By Bill Stamets
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This week, to commemorate Veterans Day, Barnes & Noble is releasing the first U.S. edition of War of Our Fathers: Relics of the Pacific Battlefields, a collection of Marin’s landscapes and studies of relics. Rendered by Varouj Kokuzian, senior printer at Gamma Photo Labs, Marin’s black-and-white photos are meditations on nearly erased horrors. War sites are memorialized with photo captions that carry terse notes like “bombed 1942,” “assaulted 1942,” “sunk 1943,” and “destroyed 1943.” The book includes portraits and remembrances of American veterans. Marin wanted to pair them with Japanese vets until he realized how hard it would be to find survivors: the battle of “Bloody Tarawa,” for instance, took the lives of 900 Americans and 4,700 Japanese.
Marin’s father was in the U.S. Army Air Force during the war, and as a kid Marin met three generals his father had served with in the Pacific. After returning from the war his father had started the advertising firm Allan Marin and Associates, and he brought Marin along to photo shoots at the loft of Japanese-American photographer Woody Kozumi. Later Marin read William Manchester’s war memoir Goodbye, Darkness, which “clued me in to the idea that there was all this stuff laying around there that you don’t see in Europe because it’s all been cleaned up.” In 1984 he approached Life magazine with the idea of a photo story documenting Pacific war relics. Various anniversaries–the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima in 1985, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1991–failed to pan out as story hooks, but in 1991 a Japanese publisher embraced the project. “It was rejected by a breathtakingly broad and deep group of American publishers,” observes Marin. “In the wake of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan the conversation just seemed to change.”
