A Colorado Photographic Arts Center program helps veterans process emotions, experiences and photographs

Yvens Alex Saintil held up his iPhone and pointed to a photo of a dirt road on the screen. “I almost shot a family on that road,” he said, tapping his index finger against the phone’s glass.

The photo was taken by a fellow U.S. Army soldier during Saintil’s deployment in Iraq. Saintil was a machine gunner, and the road was one of the borders on his neighborhood outpost. As Saintil swiped through photos on his phone the stories poured out of him. He mimicked the sound of sniper bullets whizzing past his head while he held a photo of a rooftop. He patted his shoulders to describe the heavy gear and desert heat as he gazed at a photo of a watchtower. 

This photo series, titled “Undisciplined Cowboys,” is part of Saintil’s yearslong process of reconciling his time spent in the military. Two of his photos will be on display in an upcoming exhibition, “Through Their Lens: Personal Projects by Veterans,” at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, also known as CPAC. The show displays the work of 27 Colorado artists who served in the military and participated in CPAC’s Veterans Workshop Series, a free, six-month program that provides veterans with instruction and resources for developing a photography practice. 

“Clinical Evaluation” by Robert Grimmer. Grimmer developed his photography project during the CPAC workshop, then photographed it while volunteering as a medic in Ukraine last Fall. (Photo by Robert Grimmer, courtesy of CPAC)

“Very few people leave the military with their identity intact,” Saintil said, who left the Army in January 2016. “What that program did for me, it helped me find my identity. It helped me make sense of all of these stories, of all these ideas that I had.” Through the process of collecting, editing and sequencing the photos, Saintil watched his own narratives emerge, and made space for new ones. 

The photos in Saintil’s series aren’t gripping, action-packed war shots. They’re point-and-shoot and camera phone photos: crooked, unfocused, streaked with dirt. Only a handful have people in them, a mix of Iraqi civilians and American military personnel. A few of the scenes even feel quiet, like a photo of civilians planting roadside foliage — until you notice the shadow of a Humvee cast onto the mound of fresh soil. “It’s kind of like a selfie,” Saintil said. 

People projects

The Veterans Workshop Series launched in 2017 as a community outreach program led by Samantha Johnston, executive director and curator of CPAC. 

Over the course of six months, veterans attend six-hour workshops on camera skills, post-processing, artist statements, marketing and social media, and developing a personal photo project. They also get one-on-one mentoring with Johnston and two of the program’s instructors, Frank Varney and Patti Hallock. The course culminates in an exhibition and catalog featuring their projects.

The program was created for veterans — many of whom have suffered some sort of trauma, even if it’s not overt, Varney said — but they don’t consider themselves an art therapy program, which combines therapeutic principles with artmaking and often targets veterans suffering from PTSD. 

“We just want to provide an opportunity for the veterans to find their own way,” Varney said. “By being open and providing a community, great things happen without us meddling.”

“Combat Medics” by Robert Grimmer. The presence of a Grimmer’s camera didn’t faze the medics and soldiers, Grimmer said. “I mean, the units that we were supporting have their own YouTube channels, you know? You can just go and see hours and hours of just combat footage,” Grimmer said. “I guess that’s just the way war is nowadays, you know, the more we publicize things, the more we can shape the narrative.”

Some veterans focus their projects on experiences in war zones, like Robert Grimmer, who photographed his project while volunteering as a medic in Ukraine this past fall. Others focus on the more intimate thoughts swirling around their heads, like Cherie Sutton’s project addressing aging and grief. 

“It sounds like we’re all over the map and it’s a free-for-all, but there is an underlying thread here, and that is: why are you making these pictures?” Varney said. “I kind of have a reputation for pushing people towards ‘people projects,’ because I find that people engender more emotions in photographs, and I’m about getting in touch with those emotions.”

Turning points

Grimmer was selected for the workshop around the same time that he was accepted into the Global Outreach Doctors program, where he worked as an EMT and trained medics near Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine. Due largely to timing, and partly to a background studying photojournalism, Grimmer pitched photographs of the medics in Ukraine for his personal project. 

“Frank (Varney) was like: know how to operate that thing in the dark, be able to troubleshoot it, change your settings and all, you’re not gonna get a chance to do any of that,” Grimmer said.

He brought a compact, fixed-lens Leica Q2 to avoid lugging around extra camera gear on top of his medical equipment. He also worked on a shot list ahead of time and studied photographer Eugene Richards’ “The Knife and Gun Club,” a series of photos from the 1980s taken in a Denver emergency room.

“I committed a lot of those pictures to memory — what you could see, what you couldn’t see, the emotions on people’s faces, things like that,” he said. “A good photographer is able to see a moment instantly and capture it, but I think there’s also a lot of pre-planning that needs to go into that.”

Despite the planning and support, Grimmer found it challenging to work as a photographer and a medic. 

“When I do go back,” he said, glancing sideways to see if his wife was listening before correcting himself. “If I do go back, I’m going to go back to take pictures. I’ll get a press pass. I’ll develop a good story. I’m not going to try to half-do two different jobs. I want to go as a photojournalist.”

“Overturned” by Cherie Sutton. Sutton’s photography project was meant to help her grapple with the process of aging as a woman which, in her words, “sucks in every way, like zero out of 10, don’t recommend.” (Photo by Cherie Sutton, courtesy of CPAC)

For Saintil, the Veterans Workshop Series laid a foundation for him as an artist. When he started the workshop he was studying political science at MSU Denver. When he finished the workshop he had changed his major to art.

The “Undisciplined Cowboys” project, which he developed during the workshop, was only the second time he’d used his military service in an artistic practice. This time, he outsourced a lot of the photography. He reached out to veterans who served with him in Iraq and asked them to send him photos. In his words, he was too busy “trying not to get shot in the face, not carrying around a camera taking photos” during his deployment. He received around 300 photos and has been working through them, methodically editing and sequencing them into the series. 

The two photos that will be on display at CPAC’s exhibition are only a glance at what Saintil plans for the project. He wants to expand his series to dig into nuanced aspects of the veteran experience, like racial inequities in the benefits they receive. He also wants to visit the veterans who sent him photos for the series and interview them about their experiences. 

“Documenting individuals’ stories, I guess you could say it’s my sketchbook for life, now,” Saintil said. “You know? It’s like, it gives me a bigger perspective. This is bigger than me.”