Frozen moments of war and occupation

I have seen one photo that sums up my understanding of what is going on in Iraq: The setting is a street in Najaf in August of 2004, at the front line between US forces and Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army. A man, viewed from behind, crosses the street, his left hand raised in a plea to the snipers hidden in the buildings around him, his right arm clutching the sobbing toddler-aged child he carries. This picture is featured in Unembedded, a collection of work from the Iraq War by four independent photo journalists. Perhaps it was growing up the son of a photographer, from whose photojournalism books I learned about the world, but I have always felt that still photography communicates more than video or writing. Thorne Anderson, one of the four photojournalists whose work appears in Unembededded agrees: "Still photography does things that video just doesn't do," he says. "There's something about a still image and the fact that it's a moment frozen in time which gives it a life beyond the moment that you view it… There's something about still photographs that sticks with you." The photos in this book certainly will, and not only for their devastating content, but also for the contrast with anything you will see on television, the undisputed leading source of information for most in the US. Photos by Kael Alford document the wrenching loss of those on the receiving end of the "shock and awe" spring of 2003: a boy sitting on the floor as his mother, abandoned as a lost cause by overworked doctors, dies on a gurney; a man who lost his wife and two children, restrained by his friends as grief swallows him; a father and his brothers, mourning over the body of his eight-year-old, killed by a US missile that struck a busy market. If someone gives you "Why do they hate us?" (or a post-invasion "Why aren't they grateful?"), direct them to Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's moment-by-moment record of the murder of twenty-two Iraqi civilians by US helicopter gunners who attacked a crowd gathered around the burning remains of a military vehicle which was disabled during an insurgent attack that killed not one US soldier. "A lot of people are misled by terms like 'surgical strike' and 'precision bombing' and those kinds of terms can make people think that a bombing is kind of clinical, sterile, when in fact a bombing campaign is an act of incredible violence," says Anderson. The Iraqis were "subjected to incredible violence, and they weren't going to forget that. It was their family, their friends, their relatives, their neighbors, who were mutilated and killed in that bombing campaign. That's something that I think, once the statues started falling, a lot of US media, at least, seemed to gloss over, and it created a lot of anger that generated a lot of, perhaps, the insurgency that followed the invasion." "The purpose of producing Unembedded," he explains, "was not to advance any particular political agenda… It doesn't have a particular domestic political agenda. It's not an anti-Republican book. It's really just a look at what the war looks like, if you're not with the US soldiers, what it looks like when you travel on your own. And I think it's important for Americans to see that." Another independent journalist whose work has been recently published is New York artist Steve Mumford, whose drawings and paintings of occupied Iraq are collected in Baghdad Journal. Mumford–who describes himself as a "combat artist" inspired by Winslow Homer's Civil War battlefield illustrations of Harpers magazine–is extraordinarily skilled at creating emotive portraits of US soldiers and locals he met. His work is all the more impressive because it was drawn and painted very often onsite, which in some cases meant in the line of insurgent fire or during nighttime raids on civilian homes. "I worked right on the street," Mumford says. "I often finished stuff up from photographs if, for example, I was accompanying soldiers on a mission–they didn't have much time, so we might just stay somewhere for twenty minutes or half an hour so I could just get a drawing started and in that case I'd take a few photographs with a really small digital camera that I could keep in my pocket… a lot of times I did finish the drawing on the site. I'd try to if I had enough time." Most of Mumford's drawings are not about combat, however, but about day to day life in Baghdad. Although much of the work focuses on soldiers, there are also many depictions of Iraqis and the city. Like Thorne Anderson, Mumford disavows any political message behind Baghdad Journal. "My interest was in the soldiers and the job they were doing, and the Iraqis that I met," he explained. "That was what the art was about. It was about their immediate experiences day to day. It wasn't about the politics of the war, so I just think that's a completely separate issue." Mumford uses the term "embedded" when describing his relationship with the soldiers he lived with. He is also clear in saying "I think an artist tends to see things very individually and that's the way they draw or paint them." What makes his subjective, embedded view of Iraq worth examining is that, like the subjective photography of Unembedded, Mumford's pictures come across as honest, which is a tremendously rare thing among reports from Iraq. Both collections have much to offer readers.