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When the Iraq War began, I was sitting in a small steakhouse in rural Central California and as the television screens lit up with grainy, phosphorescent splashes of color, the people around me began clapping. We all knew it was coming; the build up to the war had been years in the making. But I was the one stunned into silence, amazed by the satisfaction and appreciation on the faces of the people around me.

Near the Iraq/Syria border, 3/6/06. Photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon, U.S. Air Force.

The next day, the Department of Defense released its first press photo (stock photos shot by the DoD for media outlets) of the war — an image of Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference. Since then, the agency’s collection of media photos has grown into the hundreds. They’re fairly uniform: Soldiers run to helicopters that are blowing up walls of dust. Soldiers with guns search homes. They stand in streets having pleasant conversations with Iraqis and they peer around brick walls with their guns at the ready. There are never any dead bodies; the smiling Iraq children are always hugging smiling soldiers — the photos are propaganda at its most transparent and banal.

And the photos are, at times, beautiful. They were shot by people with an aesthetic eye for the moment, an eye for the dramatic and powerful. The truly artistic photos are rare — only a few each year. And they’re limited in their scope: dramatic composition and lighting is the best most photographers can pull off. But the images are striking and memorable all the same. Flipping through the last four years, I find myself pulled into the DoD’s narrative of the war.

Sather Air Base, Iraq, 3/12/08. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force.

Camp Ar Ramadi, Iraq, 9/3/06. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock, U.S. Air Force.

When I write that sentence I hear the echo of four-year-old applause in my words. I know the steak house diners were clapping for something different. Me appreciating a propaganda photo from the DoD is not the same as their Pavlovian response to foreigners dying along the axis of some fabricated argument for war. But it’s disingenuous to pretend the photos are independent from the government that created them. It’s like my relationship with the US Army, which I despise for its role in the war, and the individual soldier, whom I respect for her service. Each one is an intrinsic part of the other, just like a photo and the events it depicts.

To like the photos does not mean I have to be an apologist of the war. But to like them brings me into a closer relationship with the powers that created this war than I would ever want. And so I try and balance on that line. I see the art. I hear my own clapping. And I remain coldly aware of what birthed these beautiful images.

Fair al Jair, Iraq, 12/16/07. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Adrian Cadiz, U.S. Air Force.

Sonny Liston had 15-inch fists and a 7-foot reach. He was the son of an Arkansas sharecropper, a “labor enforcer” for the Italian Mafia, a world heavyweight champion who learned to box during a teenage prison stint for robbing a gas station. He was powerfully built, illiterate, sullen, violent and withdrawn — a man who did not engender support from the civil rights leaders of the 1960s.

Liston is best remembered for loosing two of boxing’s most controversial and most famous fights, one in 1964 and one in 1965, against a man with antithetical looks and personality, Muhammad Ali. You don’t know it, but that’s how you know Liston, too. The iconic image of Ali standing triumphant and raging over the sprawled figure of a boxer was from the second of those two fights. Ali’s muscles are taught and shiny; he looks impossibly powerful. Liston, his face obscured, looks not just defeated but destroyed.

That’s the famous photo. The one below was taken as Liston struggled to stand up moments later. He would fall down again, get up and then try to defend him self from a flurry of blows from Ali before the fight was called.

The match was fixed. Or at least that’s the predominate theory. He supposedly owed money to his underworld contacts. Or he threw it because he was scared of what the Nation of Islam, which was managing Ali, would do to him if he won. The punch that sent him to the floor was, from some angles, glancing at best. Four former heavyweight champions said he threw the fight. But Sports Illustrated did a frame-by-frame analysis and said he didn’t. Liston was not a subtle man. His acting skills — especially for a man who’d never been knocked down in a match before — weren’t that good. Either way, while he continued boxing over the next five years, Liston’s career was essentially over. He was found dead in his apartment in 1970 from what police described as a suspicious heroin overdose. Liston didn’t know the date of his birth; he was dead for long enough before being found that the exact date of his death is unknown, too.

In the footage of the pre-fight weigh-in for the 1964 fight, the locker room is a melee — a mass of people, helmeted police, cameramen and Ali, who formed his own whirlwind of taunts and verbal explosions. Liston looks at once both irritated and tired as he weakly tries to shout rejoinders at Ali over the crowd. Somehow, he looks sad.

But maybe that’s because I know what’s facing him. I watch him unsmilingly flash peace signs to the crowd as a doctor checks his lungs with a stethoscope and wonder what it must be like to fall to the ground like he’s about to do. What a deep ache there must be in your heart you try to get back up and your legs fail, and the lights overhead explode like stars, and you collapse with the roar of the crowd and the echoing taunts of a younger, better man ringing in your ears.