Photography: Claire Beckett

The photographs in Claire Beckett’s Defense Language series features costumed role-players, intricate Hollywood-style sets, and staged scenes on military bases throughout the United States. Between 2006 and 2023, Beckett embedded herself on these bases to examine how Arabs and Muslims were represented during counterinsurgency training for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those shown in the photographs include military personnel who were often combat veterans acting as enemy combatants, and immigrants from Iraq or Afghanistan who were brought in to increase the realism within the exercises. The images range from formal portraits and landscapes of improvised, constructed environments to more candid moments of individuals interacting within the training scenarios.

Photography: Lorenzo Tugnoli
Text: Habib Zahori and Francesca Recchia
Design: GHOST

IT CAN NEVER BE THE SAME presents a body of work that spans from 2019 to 2023, during Afghanistan’s pivotal years of transition — from the US-Taliban peace talks to the collapse of the Afghan republic and, ultimately, the Taliban’s return to power.

The images depict a country in upheaval, as experienced by a foreign photographer who has spent over a decade navigating its complexities. This book is not a traditional reportage but a reflective journey. Through the ambiguity of photography, it explores how visual representations shape the perception of a complex country, its history, and the distance between those who tell the story and those who live it.

Tugnoli arrived in Afghanistan in 2009, where began working as a full-time photographer. He spent six years living in the country and then returned to it again and again. Through the years he travelled all over the country and learnt so much from its people.

After 2023, Tugnoli spent over a year reflecting on the photographs he had taken, shaping them into a body of work that seeks a more meditative tone. This process was driven by a growing interest in the relationship between images and the broader visual representation of Afghanistan, and developed in collaboration with researcher Francesca Recchia. As a photographer, Tugnoli was deeply inspired by the tradition of black and white photojournalism but he started asking himself whether he was photographing Afghanistan to recreate the familiar imagery, to emulate a movie that repeats itself on loop in my outsider’s head, or whether he was truly telling a story grounded in a deep sense of the place.

Afghanistan resists foreign understanding, and its image has been repeatedly appropriated and reshaped by the empires that have occupied it over the centuries. Misunderstandings arise not only from the difficulty of accessing the country’s many layers of meaning but also from a tendency on our part, as journalists, to simplify and misrepresent. These simplifications help build narratives that justify foreign wars and occupations, often carried out in the name of spreading democratic values and defending women’s rights.

The publication of this book is particularly important at a moment when foreign aid to Afghanistan has been severely cut, after decades of occupation and relentless bombing by foreign powers, and the country has, for the most part, disappeared from the headlines.

Texts : Nicola Bertasi, Damarice Amao

Graphic: pupilla grafik

Like Rain Falling from the Sky is a photographic work that addresses the consequences of the American war in Vietnam forty-five years after the end of the armed conflict. Starting from this, the work constitutes a photographic research project that also investigates the relationship between memory and war.

Photography and text: Ben Huff
Graphic Design: Hans Gremmen

Adak island served as the westernmost physical front in defense of democracy from 1934 to 1997. In a few short years during World War 2, the previously uninhabited island of Adak in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bordered to the north by the Bering Sea, was made into the fourth largest city in the territory of Alaska. At the height of the Cold War, six thousand military personnel and their families lived in Adak. In March of 1997, with the Cold War over, the Navy abandoned the island. Today, less than seventy-five people live there amongst the crumbling buildings and fading memory of our past military ambitions.

Photography and text: Jessica Hines
Endpaper illustrations:  Lee Granger Hines
Design: Dewi Lewis

My Brother’s War tells the story of a soldier, Gary Hines, and his younger sister’s search to understand the circumstances surrounding his life with Post Traumatic Stress – and his untimely death by his own hand ten years after returning home from the Vietnam war.

Gary’s letters, photographs, and his personal effects found in a small box, served as guides to Hines who travelled twice to Vietnam, attended a reunion of his comrades, called army buddies decades after the war, and visited the home where he died. Finding handwritten declarations of love written by Gary’s Vietnamese fiancé, Hines also uncovered a surprising and mysterious love story.

Using her brother’s photographs as starting points allowed Hines to see the landscapes that shaped his experiences of trauma and to create the illusion of memory. Using shadows, magnification, and reflections, Hines met the challenge of discovery and understanding by creating images, with limited means, of things that no longer exist.

This work is the often untold story of loss, grief, hope, healing, love, and living in the aftermath of war – both for a veteran and for his family and friends. My Brother’s War makes reference to families worldwide that have lost and are presently losing loved ones to war. Hines’ work seeks to inspire, as the only alternative, a peaceful coexistence.

Jessica Hines, uses the camera’s inherent qualities to explore illusion and to suggest truths that underlie the visible world. At the core of Hines’ work lies an inquisitive nature inspired by personal memory, experience and the unconscious mind. Hines has won many awards including The Kolga Award, The Pollux Humanitarian Documentary Grant, Lens Culture International Exposure Award and the Kuala Lumpur International Photoaward. Her work has been extensively exhibited and published throughout the world in North & South America, throughout Asia, Europe, and Australasia.

Photography: Brian Griffin

SPUD, a new book by Brian Griffin, inspired by a residency in Béthune-Bruay in Northern France, marks the centenary of the end of World War I. With the coincidence of ‘SPUD’, the informal British word for potato also being slang for low ranking British soldiers in World War I, Griffin began to explore the relationship between the potatoes grown in the soil and the soldiers who were killed in the very same place, over 100 years ago

Griffin was originally approached about the residency due to the links between Northern France and his native Black Country, a region of the West Midlands in the UK, both in terms of landscape and an industrial history. Upon visiting Béthune, Griffin was greatly moved and disturbed by the number of casualties on the Western Front in World War I– over one million during the Battle of the Somme, close to Béthune where the British suffered the greatest number of casualties in a single day in the history of the British Army.

The result is a postmodern ode; anchored in the farmland of France and replaying the trench elsewhere. The book is divided into several chapters of fictional storytelling and explores the relationship to the body, industry and ultimately, to war. The most recent photographs in the book were taken in 2017 and journey across diverse locations from the McCain factory to the battlefields of the past, including an RAF base in the UK and the City of London. These new photographs often echo and link to Griffin’s previous projects which are featured later, including his Broadgate commission of 1986, ‘Sliced Bread’ featuring photographs and office dances drawn from his archives of photographing management and bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s for Management Today magazine. The titles of each chapter are cryptic, for example ‘Welcome to Twin Peaks’, ‘The Protagonists’, ‘Where Have All the Young Men Gone’, ‘Sleepwalkers’ and ‘Tools of the Trade’. Valentine Umansky, the exhibition curator, describes the project as being like a game of Cluedo – clues are given but nothing is fully revealed in this post-modern, satirical project exploring themes of class, work, war and soil.

The exhibition ‘Between Here and Nowhere’, curated by Valentine Umansky, will be on display at Labanque Arts Centre in Béthune from 17 March – 15 July 2018.

Photography: Richard Mosse

“Infra,” Richard Mosse’s first book, offers a radical rethinking of how to depict a conflict as complex and intractable as that of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mosse photographs both the rich topography, inscribed with the traces of conflicting interests, as well as rebel groups of constantly shifting allegiances at war with the Congolese national army (itself a patchwork of recently integrated warlords and their militias). For centuries, the Congo has repeatedly compelled and defied the western imagination. Mosse brings to this subject the use of a discontinued aerial surveillance film, a type of color infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. The film, originally developed for military reconnaissance, registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. The results offer a fevered inflation of the traditional reportage document, underlining the growing tension between art, fiction and photojournalism. Mosse’s work highlights the ineffable nature of current events in today’s Congo. “Infra “initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken genre, but ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy.