Thursday, June 21, 2007
A+E

06/24/07 A&E, ARTS: Bearing witness

Bearing witness ‘Unembedded’ captures life in war-torn Iraq BY NATALIE BENNETT There are two sides to every story, as the saying goes. But for many stories, there are far more. The national t...

“Zafrania, April 26, 2003”: Angry residents of Zafrania confront U.S. soldiers guarding an ammunition stockpile. CREDIT: © Kael Alford

UNEMBEDDED: FOUR INDEPENDENT PHOTOJOURNALISTS ON THE WAR IN IRAQ Atlanta Photography Group Gallery 404-605-0605 www.atlantaphotographygroup.org Through July 28

Bearing witness
‘Unembedded’ captures life in war-torn Iraq
BY NATALIE BENNETT

There are two sides to every story, as the saying goes. But for many stories, there are far more. The national touring exhibit “Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq,” based on the book of the same name, goes beyond the newspaper headlines and the political spin from both parties to capture the horror, the destruction and the day-to-day life of modern-day Iraq as seen by photographers Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. The Sunday Paper recently caught up with Alford—who gives a presentation entitled “State of War, State of Grace,” at the Atlanta Photography Group Gallery at noon on Saturday, June 30—to get her side of the story.

Q Some photojournalists say that they believe the right picture could stop the war. Do you believe that? Was there one strong motive for going to Iraq and risking your life to take these pictures?
A I’m not so idealistic or naïve to think that a photograph is going to stop a big powerful war machine. But I do think that documenting things as they happen is a good anecdote to propaganda. And when people do start asking questions—like, “How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? What does it look like? If we’re being lied to en masse, publicly by our leaders, then what really is happening?”—at least these photographs will have some answers to those questions. And I wanted to come back with a cohesive enough document that I could provide people with a legitimate, convincing, alternative narrative to the way things actually unfolded on the ground. It’s almost impossible for anyone to get a sense of what’s happening in a place unless there are witnesses.

In the video accompanying the “Unembedded” book, you mention that the chaos is punctuated by moments of beauty. Can you elaborate on that?
Well, there has to be [moments of beauty]. I think we’re human and we have to find reasons to get up in the morning and look around and see something edifying. So there’s an urge when you’re in an environment like this, especially with the people living there, there’s this heightened necessity to try to find something positive about your life around you. Right now, it’s just so horrific there, I think it’s getting harder and harder to do that at all. But I’ve often been places where there’s conflict and there’s people celebrating desperately in the wee hours of the morning between air strikes, because there has to be something else.

How has your experience in Iraq changed or affected you?
It’s a pretty life-altering perspective to gain. I think being in a place that’s completely turned upside down—it went from being the most locked-down, organized, secured city, in a sort of superficial sense at least, that I’ve ever been in. It was incredibly orderly, clean and terrified that war was coming—I was there three weeks before the bombing started. But I wanted to at least see what the landscape looked like then; and the way it changed in a year—it’s mind-numbing that order can be turned upside down so completely. Orderly places don’t look orderly to me anymore; they look temporary. You know, when I look around Atlanta and I look at this country with all its wealth and affluence and security, I think this is a temporary state, because the world is in a state of flux all the time and things can always change. I feel this is just one period of history we happen to be living in now where it’s like that here. It doesn’t have to be this way, it could be like this [motions to pictures of Iraq]. So we’re all responsible for the state of the world and keeping an even keel. And we’re not immune either. Chaos is always just below the surface waiting to erupt. And it’s just a number of economic and political factors that can allow it to happen.

Tell me about this photo, “Najaf, August 21, 2004.”

This is a man crossing a front line during that confrontation [the beginning of the Sadr resistance movement against the American forces] with U.S. soldiers and the Sadr militia. Both sides posted snipers all around the city, so that sort of contained the fighting to this winding medina, this old part of the city with cobblestones and close buildings. It was ideal guerrilla warfare territory because the Americans couldn’t bring their own vehicles in there and they certainly weren’t going to go in on foot. So the fighters controlled this part of the city. This guy is walking across the street, across this barrier with the old city with the narrow alleyways and the wider streets where the Americans were patrolling with their tanks, and he’s just trying to get out of there with his kid. I followed him out into the street and then I came back to the side because it was very hard to cross the line. It was the most nerve-wracking transition because it was guarded by snipers. So I wanted to stay on the inside and keep working.

I like this aggressive picture [“Zafrania, April 26, 2003”]. What’s happening here?
This was a year and a half earlier, almost immediately after Baghdad fell. It’s an angry crowd confronting U.S. soldiers. I wasn’t really sure what he [the aggressive man in the center] was going to do, but I was glad for the other man [on the right]. … This was a common experience. You’d be in a crowd and some people would be angry and others would be asking to show restraint. And that was really the atmosphere in Iraq at the time, after the Americans invaded: There was this open-ended question of, “Do we fight them? Or do we let them come?” It was portrayed in the media largely that the Iraqis were celebrating, but there was a lot of tension. A bit later, once Paul Grammar, the interim overlord of Iraq, dismissed the Iraqi military, he fired a million armed soldiers who depended on that work and that paycheck to survive and feed their families. And that was really a turning point in the resistance. People thought, if we’re not going to get fed by these people, we might as well chase them out.