Photographers bear witness in Iraq
A handful of photographers showed up at the Baghdad airport last Thursday for a forlorn ceremony marking the end of the Iraq war. It seemed a fitting end — both for the military and the photojournalists — to a war that began eight years ago with “shock and awe,” and an enormous attendant gallery of […]Michael Kamber reports for The New York Times:
A handful of photographers showed up at the Baghdad airport last Thursday for a forlorn ceremony marking the end of the Iraq war. It seemed a fitting end — both for the military and the photojournalists — to a war that began eight years ago with “shock and awe,” and an enormous attendant gallery of picture-takers.
I’m left, too, with the interwoven narratives of my subjects, whose lives crossed my camera’s viewfinder briefly, and will now never be the same. Looking back at eight years of images, I wonder: Where are these people and how are they getting by after being ravaged by this conflict? Where is the American soldier — a former college basketball star — whom I photographed the day her arm was blown off? Or the Iraqi mother who wailed beside the wall where her son had been killed earlier that morning?
