The bride’s expression is equally opaque. Some people think she looks stunned. Others describe her expression as anxious, or even fearful. Her mouth turns down slightly at the edges, but her wide brown eyes gaze straight ahead and something about the set of her jaw suggests resolve. Some viewers strenuously deny that there’s anything unusual about the young woman’s countenance at all.

The portrait is just one of a much larger series Berman shot on assignment for People magazine showing Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel’s recovery, homecoming and wedding day. Berman was sent to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas to meet Ty, and his fiancée, Renee Kline. At the time, Ty was 24 and Renee wasn’t quite 21. The two had been high school sweethearts and were engaged before Ty’s second tour in Iraq. But in 2004, Ty’s tour was cut short when a suicide bomber blew up near his truck during a routine patrol. The searing heat melted most of the skin off Ty’s body and left him blind in one eye. His skull was so badly shattered that doctors had to replace it with plastic. Ty was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center, where he underwent 19 surgeries. Berman completed the series over the course of three separate visits, first chronicling Ty’s convalescence, and then, following his release, the couple’s marriage in late 2006.

Four weeks ago, Berman’s wedding portrait, “Wounded U.S. Marine Returns Home From Iraq to Marry,” won the World Press Photo competition for portraiture in 2006. The World Press Photo competition is the most prestigious international award for photojournalism. Since then, the image has been viewed online hundreds of thousands of times, sparked countless blog posts and endless comment threads. Everyone sees something different.

Salon reached Nina Berman by phone to talk about the story behind her haunting image.

Can you describe the circumstances under which the prizewinning photo was taken?

It was their wedding day. Before they went to the high school where they were married, they went to a commercial portrait studio. I normally don’t find those commercial studio pictures very interesting. They seem fake. People just put on a happy face. But then I thought, this is a different wedding picture, isn’t it? So I kind of stepped back. I thought, it’s the same as having someone with their body blasted off in a high school yearbook.

Rituals like this, young people getting married, if this doesn’t say that this war is having an impact, I don’t know what does. It just cries out to people — hey, this war is real. There’s a very palpable reality to this war in certain communities. It’s right there, not in the cities or on the coasts. Most people in the media and the cultural elite don’t know anyone in the military. My whole goal is to say, hey, this war is not some kind of abstract thing.

How would you describe the photo?

It’s a very static picture. It’s a moment stopped in time. That picture said to me that this was a moment of reflection and quiet. A break from the wedding day craziness.

In the portrait, Renee has a kind of haunted or overwhelmed look. And she seems to have that same haunted expression in several of the photos in the series, like the shot of the two of them on the porch. Did you see that same expression on her face at different times when you were shooting the series?

I did. I was looking for a way into her soul. To see into her eyes, if she was thinking about something else than what was happening right in front of her. But I never asked her about it. I felt like she could have offered it up. Sometimes I feel free to ask probing questions, but not this time.

How would you describe the expression on Renee’s face?

I don’t know. That’s what’s so interesting about it. It suggests something different for everyone. For me, it seemed like this one brief moment to take stock.

Some people have asked whether the expression was just some kind of fluke, whether it might have been unrelated to the wedding or Ty’s disability —

Yes, you can say, “She was exhausted,” or “They were hung over” — they were — or “They just wanted to get this over with and get out of there so they could have fun.” That’s part of it too. But that’s not what makes pictures interesting. What makes pictures interesting is that they provide the space for the viewers to contemplate.

What’s the public response been to the picture?

I’ve published photos that generated a lot of response before. But this time, there was this crazy cyber-response. A hundred thousand people saw it through Fark in one day.

Has the reaction been generally positive?

What other people bring to the picture is extraordinary. I got linked to by everyone from pro-war sites to antiwar sites to sites dedicated to love and Valentine’s Day. Then there were other people who were interested in the picture as photographers.

No one’s said that it was a cheap shot. Most people are heartbroken. That’s what sort of shocked me. They’ll say, “I cried for days,” or “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Personally, I didn’t feel any of those things.

How many frames did you shoot of the couple in that pose?

Just one frame of that pose. I also shot some from the side. I thought those were a little more artful, a little softer. Then I came around to the front. I liked the flatness to it. I like that it had almost a snapshot feel. It didn’t require a lot of technique to take that picture. It’s a standard wedding photograph, but something’s different. The war is affecting our rituals, our daily rituals. Look around.

When did you first meet Ty?

I met Ty at Brooke Army in Texas. He was near the end of what was a 19-month recovery there. Renee, his fiancée, was down there and his mom, Becky, was there with him as well.

Was Renee living with Ty at the hospital?

They were all camped out at this place called Fisher House, which is a nonprofit group that provides housing for military families whose loved ones are receiving medical care. One of the issues in this war is that many of the wounded are really, really badly wounded — they don’t need one surgery, they need 30 surgeries that can go on for over a year. So in order for a family to be with a wounded loved one that whole time, they might have to quit their jobs and move — and the government doesn’t pay for that. Maybe it’ll pay for a week, and that’s it. Fisher House helps them stay longer.

What did you think when you first met the couple?

The first time I [met them] I was shocked. I was scared about the assignment. I had photographed really burned vets before, but [this] was a People magazine story, and I was concerned that they picked someone who was so shocking-looking that it was going to be a super-sensationalist piece. I was afraid viewers weren’t going to be able to look at Ty, so when I first saw him I was put off, for maybe five minutes. But then his disfigurement just sort of faded away. I would watch and see how the rest of the public looked at him. In some pictures you can see that.

Like the shot of the little girl in the candy store?

Yes. I asked Ty, what do little kids say? Do little kids get scared? In my book, I’d photographed a really severely burned soldier. And when I was with him I’d see kids shy away and he would smile at them.

Ty would just laugh — he’s got a great sense of humor. Kids would say, “What happened to your ears?” and he’d say, “The bad guys took ‘em.” They’d say, “What happened to your nose?” and he’d say, “The bad guys took it.” I guess he tried to make some little game out of it to deal with it.

Did you get a real sense of what Ty was like as a person?

It was difficult for me to know what was Ty before the injury and what was Ty after the injury. Because he’s got an almost aloof manner. He’s not that communicative, and he’s got an acid sense of humor. He was closed up at Brooke Army. I never really saw him smile much. When he went home to Illinois I started to see more expressions — which as a photographer I was always looking for. But because of his burns and the way his face is, it’s hard to see expressions.

So the injuries and his burns made his face somewhat inscrutable?

Yeah. I was always looking for signs of life in his face. And then one day, once he was back in Illinois, I went to this thing with him. He and his friends really like this Ultimate Fighting Championship show on TV. This one day, he was with all his old friends from high school and he was like one of the guys. You could see the personality coming back and you saw the smile as he’d stand up pumping his fist for his favorite guy. You started to see the person come back in his face.

Does his family see him as the same guy?

They see him as kind of the same guy. I know when he was at Brooke Army he was super-depressed. During my visit there he was really itching to leave, but things were being held up. He’d sit in there and watch a lot of TV, and he was kind of aloof to his family. I was really surprised by that, but his mom and Renee would laugh it off and go, “Oh, that’s Ty.” But I think when he got home, his personality came back, which is kind of remarkable.

He had a reputation at Brooke Army of being this super-positive character. He would go in to the other soldiers and Marines who would come in really sick and cheer them up. All his therapists said he was a completely remarkable person for surviving and having a very positive attitude. He seems to be the kind of guy who always looks forward, doesn’t look back. He’s not super-reflective about his experience. Never talks politics. I asked him if he ever watched the news or read the papers and he said, “No, I figure that if I need to know something, someone will tell me.”

Can he get work?

No, there’s no work — though he can drive fine and I think mentally he’s all there. He can concentrate. He can certainly hold a conversation and all that. They pulled a toe and gave him a thumb from his toe, but he’s lost several fingers on his good hand, and he wears a prosthesis on the other side.

I was in Illinois the day his medical discharge came in and Ty was really sad. He would very much have liked to have stayed in the Marine Corps. For a lot of these guys it’s a very hard moment when they realize that their life in the military, which they put so much stake in, is finished.

What’s Ty’s plan for the future?

He wants to raise a family, he wants to have kids. He wants to be a dad. That’s his big dream for the future.

What’s Renee like?

Renee is a 21-year-old who has been through so much in the past couple of years. Her dad was killed in a quad-bike accident shortly before Ty’s injury. I’d say she’s fairly outgoing and honest. Renee comes from an even smaller town than Ty. They live about two hours from Chicago, but if you asked them how to get to Chicago, they couldn’t really tell you. They couldn’t tell me. They live in a community where people don’t leave. They’re not worldly characters.

I don’t think she ever doubted that she was going to stay with him. They were high school sweethearts. I think it’s common in that town to get married young. And I don’t think she could have conceived of a future living in that town having decided not to be with him. But I also think she really loves him. They remind me of a married couple that has been married for 30 years. They weren’t very romantic with each other at all, but there was a real bond there.

Do Ty and Renee do the usual stuff that 20-something couples do socially?

Yeah, they go out drinking. She’s more active than he is. They go out. Everyone there drinks a lot.

How did you get interested in photographing wounded veterans?

Looking back I guess it’s been something that’s always been of interest to me. I’ve been a photographer for over 15 years. I’ve worked for a lot of different magazines, here and in Europe. But I was a print journalist before I was a photographer. In 1987 I followed a group of Vietnam vets on one of their first trips back to Vietnam. I got very in-depth with one or two of those soldiers and saw the psychological battle and also the physical battle. Some of them had Agent Orange poisoning and various other issues. It was clear to me that war goes on long after the armies leave.

Since the war in Iraq began, I’ve spent a lot of my time photographing the war wounded — physically wounded and mentally wounded. That work turned into a book called “Purple Hearts Back From Iraq.” The series with Ty and Renee was an outgrowth of that work.

Are you ever shocked by what your pictures reveal?

I am shocked sometimes. That’s why photography can be such an intimate art. People are always trying to put masks on and defenses on. In this picture, we’re seeing the moment that those two are experiencing, and they are experiencing it alone — that’s what I got from their body language. No one’s around. The other members of the bridal party have moved away from them. It’s before the wedding photographer steps up. They’re standing together, they’re clearly united. They’re going to be joined for life. But the way their eyes are, you can tell they’re not looking at each other. No matter how in love you are, you’re always alone.

When I did my other work on wounded soldiers, I thought really carefully about how I wanted to present them. I almost always photographed them alone, even if they had loving parents or girlfriends or wives. That was a choice because I wanted to show how lonely and isolating it can be for them. I realized when I took this picture that sometimes you can show being alone much better when there’s another person in the frame.

A lot of powerful pictures, and a lot of gory pictures, have come out of the Iraq war — but this one seems to have a unique effect on people. Why do you think that is?

It’s funny the things that will make people stop and look around. Sometimes it’s just the surface things. I think the picture challenges a myth that’s out there, which is that that we take care of our own. Anyone who has worked with soldiers and vets knows that’s bullshit. But people buy it. The idea is he’s at Walter Reed and he’s going to be OK. They put their magnets on their cars. A lot of committed journalists have been punching holes in that myth for a long time. But you still see the stories about everything’s great because there’s a guy at Walter Reed with a computerized leg.

It took mold on a wall to blow the whole Walter Reed thing open. But mold, that’s just on the surface. I was at Walter Reed in October 2004. I knew about the place, that they couldn’t take care of all the guys they were sending in. There were so many bigger things compared to the dingy rooms. It’s very peculiar what sets people off, what just gets people to look around.

The response to the photo reaffirms my belief in the power of photography. My photograph became a way for people to discuss issues and to feel things. Maybe somehow this picture will be a wake-up call.

Back in October, Bob had invited me to join a few local bloggers at an off-the-record meeting with Elizabeth Edwards at the Loews Regency Hotel. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go.

Mrs. Edwards is a celebrity in the netroots because she maintains an active presence in the community. Months later, bloggers who attended that meeting are still talking about it in glowing terms. Mrs. Edwards has been writing her own diaries on DailyKos for years.

As a fellow blogger put it, “Elizabeth Edwards is everywhere.”

Bob and I arranged to have an exploratory conversation on Sunday, Jan. 14, after the Martin Luther King Day commemoration service at Riverside Church in Harlem, where John Edwards was scheduled to speak. It was a mutually convenient time because Bob was there with the campaign and I was blogging (and photographing) the event.

After the three-hour ceremony, Bob worked his way through the throng of parishioners and choir members to greet me as I packed up my camera gear. He’s a slight, soft-spoken guy in his 20s with short, dark hair and bright green eyes.

“You guys put on a great show!” I said. It was true. Everyone from Chuck Schumer to Bill Moyers had showed up to watch John Edwards denounce Bush’s Iraq escalation in Hillary Clinton‘s backyard.

It was already dark and drizzling when Bob and I left the church. Bob was telling me how John Edwards was going to be a different kind of candidate. We, a new generation of Internet-savvy activists, had finally come of age. We were going to help Edwards run a campaign that was totally outside the Beltway.

I nodded. The glow of the ceremony was still with me. Anything seemed possible.

As we walked, Bob downloaded his vision: The whole Edwards campaign was going to be a decentralized grass-roots operation.

“Elizabeth Edwards gets it,” he said with unabashed admiration.

We settled into the back of a small, brightly lit shawarma joint and ordered baklava. After this heartfelt pitch, Bob asked me if I was interested in blogging for the Edwards campaign.

I was dazzled by Edwards’ speech, Bob’s vision and the sense that I might be on the verge of the big time. I wanted to jump on the bus, but I knew I couldn’t.

“I’m probably not … the person you want,” I said, finally. “I mean, I’m on the record saying that abortion is good and that all drugs should be legalized, including heroin. Don’t you think that might be a little embarrassing for the campaign?”

Bob assured me that my controversial posts weren’t a problem as far as the campaign was concerned. They were familiar with my work. And Bob did seem to know my writing. I didn’t get the impression he was a daily reader, but it was obvious he had been reading the blog for a while.

“That’s you, that’s not John Edwards,” he said.

Bob was confident that people would understand the difference. I wasn’t so sure.

“So, it’s not a problem that I’m an outspoken atheist?” I asked.

Every blogger says controversial things from time to time, Bob assured me. He admitted that he’d drawn some fire for a tasteless joke on his own site a while back. It hadn’t been a big deal.

I asked if I would have to quit blogging at Majikthise in order to take the job with Edwards. My blog means more to me than any job I’ve ever had. After three years of hard work, I finally have a platform from which to express ideas that won’t get a hearing in the established media, let alone in mainstream Democratic politics. So the prospect of giving up my untrammeled freedom to blog press releases for John Edwards gave me pause. Still, I assumed Bob would say it was a necessity.

I was wrong. Bob promised that I wouldn’t have to give up my personal blog. He added that I probably wouldn’t have much time left for personal blogging, since everyone was working 18-hour days on the campaign. But, he noted, he hadn’t given up his own blog, and neither had another member of the Edwards Internet team.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A bunch of Internet staffers with private blogs sounded like a disaster waiting to happen.

I knew that if I was blogging for Edwards, anything I said on Majikthise would be a potential liability for the candidate, even if I wasn’t talking about politics.

And aside from the risks to the campaign, I wasn’t sure this arrangement would be healthy for my blog. With this responsibility weighing on my mind, how could I continue to deliver the independent perspective that my readers value? If I were suddenly on a candidate’s payroll, yet still posting my own “independent” thoughts on Majikthise, what would my longtime readers think? Would they still trust me? Should they? Full disclosure wasn’t going to solve the problem of divided loyalties.

Bob and I sat for a long time, nibbling baklava and talking strategy. He asked me if I knew of any other feminist bloggers who might be interested in the job.

I don’t remember who brought up Amanda Marcotte’s name first. I said Marcotte was the best writer in the feminist blogosphere. If they wanted a high-profile feminist blogger, Amanda was the best.

Bob is a regular reader of Amanda’s blog, Pandagon. We reminisced for a while about some classic brawls and blowups that had erupted at Pandagon.

“The thing you have to realize about Amanda is that she’s got real enemies,” I said. “We’ve all got trolls, but Amanda gets a whole different level of abuse.”

I told Bob this story to give him some idea of the kind of seething hatred the campaign might have to deal with: The first time I heard Amanda on the radio, an angry caller phoned up to say, “You’re Amanda Marcotte, and you’re a clerical worker at the University of Texas at Austin.” He had his facts wrong, but his message was clear. He was trying to get Amanda fired while leaving some darker threat hanging in the air. The host had to cut him off. Since that incident, at least one of Amanda’s trolls had called her then-employer and tried unsuccessfully to get her fired.

I tried to suggest that the campaign might not want high-profile bloggers. I thought it might be better off hiring a well-connected political operative with good connections in the blogosphere.

Bob listened attentively, scribbling copious notes. I didn’t feel I was making much headway. The Edwards team was obviously looking for the blogospheric equivalent of star power, but they weren’t looking for another high-powered blogger/political consultant like Tim Tagaris or Matt Stoller. They wanted a charismatic audience-builder who could connect with readers who weren’t political junkies.

I tried to explain this as delicately and clearly as I could: A-list polemicists are popular because they say things you don’t hear on television. The blogosphere isn’t just “The Situation Room” with swear words, it’s a space for writers to explore ideas that are outside the bounds of mainstream discourse.

If you hire these larger-than-life personalities to blog for John Edwards, they’ll have to stop espousing many of the radical policy positions and unconventional values that made them popular in the first place.

Fans will also know when a John Edwards message conflicts with the bloggers’ own record on an issue. Big-name bloggers hired by campaigns will be accused of “selling out” and open themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy from both sides.

What Bob didn’t seem to realize is that the right-wing blogosphere was going to try to get Edwards’ bloggers fired no matter what. Unlike the liberal netroots, the right-wing blogosphere is capable of exactly one kind of collective political action. They call it “scalping” — they pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye. Whoever blogged for Edwards was signing up for a lot of bad hair days, and it wasn’t going to be me.

I left the meeting feeling optimistic but uneasy. I later applied for a job as a campaign photographer. Taking pictures meant I could work for the candidate without having to type up and post endorsements of political positions I might not agree with. I felt that the Edwards campaign was going to make history one way or another. I would even have put the blog on hiatus for a front-row seat.

When the campaign announced that it had hired Amanda as blogger, I was overjoyed — but very surprised. It’s one thing to have a relatively junior staffer say your blog archives don’t matter; it’s quite another to see that assessment reflected in a hiring decision.

It was certainly a gutsy move, and I knew Amanda could do a great job. If anyone was inured to right-wing intimidation, it was Amanda. She’s been fighting the wingnuts tooth-and-nail for years and she’s already shrugged off every epithet in the book.

Upon reading the announcement, my partner Darcy said, “I hope the Edwards campaign knows what it’s in for.”

“I’m sure they do,” I said.

At first it looked as if the Edwards campaign might have pulled off a real coup. The right wing’s opening salvos fizzled. It was attacking Amanda for using bad words and supposedly rewriting her own posts, but nobody outside the blogosphere cared. Then, just when it seemed like the campaign was going to ride out the storm, my worst fears were realized. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League and the right-wing blogosphere aligned for an all-out assault on Amanda.

If it had just been the right-wing bloggers gunning for Amanda, the problem would have been short-lived. Unfortunately, as the Edwards campaign learned the hard way, the right wing has a large network of surrogates, like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Donohue, who can propel virtually any story into the mainstream media. These professional blowhards are supported by a lavish infrastructure of publishers, partisan media outlets, think tanks, grants, lecture circuits and more.

Republican benefactors lavish funds on the conservative message machine because they recognize the value of a good surrogate. Candidates don’t pay their surrogates or give them orders. Instead, they rely on them to say all the outrageous things they can’t say themselves.

So far, the left doesn’t have much in the way of institutionally supported partisan counterweights. We’ve got Bill Moyers, they’ve got Bill Donohue. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Progressive blogs have the potential to become the left wing’s open-source counterpart to the right-wing noise machine. But that doesn’t necessarily mean using money and a title to yoke an established blogger to a specific candidate.

There is a breed of blogger that has proven useful working in an official capacity for political campaigns — the party activist/consultant/blogger hybrid, someone like Matt Stoller of MyDD. Ideally, but not always, that kind of blogger puts his or her own blog on hold while being paid by a campaign, perhaps returning to it once the race is run. And the content of a party activist’s blog is heavy on poll numbers, policy discussions and electoral minutiae. An opposition researcher might unearth something allegedly “intemperate” from the archives and use it against the candidate, but that risk is less than with the other style of blogger, an independent polemicist like Amanda.

I can also see the argument for letting these party activists maintain their own blogs while working for a campaign, provided there’s full disclosure. In 2006, the Jim Webb Senate campaign put two bloggers from Raising Kaine, Josh Chernila and Lowell Feld, on its payroll. Feld had launched the blog in 2005 with the express purpose of helping elect Democrat Tim Kaine governor of Virginia (Kaine won). Feld and Chernila then cofounded the draft movement that pulled Jim Webb into the Senate race, and Raising Kaine became one of the chief cheerleaders for Webb before the 2006 Democratic primary. When Webb eventually hired Chernila and Feld — Chernila as deputy field director and grass-roots coordinator, Feld as netroots and online fundraising coordinator and blogger — he wasn’t paying them to say or do anything they didn’t already fully endorse.

In my opinion, though, the real lesson of the Webb campaign is how effective bloggers can be when they’re outside the campaign. I think the candidates who benefit the most from the netroots are the ones who can inspire bloggers to do their work for free. They create unpaid, unofficial surrogates. Webb is a netroots success story because his team captured the imagination of independent bloggers and online activists.

It was always clear that the netroots adopted Webb, not the other way around. His people figured out a way to make the relationship work. Throughout the race, besides hiring Feld and Chernila, his staffers also diligently cultivated relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. The Webb team started taking the pulse of the larger blogosphere before the Democratic primary — and their candidate’s primary victory was due, in part, to intense Internet support.

Some candidates effortlessly attract blogger buzz, but love at first sight is rare. Usually it takes a little more work to build relationships. Campaigns “work” bloggers more or less the same way they work the mainstream press. They send out e-mails and press releases. They make phone calls. They make their candidate available for interviews. They invite bloggers to campaign events. They network in person at Drinking Liberally or the YearlyKos convention. Webb’s team was especially good at maintaining lines of communication with bloggers, and benefited from the netroots’ infatuation with their candidate.

When Webb’s videographer captured George Allen’s “‘macaca’ moment,” therefore, the campaign had a ready-made, receptive audience. All the campaign had to do was upload the video to YouTube and send out some well-targeted e-mails to bloggers and other supporters and wait.

Supporters forwarded the clip to their friends. Bloggers started posting the video on their sites. The “macaca” clip got more than 600,000 views on YouTube alone and exploded into the mainstream media.

The vast majority of bloggers who pushed the story didn’t just seem like they were independent of the campaign, they were. They were unabashedly partisan, but they weren’t paid operatives. The Webb campaign didn’t want to push the video itself, but hoped that it would capture the imagination of supporters on the outside.

If the Webb campaign had pushed the video directly, the campaign would have been criticized for going negative. Instead, it left a tasty tidbit where bloggers would seize upon it.

In general, because of the candidate’s popularity, and because of the relationships it had cultivated, the Webb campaign was able to benefit from much rowdier surrogates than Amanda Marcotte without paying for them. In addition to the “macaca” storm, pro-Webb blogger Mike Stark actually got arrested while covering an Allen campaign rally. The incident made national headlines. The video of Stark being carted away in handcuffs reinforced Allen’s image as a bully in the last days of the campaign. It’s unclear whether Stark’s self-assigned political theater ultimately helped the Webb campaign at the polls, but it didn’t hurt.

The Edwards campaign wants decentralized people-powered politics. Ironically, by hiring well-known bloggers to manage a destination Web site, it was actually centralizing and micromanaging. Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate’s netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. And the bomb-throwing surrogates need to be outside, where they can make full use of their gifts without saddling a campaign with their personal political baggage.