Reviews
December 19, 2006
By Roger Green
Booth Arts Writer
DETROIT -- Sometimes conventional language fails. In "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell argues that traditional speech proved unequal to describing the horrors of World War I. Carnage of the magnitude transacted in that conflict had never been witnessed before.
The same might be said of today's Iraq -- or at least of art criticism as it relates to photos of horrendous conditions there. "Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq" comprises images of destruction and suffering rarely seen in the mainstream media. Through Jan. 12, the traveling exhibit continues at Wayne State University's Elaine L. Jacob Gallery.
Harrowing pictures at the facility show bloodied corpses filling shattered streets, smoke from explosions blakening skies, anguish warping Iraqi faces. It's not a pretty show.
The assembled pictures in it are by four freelance photojournalists: Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner, Kael Alford and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Their 70 large-format, color photos span three tumultuous years, from before the U.S. invasion in 2003 to spring 2005. All but two of the photos were taken outside the confines of the U.S. military's embedded journalism program. That freed the photographers from what some might perceive as sympathetic bias, if not censorship.
What viewers will discover is presumably unvarnished truth.
As noted, conventional, art critical language falls feebly as regards Iraq. But to some small degree, its vocabulary and points of reference can help to communicate in print the ghoulishness the photos record.
Anderson's photos are the most susceptible to formal analysis. Despite horrific content, his pictures are inventively, even exquisitely, framed, and are quite simply beautiful. Imagine synthesizing beauty from a war zone.
One photo portrays the burial of an elderly woman, shot by U.S. soldiers at a temporary checkpoint; the nucleus of the picture's handsomely structured composition is a red parallelogram -- a burial cloth held aloft by several mourners' hands. In another photo, survivors of the siege of Najaf emerge to survey destruction. The figures and background buildings are viewed through a "web" of shattered glass.
Leistner imposes less-aesthetic but more-revealing order on another record of the Najaf siege. Each of 28 pictures, arrayed in a grid, portrays the temporary grave of a Mahdi fighter -- that is, of a follower of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Each of the makeshift graves comprises an identifying scrap of cardboard or paper, sometimes slipped into a plastic water bottle.
Both Alford and Abdul-Ahad capture incisive images more spontaneously. Two pictures record conditions whose hellishness art historical references can to some extent bring to life.
One Alford photo portrays a father raising his hand to snipers as he carries a wailing child across the front line between U.S. forces and the Madhi army. The harrowing subject and angular placement of figures recall Picasso's "Guernica."
One of Abdul-Ahad's pictures is of a miserable-looking woman hunched before a burning car, hit by U.S. fire. Orange flames in the darkened cityscape suggest macabre visions by Dali or Hieronymous Bosch.
Viewers familiar with these artists may understand the Iraq photos as belonging to ennobling, even heroic, traditions. But belonging or not, the "unembedded" pictures are riveting.
Review from Ideas Magazine
Reviewed by Ronald Deibert
Getting an unmediated and unbiased view of the horrors of war has never been easy. Up to and including World Wars I and II, war correspondents were treated largely as appendages of the military, and little more than vessels of state propaganda. Although there were always exceptions (William Randolph Hearst—no one’s lackey—was accused of actually fueling the Spanish-American wars to sell newspapers), for the most part, war correspondence offered only great personal risk and little freedom from state censors.
The Vietnam War changed the equation, but only momentarily. Journalists covering that war provided immediate, disturbing imagery that not only upset American public opinion, but left a sharp imprint in the minds of U.S. military planners. The lesson learned: never should such unrestrained freedom of expression have a place in the execution of future wars. Today, Pentagon planners see the task of managing the media as being just as important as delivering missiles to targets—a strategy covered under the secretive, but highly financed domain of “Information” or “Psychological” operations. Since Vietnam, war correspondents have been prohibited from witnessing the conflict first-hand (Grenada), fed a steady stream of high-tech, sensational imagery (first Gulf War), or “embedded” in carefully managed pools and shepherded around by military handlers (Iraq). Those who do not play by the rules risk their lives. Eighty journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.
Enter Unembedded, a new compendium of photographs taken by four independent journalists of life in and around the ongoing violence in Iraq. The title is appropriate. These are images the U.S. military strategists do not want you to see: headless corpses strung up on lamp-posts; angry mobs confronting American soldiers; a lone person standing amidst the ruins of his bombed-back-to-Stone-Age neighbourhood. Yet these are the real images of war: unfiltered, immediate, disturbing. This is no coffee table book. The images are hard to take. (The book’s foreword talks of it being “an antidote to the pap served to the American public,” and it certainly is.) But then again, so is the reality of war. Unembedded includes not only images, but also harrowing narratives written by the photojournalists, each of whom took great personal risk to do their job. It also includes photos of some startlingly antithetical, happy moments: giddy women packed into the back of a sedan on the way to a bridal shower; Iraqi teenagers gleefully riding a Ferris wheel during a lull in the bombings. Amidst the disturbing images of death and suffering, these glimmers of hope seem to say something about the indomitable human spirit. But the bottom line of Unembedded is that the consequences of war are very real—and always very, very ugly.
Mandahla: Unembedded Reviewed
Shelf Awareness
by Marilyn Dahl
April 10, 2006
The first image I saw when I opened Unembedded was of a weeping woman in Rashad Psychiatric Hospital, pleading to go home. Another woman, Ranya, has been there for over two years because she won't sign papers to turn her property over to her brothers. Then there is the heartrending photograph of a crying woman who, according to a nurse, is suffering from a broken heart. These are pictures that embedded, official photographers probably won't be taking or publishing, per their contracts with the military. Fortunately, there are some photographers who color outside the lines and whose "irrefutable images pose difficulties for those in power who work on the principle that you can indeed fool most of the people most of the time." Four of these independent photojournalists have teamed with independent publisher Chelsea Green to create an un-sanitized record of the war in Iraq.
Many of the pictures were taken during the siege of Najaf in 2004--families trapped by fighting near the front lines, burned buildings, smoldering cars, ruined markets; a father raising his arm to snipers as he carries his terrified child cross the frontline between U.S. forces and Mahdi fighters. Most of the photos are terrible and distressing, like a makeshift operating room in Baghdad, its floor covered with fresh blood, a mop moving in from the left like a macabre cleaning commercial; an eight-year-old girl being washed for burial, no marks on her porcelain skin; temporary graves with mere scraps of paper to identify the dead. Some of the photos are luminous: boys swimming in the Euphrates; young men leaping at a wedding dance; domino players on the banks of the Tigris; smoke from burning oil trenches over the Euphrates. The absolute devastation of Iraqi cities is overwhelming--people going about their daily life as cars burn in the street, people crouching and stooped as they continually run for cover, the almost total debris and rubble.
Unembedded is an important witness to truth with its searing images and its apolitical stance. As Phillip Robertson says in his introduction, "We crossed the lines because we believe it is more important to humanize a conflict that it is to trade in rhetorical truths, or to reinforce easy notions of enemy and friend, which are mere propaganda. Instead, we wanted to document honestly what we witnessed in the war because this is the sole duty of journalists, regardless of their nationality and religion. . . . If our journeys behind the lines were acts of faith, they were also proof that often when one man is confronted with the humanity of another, he will not raise his rifle and pull the trigger. This is not disloyalty to one's country. It is the thing that brings an end to war."
Chelsea Green has created two videos (12- and 2-minute versions) of the photographs, with the photographers' voiceovers, that are compelling and immediate.
Review from Publisher's Weekly
January 2006
One of this book's blurbs calls it "apolitical," but this seems misleading: there's no dearth of subtext embedded in these images, taken by four photojournalists traveling independently through war-torn Iraq. Phillip Robertson, a journalist for Salon.com, describes crossing battle lines to cover the insurgent Mahdi Army. The street fighters "took us in, and there was an innocent, human quality in this moment that I cannot describe over a year later." Clearly, the book is not designed to make anyone feel comfortable: Pictures of blood-stained hospital floors, children being prepared for burial and excavated mass graves are morbid (and expected) images of war, but what makes this collection so wrenching is the gray area it covers. Photographer Thorne Anderson, the veteran of the group, was present at the toppling of the Saddam statue, yet "there were also chants of 'Down, down, America!'" Iraqi-born Ghaith Abdu-Ahad has compiled the most grisly of images, many of which resulted from an American helicopter attack on a crowd celebrating around a burning U.S. armored personnel carrier. Woven in are photos of everyday life—fashion shows and men playing dominoes—a contrast that serves the photographers' intention to "humanize a conflict."
Chelsea Green’s ‘Unembedded’ Seeks Photographic ‘Truth’ About Iraq
The Valley News
by Alex Hanson
January 13, 2006
Aside from the Iraqi people, the American military and the Bush administration, it’s hard to find anyone who’s taken a bigger beating in the Iraq War than the media.
It didn’t dig deep enough to expose the faulty—or in some cases invented—intelligence used to justify the war. Once the war started it sent reporters out with military units, rather than on their own, resulting in stories told from the military’s point of view. It has exposed national secrets, including the CIA’s clandestine prisons in Eastern Europe and the president’s authorization of domestic wiretapping without the warrants required by law, in the view of some a criminal breach of intelligence protocol.
Now here comes a book published by Chelsea Green, the White River Junction publishing house, to give us :the truth” about the Iraq War, at last. Unembedded: Four Photojournalists on the War in Iraq is a remarkable, harrowing book of war reportage that is no more or less true or credulous than the work of the New York Times or Washington Post.
That isn’t because the reporters or the photographers were in anyone’s pocket, or contrived to do their jobs poorly. It’s because recognition of what is true or credible lies with us, the public, and we make relatively few demands of our leaders to give it to us straight. Too many of us like what we’re hearing to demand clearer language. The press hasn’t deserted the public; the public has gone private.
The journalists who took the photographs in Unembedded certainly aren’t interested in our comfort, thank goodness. Thorne Anderson was in Iraq before the war began in March 2003. Rita Leistner traveled into Iraq on foot from Turkey at the start of the war (and was an “embedded” reporter for four months before striking out on her own.) Kael Alford also was in Baghdad while American bombes “softened up” the country before our boots hit the ground.
The book tells us that those three each spent 10 months or so in Iraq. While they all found worthwhile stories, only Ghaith Abdul-Ahad gives us the horror of the war.
An Iraqi by birth and upbringing, Abdul-Ahad had spent the years before the war dodging service in Saddam Hussein’s army. His pictures of combat on Haifa Street in Baghdad are almost impossible to see without flinching. The truth of this moment was that military helicopters, most likely American, fired on civilians gathered to look at a burned out Bradley Fighting Vehicle on Sept. 12, 2004.
The images are indeed horrifying, there men dying with the burning armored vehicle in the background, but still partial. How was the vehicle attached and by whom? Were the helicopters returning fire from people on the ground? The answers to these questions can’t justify the deaths of civilians, but they remind us that the truth we’re looking at lacks particularity. The truth we get, and that we need, is war is horrible, no more, no less.
Have the media failed to make that clear? Have photographs by Tyler Hicks at the Times, among other, not given us images of violence and conflict as accurate as what we find in Unembedded? Should it be on the front page every day?
In the book’s foreword, the great photojournalist Phillip Jones Griffiths writes, “With the mainstream media having given up, for the most part, on the task of truly informing the public, books are fast becoming the medium of choice for getting the truth out.”
What he means, or should mean, perhaps, is that there is a right and wrong. That starting a war to push your ideology is wrong, even if your ideology is democracy and liberty.
While Unembedded possesses no monopoly on truth, it has a cumulative effect that reading a newspaper every day lacks. Leistner’s photographs of Rashad Psychiatric Hospital in Baghdad give us a window into another type of savagery: hundreds of mentally ill women, warehoused by families who feat that one such daughter will make it impossible to find husbands for other daughters. Both Leistner and Alford take us into the lives of Iraqi women. Anderson’s and Alford’s photographs of injured and dying Iraqis in hospitals are among the most harrowing in the book.
That doesn’t mean the work is uniformly good. Alford has an irritating tendency to tilt her camera, always to the left, to heighten the sense of dislocation in her pictures. Used too often this is a cheap device, and the best work in the book uses more solid techniques to convey mood and emotion.
In her landmark 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag asked the perennial questions about war photography: “Could one be mobilized actively to oppose war by an image (or a group of images)…?” The photographers, and publisher, of Unembedded would answer this with an unambiguous “yes.” Their book should go a long way to convincing the rest of us.
But enough with the worries about truth. Let’s talk right and wrong.
by Colleen Mondor
January 2006
I have had my issues with the current Iraq war for some time now -- starting with the fact that we call this conflict a war even though no formal declaration of war against any formally identified enemy has occurred. (There are actual rules to war, believe it or not, that’s why Korea was a “Conflict,” Vietnam was a “Police Action” and Desert Storm was an “Operation” -- a declaration must be voted on in Congress and must be against another country, or no war.) The one thing that has really bothered me though is the kind of coverage the American press has provided since the beginning. At first I was excited and impressed by the idea of embedding journalists with fighting units on the ground, but as more and more pictures of “insurgents” surfaced, and practically none of Iraqi civilians, my doubts escalated to the point of disbelief. Everything crystallized for me when I read Donna Seaman’s interview with author Ward Just in Writers on the Air. Just covered Vietnam for a year and a half for The Washington Post and as he explained the situation was very different there. In response to Seaman’s question about comparisons between the press in Vietnam and Iraq, Just replied:
“I thought a lot about the embedding process. As people may know, in Vietnam there was no restriction. You could go wherever you wanted to go, and the military would take you there. Furthermore, because there were no front lines in the war, there was just a series of fire bases where occasional battles would erupt. That meant you could go to these places and arrive safely… The great value of that was that after six months’ time you really could gain a sense of the whole country. And if you used your eyes and ears, you could really believe that you probably knew more about the country than any resident American official for this one simple reason: No one else but a journalist could look at it all the way around. No one other person could go visit the Vietnamese Army, the American Army, the AID people, the government people, the proud provincial headquarters, or drop in on the CIA. And if you just kept your eyes and ears open and you did not go into it with some vast bias ideological or otherwise, you could come up with a pretty clear picture of what was happening.
"With Iraq, you’re embedded. In Iraq. It would very difficult if not impossible to pursue the matter the way we pursued it in Vietnam.”
And that’s it, isn’t it? Embedded with US troops means that you are only with them, you only see what they see, only understand what they understand. You are covering the war (engagement, conflict, whatever…) strictly from their perspective. And that is where things start to go very, very badly, that is where we become people who know only one version of the events; that is where it becomes very easy for us to be mislead.
That is where we are today.
Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq was recently published by Chelsea Green and it is an amazing collection from photojournalists who elected not to be embedded. They each have different reasons for remaining independent in Iraq, and Unembedded includes essays about their decisions and what they learned by covering the action in this way. What they have produced are pictures of angry, injured and dead Iraqis, photos that recall the iconic Vietnam images taken by Nick Ut of the little girl running from a U.S. napalm attack or by Eddie Adams of the street execution. The Iraq photos are the missing piece of the war that we have been watching on our televisions every night. These are the pictures of the rest of the cost -- the cost that far exceeds what the U.S. government acknowledges. (Although as photographs of flag draped coffins are not permitted, we have yet to truly appreciate the American cost either.) Quite simply, Unembedded is our witness to the horror of this current war -- a war to which we continuously declare victory.
The book shows images from Iraqi hospitals, where brutal and necessary decisions about who can be saved and who can not leave a young and bloody boy sitting on the hallway floor next to his dying mother; she is too far gone to try and save. There are the people left to die on a street after U.S. helicopters opened fire on a crowd. I don’t know how many of these people are part of the insurgency; I just kept thinking they looked like the same people I see on the streets of my town everyday. There are the female inmates of the Rashad Psychiatric Hospital in Baghdad. Can you imagine how chaotic and confusing their lives must be in the middle of all this? And there are pages and pages of people talking and laughing and sitting together as armored personnel carriers drive by -- people struggling to live a life, to still be people, as shots are fired over their heads and casualties mount. There are guns and bodies and blood stains, but mostly there are pictures of people that all of us will recognize, because if we were there, if this was our country, then we would look very much like them.
The pictures show, how very much we are like them.
Unembedded is like the best of books about war. It should be as revered as We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and The Things They Carried. It is a book that insists on being recognized, that refuses to be ignored. These photographers are saying that you must look at the faces they saw, you must see the people they saw and you must acknowledge them. You must allow their stories to be told. You must believe these pictures.
Unembedded is a book about war, about our war. Whether you support what the U.S. is doing in Iraq or not, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, Unembedded tells a story that we all need to read. We are Americans, and America is in Iraq. It is only right that we at least take the time to see what life is like for the Iraqi people, it is only fair that we at least take the time to meet them. And we can not do that if we don’t leave the American military behind, we can not find the truth of every part of this war if we don’t go looking for the places where the other half of that truth lives. We will never know what has really happened in Iraq if we don’t let someone take the pictures and show us.
Unembedded is out there, it is ready to show what these four photojournalists learned on the streets of Iraq. I wish I could say that I was surprised by these pictures, that I was shocked and disappointed. But really they have only showed me what I suspected all along: this war, like all the ones before it, is hell. The book is, according to Vietnam War photographer Tim Page, “a powerful, apolitical and impassioned view of the horror and torture of a society in the throes of an apocalypse: hard visuals with the four shooters putting their personal word licks into each essay. It is this rawness that brings home the reality, the diversity, letting us look at the ‘the other side’ now and grasp the story that we have been denied.”
You have no more excuses now, read Unembedded, look at the pictures and make your own decisions about Iraq. Decide one way or the other just what you’re going to do now that you have seen the faces of people just like us. And then get off your chair and do something about it.
Iraq Unembedded
The Valley Advocate
by James Heflin
January 5, 2006
A new book featuring gripping war photos from four independent photojournalists tells the story an embedded US press corps couldn't tell.
Just before the war in Iraq began, I happened upon a protest in downtown Northampton. The main intersection was blocked by the protesters, several of whom were splayed out on the concrete as fake war casualties. I went up close. I've thought of war, of organized killing, as a failure of reason for a long time. Those who would seek war, as our commander-in-chief seems to, first have to manage to dispense with the bother, the irritation of the deaths of innocents that mars any military action, no matter how noble.
But those deaths mostly still bother the rest of us. I stood in the intersection, and the utter reality of the abstraction--war--that I had been fighting in print since Bush's first obvious lies, became in the next moments more tangible. It all came down to what was being enacted there: death. I believed that soon, despite all of us who could see that Bush was hyping cobbled-together, well-spun intelligence, real and innocent people would be lying on the streets of Baghdad, blood blooming from some terrible wound. You've got to have a really good reason to do that to someone, even someone who opposes you. Somehow, standing there surrounded by others who felt as I did, seeing their passion on display, and seeing their enactment of Iraqi casualties, I felt, viscerally, a sense of loss and despair, and I imagined all too well the death that would come, no matter how many of us thought Bush's trumped-up scare tactics weren't sufficient reason to fight.
I knew, too, that the sense of horror at lost life, at helpless victims shattered by our bombs, bombs with all our names attached, whether we like it or not--was precisely what warmongers never want us to feel. These are the people who think the lesson of Vietnam was that images of war, not the moral cost of killing, are bad for you. It must be necessary to remain a naif or to harden oneself against the humanity of an enemy to hold such a position. Bush has worked hard to make sure most Americans remain naîve, remain in a starry-eyed state where "freedom" and "liberation" and "democracy" stir the proper fervor, unsullied by the knowledge that acting on abstractions still carries un-abstract costs.
Is a war with justifications that evolve monthly, that seems mainly to have visited death and injury upon its combatants and its bystanders and removed a dictator who had no ties to al Qaeda and no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons capability worth it? Can we allow ourselves to ask that question in the onslaught of attempts to portray even asking as unpatriotic? We can surely only answer it once we have really seen the cost of our actions.
The military tried to make sure that, from the first shots of the war in Iraq, photojournalists, "embedded" with the troops, would only be able to photograph alongside our troops, inevitably portraying their suffering more than that of innocent Iraqis. The country of Iraq, the embed program seemed to imply, should not to be visited by journalists on their own. Many of those who did so anyway suffered for their actions. But the unembedded were seeing to the most vital task of war journalists: to portray everything that's happening in a war, free of guidance or censorship.
The photos in the book Unembedded (from Chelsea Green publishers) are the work of four photojournalists--Kael Alford (American), Thorne Anderson (American), Rita Leistner (Canadian) and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (Iraqi)--who put the acquisition of these important images above all else, braving whatever they would find beyond the borders of Iraq. This is the real version of what I could only imagine in Northampton; this is a tiny bit of what happened in Iraq, the real faces of loss and despair. The images they brought back are absorbing and fascinating, but more than that, they are complicated--complicated in that the reactions they elicit are not readily file-able for someone trying to impose a lefty or righty filter on the world. Something, one imagines, like the reality of life in Iraq.
There is happiness on one page, utter despair on the next. The photographers write lengthy captions about most of their shots, and each offers a longer essay as well. In one image (by Thorne Anderson), a boy urinates on a fallen statue of Saddam. In another (by Kael Alford), a young boy sits staring on a hospital floor beside his mother, who's bleeding and has been given up for dead by doctors. The former may provide vindication for those who hang onto turning out Saddam as the ultimate war rationale.
The latter may well be the most important image in the book.
The boy is clearly deep in thought, and he seems strangely calm. His is a look of cold calculation, not fear or sadness. He seems oblivious to his own injuries. Of such moments, repeated countless times as bombs fall on the Muslim world, terrorists are made. What Alford froze with her lens is surely a moment of traumatic change for just one of the thousands of victims of our war. Our justifications--"freedom is on the march"--can't change the fact that a boy's mother is dying at our hands. It's all too clear that, with every one of those moments, anti-American sentiment is seared into young brains, and we are seeing to the certain creation of another generation of terrorism and conflict. This boy may never take up arms against the United States, but whatever he does, thanks to this war, he must grapple for the rest of his life with the horror of his mother's death at our hands. It may be difficult for him to think of those hands as benevolent.
That's not something that Bush and all his illegal wiretapping can prevent. If we do not look unflinchingly at such moments, understand them and seek to prevent the damage they do, we will be doomed to ceaselessly pursue the "war on terror." We must realize that one can declare war on an emotion--terror--but one can only do battle with the non-abstract, with real people, and dealing with them poorly often makes them willing to take up arms against us and employ terrorism as a tactic.
Unembedded, though at first it appears to be but a slender volume of modest import, is a truly hard-won book, and it should be required viewing. This depiction of events that befell (and still befall) Iraqis, this, for better or ill, is a slice of the real results of our invading Iraq. It may be bad from a strictly military point of view to humanize the enemy--it's hard even for the well-trained to kill someone they see as a real person--but it's vastly important to understanding the causes of terrorism and actually dealing with them. And that, in the end, is the only way out of Bush's war.
Review from Library Journal
January 2006
All four of these photojournalists worked independently of one another and outside official U.S. military authorities in Iraq from 2003 to 2005. Three of them-Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, and Rita Leister-first came to Iraq during or just before the current war; and Abdul-Ahad is a native Iraqi who has spent the majority of his life in Baghdad. Taken together, their color photographs-captioned here with the date, location, and subject-evoke shock, disbelief, and possibly anger. No further words indeed prove necessary in elaboration of the graphic nature of the presentation. There are no military actions or official political scenes shown, only the suffering of individual Iraqis and the carnage of war for civilian men, women, and children. From city streets, hospitals, and homes, the huge cost in lives and continual fear of death is vividly portrayed. Included are short bios of the contributors, with each giving a brief statement on his or her work and a separately authored foreword and introduction, both helpful in establishing the "unembedded" parameters of the book. Whether one opposes or supports the war in Iraq, this is recommended reading-or viewing-for the thought-provoking and wrenching photographs.
--David Alperstein, Queens Borough P.L., NY
January 2006
Four independent photojournalists provide a view of the war in Iraq that major news media have not shown us—a view that the Iraqi people themselves see daily. It is a view of suffering and pain, as one expects. These photos are riveting, including one by Kael Alford of a dead eight-year-old girl, killed in a U.S. bombing raid, being washed for burial. Her body seems not to have a mark on it. But one soon turns away from such photos. Even more riveting, I found, were photos that I could never have imagined. For example, there is a photo by Kael Alford taken in Baghdad on April 12, 2003. It shows [a] father and his sons posing for the camera, outside their home. The father sits, his three sons behind him. They are obviously well off. Each cradles a sub-machine gun, waiting for looters. Otherwise, it looks like a relaxed family photo. Rita Leistner has a series of four photos of a woman in psychiatric hospital doing her daily exercises. As she does her exercises she tells the photographer: “I hate war, these many wars. But I do like life. Sometimes one finds strength, like a drowning person.” There is also an incredibly beautiful portrait by Rita Leistner of the Iranian-Kurdish wife of a leader of the PKK Kurdish separatist group. In fact, many of these photographs are simply exquisitely beautiful photographs.
The combination of such superb photography with such strong subject matter has produced a book that is literally unforgettable. This is a photographer’s photography book, a work of great beauty and pain. It is a book that is likely to be remembered as one of the truly important books about the Iraq War. But it is also a book that has entered into that timeless zone of great photography where one is seeing, finally, a kind of Platonic vision of the essence of war.
Review by Professor John Rosser, Boston College
Live From Iraq
AlterNet
By Nina Berman
December 15, 2005
In the book, 'Unembedded,' four independent photojournalists reveal the human face of war-ravaged Iraq.
Two and a half years into the war in Iraq and we still know so little about the Iraqis on the ground and how they survive and die each day.
News reports are dominated by coverage of American fighters. Our visual understanding of the war is almost exclusively American: our soldiers atop tanks racing to liberate Baghdad, suffering heat and sandstorms, their faces bathed in an orange glow; American Marines in full battle mode charging across the Diwanya Bridge; and the shock and awe over Baghdad, almost like Grucci fireworks -- as long as you don't see what happens when they hit their targets.
And that's the whole problem. We rarely see who is at the receiving end of a hellfire missile, or a 50-caliber rifle, or a 500-pound bomb. The politics of that destruction and the anger and desperation it fuels, remains hidden.
So it brings great relief to finally get a glimpse into the Iraqi experience, from four intrepid independent photojournalists who have compiled their images into the new book, Unembedded (Chelsea Green). Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad decided to forsake the bubble of the American military and cross front lines to see what life is like from the Iraqi side.
The collection of 149 photographs and dispatches from the photographers begins with the American invasion in March 2003, moves through the rise of the insurgency in Falluja and Sadr City and culminates with the siege of Najaf and the Mahdi Army in August 2004.
Along the way we visit hospitals in Fallujah and Baghdad where relatives wash their dead and care for the wounded. We see a mosque in Baghdad where women mourn more than 50 killed by a U.S. bomb. We see an Iraqi boy triumphantly celebrating the explosion of an American vehicle. And from the courageous Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the lone Iraqi photographer in the group, (Alford and Anderson are Americans, Leistner is Canadian) we see an extraordinary sequence of photographs of civilians running from a U.S. helicopter attack on Harif Street in Baghdad in September 2004.
Amid the violence, there are many welcome images of daily life with Iraqis enjoying small pleasures: family members swimming in the Euphrates river, men dancing at a wedding in Ramadi, women squeezed into a car on their way to a henna party in Sadr City, and men playing dominoes at sunset on the banks of the Tigris River. In a book about war, the images of Iraqis at peace, done artfully and unsentimentally, humanize the conflict and remind us that before the American invasion and even after, Iraq is still a country of individuals who feel and dream and celebrate and socialize, like people everywhere. They are not just Sunnis, or Shiites or Kurds, or in soldier parlance, Hajjis.
The photographers do not discriminate when it comes to the purveyors of violence. It is not just the Americans blowing up civilians. There are plenty of victims here from Iraqi car bombers and saboteurs. Yet the origin of the madness is leveled squarely at Americans as demonstrated by a strong image by Alford which appears early in the book, of angry Zafrania residents in April 2003 confronting American soldiers after a missile accidentally killed several people in a nearby house. The Iraqis, of all ages, are furious, demanding an explanation. We never see the American soldiers in the picture. The way Alford shot it, we -- the viewers -- are the soldiers, the occupiers, and we are the ones who have some explaining to do.
Nearly half of the book is dedicated to the rise of the Mahdi Army and the growing power of Muqtada al-Sadr. According to Leistner, all four photographers began photographing the rise of the Shiite insurgency and naturally followed it to its culmination in the holy city of Najaf, where, in August 2004, forces loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr fought an onslaught by American troops.
"The Mahdi Army was media savvy. They actually had a quasi media liaison," says Rita Leistner. "It was difficult and dangerous but you could do it, you could make contact, and there were people who were open to journalists." The result is that all four photographers came away with up-close, unscripted, intimate moments of the siege of Najaf from the Iraqi point of view.
Looking at these pictures now, I only wish we could see the same coverage from Falluja, Ramadi and Tal Afar. But for a Westerner, it appears too dangerous, nearly impossible. Leistner says with sadness that if she were to return to Iraq, "I would probably have to be embedded and I'm not sure what that would contribute to the dialogue or story on Iraq."
Leitsner has a unique perspective, after spending four months with soldiers from the 37th Cavalry 3rd Infantry Division from April to August 2003. "Being embedded is about the soldiers, it's just inconceivable to think that it's a story about Iraq. I always knew that wasn't the only way I wanted to cover the story, that I was going to go back unembedded."
As a collaborative effort, the book suffers from some confusion, and not all the photographs are first rate. Some of the images from the early days of the war seem a waste and the book's sequencing is confusing; sometimes chronological and other times not. The few images of American soldiers are fairly innocuous, and I almost wished for a few great photographs depicting the daily humiliation of occupation -- house searches and identity checks, the kinds of shots taken most easily by embeds.
Still, Unembedded is a great accomplishment and a terrific counterpoint to the routine images gracing the front pages of most American newspapers.
Consider this: The picture most widely distributed during the Marines' violent siege of Falluja last November was a close-up shot of Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, otherwise known as the Marlboro Man, his face smeared with the grime of war and a cigarette seductively hanging from his lip. This image was taken by Los Angeles Times embedded photographer Luis Sinco and published in over 100 newspapers on Nov. 11, 2004. On that day in Baghdad alone an estimated 19 people were killed and an unknown number lost their lives in Falluja. But it was the Marlboro Man who made the front page coast to coast. There are no Marlboro Men in Unembedded.
Images from 'Unembedded' will be exhibited at the Redux Gallery in New York on Jan. 19, 2006. For more information on the book and future exhibits, visit the website.
Nina Berman is a photographer and the author of "Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq."
'Unembedded' Humanizes War in Iraq Through Photography
Editor and Publisher
By Miki Johnson
December 12, 2005
NEW YORK--Many of the photos are a little out of focus or blurry from low-light exposure. Some of them could have been framed a little better. But every picture in the new photojournalism collection, "Unembedded," shows the viewer a piece of Iraq usually hidden from outside eyes.
"Unembedded," published this fall by the Chelsea Green Publishing Co., brings together work from four photojournalists who chose to chronicle the Iraq war by their own means rather than under the auspices of a military unit. The contributors: Americans Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson, Canadian Rita Leistner, and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi who deserted the army and now contributes to the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
In his introduction, Salon's Iraq war correspondent, Phillip Robertson, describes his experience as a non-embed crossing the U.S. cordon and the Mahdi Army lines on foot in August 2004 to relay information that was restricted by fierce fighting and military blockades.
"We crossed the lines because we believe it is more important to humanize a conflict than it is to trade in rhetorical truths, or to reinforce easy notions of enemy and friend, which are mere propaganda," he writes. "We were able to do this precisely because we did not carry weapons or claim allegiance to one of the warring parties."
It is ultimately the impressive access and unflinching honesty of these photos that sets them apart from the average war image that reaches Western eyes.
In one, a member of the "Jerusalem Army" stares out through the eyeholes in his suicide bomber costume. In another an Arab foreign fighter grips his gun to the Koran, which he reads in a bunker while U.S. planes bomb Falluja. Several pictures look up at funeral cloths as they are brought down on rough-hewn caskets or into rooms occupied by inconsolable mourners and tiny, limp bodies.
But beside the unavoidable images of blood and chaos and destruction, there are glimpses into everyday lives that are affected but not yet stopped by the war. Women, so often invisible or hidden under robes, frolic in the river while bathing or smile from passing cars in a wedding party or cry against a tile wall in the Rashad Psychiatric Hospital in Baghdad.
Along with their captions, the photos are accompanied by excerpts from the photographers' letters, journals, and feature stories. In one, Anderson describes a few days he spent traveling with American soldiers, and its comparison to his work "embedded with the Iraqi people" captures the impetus for the book: "From the American humvees I could see the Iraq that I know, but there was no interaction with it … They may have an occasional chat with some random Iraqis who pass by, but the American soldiers don't make Iraqi friends over time, they don't eat in their homes, visit their mosques, play with their children, go to weddings, play dominoes, or take afternoon naps with them."
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