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.
