BOB GARFIELD: For the past 20 years, photojournalist Anthony Suau has covered virtually every major war, but this time he decided to remain on the home front covering rallies and funerals and community events. It's a vantage point that he thought might be just as if not more interesting than the deserts of Iraq. Anthony, welcome to OTM.

ANTHONY SUAU: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: This must be a very strange experience for you. As a consumer of war photography - not a producer of it - what is it like for you to be on the other end of the transaction?

ANTHONY SUAU: It's a very interesting sensation. It's easy to see that there's a sort of editing process going on between the photographer and the viewer, and there are many things, I think, affecting that editing process, part of it being that the American public doesn't really want to see certain types of images; they're very sensitive at the moment.

BOB GARFIELD:Well one thing we have seen very little of is blood. Very little civilians or soldiers in agony and certainly very few photographs of dead Iraqis. Where are those pictures?

ANTHONY SUAU: Certainly they exist. I think as a photographer when you're there, it's very emotional and it's, it's overwhelming and kind of as a knee jerk reaction you immediately photograph. The grotesque, gruesome situations are a fundamental reality of war, and if you happen to be there as a photographer, you see that over and over and over again. I do think that the Americans are living in a cocoon about that, and they don't see it, and that's somewhat tragic.

BOB GARFIELD:Do you exercise a sort of self-censorship on the battlefield or in the war zone knowing that certain categories of photograph are just not going to be chosen by a photo editor or a, or a managing editor?

ANTHONY SUAU: No, I don't. I-- and I don't think I've -I've ever seen a photographer that does. I think that when you get into a situation that is-- particularly gruesome -- for example, I remember some very gruesome situations in Haiti -- I remember in Rwanda as well - you don't censor - you feel an, an almost human and moral obligation to really make a document of that - that how atrocious man can be to himself. And you don't really care whether they're published initially or not. However, when you are in that situation, you do know that you can turn off the viewer. The magazine can reject it for that reason. And your interests are to relate to the world what is in front of you - what you're seeing, and so I do think that if the photographer uses his skills, he can look at what would be a gruesome situation and photograph it in a way that maybe won't turn off the viewer, but also get the point across at the same time -- to somehow elude those editors by being more clever than the filter.

BOB GARFIELD:It must be a frustrating thing, because you -as a photographer in a war zone - are taking many, many images, knowing that decisions are being made -- in this case thousands of miles away -- which will inform readers' understanding of the reality on the ground.

ANTHONY SUAU: It's frustrating. It's enormously frustrating. The reality is, though, that those images that you feel are important usually find their way into some sort of publication. I mean I think the immediacy of photography -- it's not its place any more. That's the place of television. We see immediately what's happening across the desert of Iraq on television. Why do I need to duplicate that into a still image? The still photographer needs to use his head to photograph the situation in front of him in a way that can transcend time. That photograph will only be a part of history if it sustains a certain period of time and has second and third and fourth and fifth publications and so on and so on and can live 20 or 30 years down the road and say well that was really what that event was like.

BOB GARFIELD: Tony, thank you very much!

ANTHONY SUAU: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Anthony Suau is a contract photographer for Time Magazine; he's covered this war, for a change, from the home front.