talking about was the "has a tale of courage" part (and, again, depending on who unSafe was referring to, it might not be overwrought metaphorical wording, but accurate wording)
posted by Bugbread at 11:13 PM on June 30, 2006

bugbread: or saying that anyone with mental retardation is "pure of heart".
ok, nonsequiter, but I once saw a down's syndrome sufferer trying to get his money back from a newsbox that had Yank! magazine (porno). It really rocked my world, and I realized I had been making the "pure of heart" assumption about retarded kids, or at least down's sufferers. Prejudice is a funny thing.

Anyway, good point bugbread about mistaking endurance or tenacity for courage. Although I think it does take a certain kind of courage to go out in public with burn scars, birthmarks, or other arresting visual differences.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:19 AM on July 1, 2006

Anyway, good point bugbread about mistaking endurance or tenacity for courage.

I don't think it's mistaking anything. The pain and therapy they go through does take courage. Endurance and tenacity are not big enough words. If you haven't seen a major burn up close, you simply have no idea. And then, not to only go out in public, but to try to continue on with what was your life. Courage fits.
posted by justgary at 12:58 AM on July 1, 2006

The photos are great, I like them a lot.

But I call bullshit on this:

"I also learned that after a few hours it becomes very difficult to see the burns anymore. When I returned and developed the photographs, I had to keep asking my wife "does this person look burned to you?", because they all looked quite normal to me."

That's just not possible, unless you were in some altered mental state, I would think. It's a great thing to say from a "you learn to look at them as people instead of seeing only their burns" kind of perspective, but I don't believe that you became physically unable to see the burns and had to ask someone else for help, sorry.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:11 AM on July 1, 2006

BrotherCaine : "Although I think it does take a certain kind of courage to go out in public with burn scars, birthmarks, or other arresting visual differences."

Agreed. That's why if unSane is saying that these folks, who stepped in front of the camera, were all courageous, I'd totally believe him.

justgary : "The pain and therapy they go through does take courage."

I don't really understand that. What if a person didn't have courage? Would that prevent them from feeling pain or going through therapy? Do only courageous people get burned? Or does everyone get burned, but only courageous people survive? I'm a cowardly type: what would happen to me if I got burned but survived?

justgary : "Endurance and tenacity are not big enough words. "

Yeah, but courage doesn't mean super-endurance or super-tenacity. I mean, "huge" is not a big enough word to describe the size of the sun, but I wouldn't say that therefore the sun is "genius".
posted by Bugbread at 3:05 AM on July 1, 2006

re: courage

A serious burn injury takes courage to survive. If you don't believe that, head over to a burn unit and volunteer for a while. I talked to hundreds of survivors.

re: not seeing burns any more

You can call bullshit all you like, but it's true. Just because you don't believe it doesn't mean it isn't true. Again, try volunteering for a while and see what you think then.
posted by unSane at 6:06 AM on July 1, 2006

As someone who's currently suffering from a protracted, unpleasant, and potentially deadly illness (although I'm sure it's nothing compared to what these people went through) I have thought a lot about whether the word "courage" is appropriate to describe what it takes to get through this sort of ordeal, and I think I agree with bugbread. When your choice is between treatment — however awful — and death, believe me, you will take the treatment. People say things like "I'd kill myself if that happened to me," but when it comes to it, you won't. You'll suffer, and it'll suck, but the urge to live is strong enough that it won't even seem like a choice.

That isn't meant to take anything away from these people; I see each of them as a testament to how tenacious and adaptable people really are. But I wouldn't call it courage.
posted by myeviltwin at 8:01 AM on July 1, 2006

whether the word "courage" is appropriate to describe what it takes to get through this sort of ordeal

This isn't just the treatment, it's the aftermath. Returning to work and family and going to ball games.

When your choice is between treatment — however awful — and death, believe me, you will take the treatment. People say things like "I'd kill myself if that happened to me," but when it comes to it, you won't. You'll suffer, and it'll suck, but the urge to live is strong enough that it won't even seem like a choice.

I'm sorry about your illness, but you are absolutely wrong. People give up all the time. They decide to give up. They decide to pull back. When a family member was recently diagnosed with cancer they were given the choice of dying within a year or fighting it with chemo, etc. No promise it would work, but it would be difficult. People do choose everyday not to fight it.

Now, I'm not saying these people are not couragous. They could choose not to fight it for many reasons. But you do have a choice, and people choosing not to fight it is not abnormal.
posted by justgary at 9:51 AM on July 1, 2006

People give up all the time. They decide to give up. They decide to pull back. When a family member was recently diagnosed with cancer they were given the choice of dying within a year or fighting it with chemo, etc. No promise it would work, but it would be difficult. People do choose everyday not to fight it.

It's interesting that you don't say what your family member did. Did he/she decide for the treatment or not? Anyway, I could have been clearer. Of course I didn't mean to say that people will take any treatment regardless of cost or effectiveness. Would you take a treatment that would prevent a certain death at 85, but which made you sick every day of your life? Not likely, right? What I am saying is that given a treatment that is effective (say it raises your chances of surviving another 5 years from 0% to 20%), almost everyone would take it.

But this is immaterial to whether the simple act of taking treatment makes one courageous; I think we both agree that it does not unless you want to call everyone who refuses treatment (and, as you note, some people have good reasons for doing so) a coward.

As to your second point, about the real courage being necessary to "return to work and family and [go] to ball games," I believe this is an error (albeit an understandable one). The fact is that most (though not all) people are quite resilient to this sort of trauma. For example, though paraplegics and cancer victims aren't as happy as the unafflicted — after all, they're not crazy or stupid — by and large they're reasonably happy. The thing is, when you imagine being in that kind of position, you expect the bad stuff be more central to your life than it ends up being, and you underestimate the extent to which you will still enjoy the company of loved ones, eating a cold apple, and being outside on a warm summer day.
posted by myeviltwin at 12:14 PM on July 1, 2006

These broke my heart. I can't even imagine what sort of personal fortitude it would take to persevere through such trauma.
posted by dejah420 at 12:21 PM on July 1, 2006

Two friends of mine agreed that they would rather be dead than live life without a limb -- a good possibility considering they were both deployed to Afghanistan at the time. They felt so strongly about this that they each claimed they'd kill themselves if they lost a limb in a firefight or IED.

A few months later, an IED went off under the humvee one of my friends was in, and he lost one foot and had the other so badly damaged that he would never be able to run on it - they would have to fuse the ankle.

His will to live -- and (pardon the cliche) live life to the fullest -- was so great that he not only didn't kill himself, but he convinced the surgeons at Walter Reed to take his remaining foot as well. Nine months later, and he's running around two prosthetic feet.
posted by cactus at 12:41 PM on July 1, 2006

Are ugly people courageous simply for ignoring their own disgusting face in their day to day living? Or am I, a beautiful person, some sort of hero to not puke as soon as a polluted photon bounces off their disgustingness and is absorbed by my retina? Maybe being a hero and having courage are what normal people do in extraordinary situations, and semantics don't quite convey truth. [disclaimer: I see people.]
posted by econous at 1:38 PM on July 1, 2006

myeviltwin: Upon what do you base that statement?
posted by raysmj at 2:13 PM on July 1, 2006

What I'm asking, more specifically is, trauma can cause mental injury (of a sort) as much as physical injury. And I don't think you'd be less susceptible to that if your physical injuries were greater. That doesn't make any sense at all. Maybe their rates of PTSD or generalized anxiety or whatever are no greater than that for people injured in any way (wouldn't surprise me), but compared to the general population that's suffered no trauma whatsoever? I'm not buying that.
posted by raysmj at 2:15 PM on July 1, 2006

Many researchers have found that people who've suffered serious illness or accident are much happier than people would expect, and are in some cases just as happy as controls. The first study (that I know of) that showed this compared lottery winners and accident victims to normal controls, and found that the accident victims were somewhat, but not hugely, less happy than the controls.
Here's a recent study that found no happiness differences between dialysis patients and healthy controls, and here's another recent one that shows that breast cancer patients are happier and more well-adjusted than people expect them to be.
posted by myeviltwin at 4:04 PM on July 1, 2006

Well, there are studies galore on PTSD and anxiety/depression resulting from or connected to incidents that resulted in disfigurement. More info.
posted by raysmj at 4:32 PM on July 1, 2006

Great post, thanks. I'm probably reading too much into this, but I wish these hadn't been taken in black and white (reminds me of most of the photos of war injuries I've seen from the Iraq War (of U.S. troops)). Is color seen as too much of an intrusion on the subject's dignity and humanity? Or is to protect and cushion the audience? Or is it just an artistic choice?
posted by longdaysjourney at 6:50 PM on July 1, 2006

Well, there are studies galore on PTSD and anxiety/depression resulting from or connected to incidents that resulted in disfigurement.

I think, if anything, that those studies prove my point! Unfortunately, I can't get to the full text of the first article, but according to the abstract, the depression rate in the burn victims was 7.1%. The depression rate in the US, according to the NIMH, is 6.7%. So being burned raised these people's chances of experiencing a major depressive episode by a whopping .4%!
posted by myeviltwin at 7:40 PM on July 1, 2006

Incredibly selective stats. The rate of PTSD in the US is 3.5 percent, 33.9 percent among those who with burn injuries.
posted by raysmj at 8:19 PM on July 1, 2006

Wow. The thing that gets me is how in many of the pics, the survivor's personalities shine through as being so much more important than the burns. Tough, brave people.
posted by snsranch at 8:44 PM on July 1, 2006

I would say whether they're depressed is pretty central to the point!

As far as PTSD goes, is it not news that two-thirds of people badly burned apparently experienced no clinical psychological symptoms whatsoever? And of those who had PTSD, how severe were the symptoms? How long did they last? From this abstract, it's impossible to tell.

Listen, I'm not saying people don't react to trauma — that would be ridiculous. I'm saying that in the long run, most people recover from trauma more quickly and completely than we give them credit for, and I think that these statistics clearly support that interpretation.
posted by myeviltwin at 9:07 PM on July 1, 2006