Associated Articles
Photography review: All's unquiet on this front
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
D.K. ROW
The Oregonian
A bloody, wounded mother too severely injured to be helped dies on a hospital floor as her little boy watches. A Sunni guerrilla fighter holds a scythe while sitting calmly like a Buddha. A rocket-propelled grenade launcher gets repaired as a young lad, no bigger than the tool of destruction in front of him, watches in wonder.
Rare is the art exhibit that can render viewers speechless because what they've seen is so overwhelming, the social, artistic and emotional impact of the work so breathtaking.
But such a show opens Thursday at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College. In the leafy confines of this academic paradise, viewers will glimpse a world far removed from our own, one unhinged in nearly every way by unspeakable violence, heartbreak and chaos. The extraordinary photo show Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, features dozens of works taken by four freelance journalists from the United States, Canada and Iraq.
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Unembedded in Iraq
From Vision Magazine
by Andrew Seguin
August 2005
The war in Iraq rages on. I state it simply because it has become a fact of everyday life, and when something as insane as war becomes usual, I find it helpful to break down the situation into a sentence like The war in Iraq rages on, and repeat it to myself until it becomes strange again. You can do this with words: say fork enough times and it becomes impossible to believe it means a four-tined object for eating. I like this little exercise because it can shake me out of complacency and restore a sense of wonder (or outrage) with the world.
I had to repeat embedded reporter until I reminded myself the term describes journalists stationed among the US troops who are fighting and dying everyday, and is not just some condition of how we in America receive our news about Iraq. I also had to remind myself that there were alternatives.
A book to be published in September will offer another way to remind yourself of the alternatives. Entitled Unembedded, the book contains the photographs of four award-winning photojournalists who worked independently in Iraq, but then became familiar with each otherÕs work while stationed there. They found themselves in close contact during the heavy fighting in Najaf, and were among journalists who were working from within the Mehdi Militia during the siege of the Imam Ali Shrine.
Read the rest of this article in Vision Magazine
The victim and the killer
Yasser Salihee was an Iraqi journalist. Joe was an American sniper. On June 24, 2005, fate brought them together on a Baghdad street.
By Phillip Robertson
Posted on Salon.com
Phillip Robertson is writing the Introduction for Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq
July 27, 2005 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah in west Baghdad on June 24, a 33-year-old Iraqi man named Yasser Salihee was driving alone as he approached a small number of soldiers from a mixed U.S. and Iraqi patrol. Salihee was driving west. It was midday and most of the soldiers in the patrol had just entered a four-story building on the south side of the street to search for suspected insurgents on the roof. A few stayed down on the street to provide security. On the north side of the street stood two U.S. snipers; across the street an American from the same unit and at least one Iraqi soldier were posted. The street was left open to traffic: the patrol had not blocked off the street with cones and concertina wire, as they normally would for a cordon and search operation. The soldiers decided to stop cars by standing in the street and aiming their rifles at the drivers.
As Salihee approached the patrol from the east, another car was turning around in front of him. He began to drive around it to the right. Exactly what happened next is in dispute. What is certain is that as Salihee went around the car, the two U.S. snipers, thinking he was a suicide bomber, opened fire. At least four rounds were fired. One blew out the car's right front tire; another ricocheted off the ground and pierced the gas tank. The final 7.62 millimeter round pierced the driver's side of the windshield, entering Salihee's right eye and shattering his skull. Salihee died instantly.
The American troops left the car in the street and moved to a different position. An hour after the shooting, an Iraqi policeman found Salihee's phone and called his wife, Raghad. Raghad arrived at the scene and found her husband's body still slumped in the car, and she called an ambulance. Then she sat down on the curb and wept.
Yasser Salihee was not a suicide bomber. He was a physician and journalist who was going to his house on his day off to pick up his two-year-old daughter Dania and take her swimming.
Read the rest of the article at Salon.com
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