Publisher: Damiani, 2013
Language: English

​Photography: Bart Michiels

Lepanto, Waterloo, Verdun, Stalingrad. The photographs comprising The Course of History by the Belgian-born, New York-based artist Bart Michiels (born 1964) show seemingly innocent landscapes and confined views of nature, some romantically beautiful, others sombre and desolate. Nevertheless, the chosen sites are the battlefields of the most barbarous combats in European history. Michiels revisits these sites many, sometimes even hundreds of, years after the clash. Thus, history has left the scene though these empty fields remain and play an important role to this day as silent witnesses to the historic events and, furthermore, as sites of memory…This is the first extensive publication of the photographic series, many of the photographs having been unpublished so far.

Publisher: MACK
Language: English

Photography: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
Collaborators: Giulia Astesani, Natalia Grabowska
Piero Martinello, Chloe Rafferty and Sam Skinner

Originally released in 2011 as a limited edition hardback, this paperback edition is a facsimile of the book which earned Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. War Primer 2 appropriates the first English-language version of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable 1955 Kriegsfibel in which Brecht combined press photographs from the World Wars with four-line poems. Compiled intermittently over three decades, Brecht’s book was a visual and lyrical attack on war and its propagandists under modern capitalism. Shifting the critique to contemporary narratives perpetuated by the so-called ‘War on Terror’, Broomberg and Chanarin strategically overlay the pages of Brecht’s War Primerwith images culled from the internet and generated by the actors, propagators and reporters of the contemporary conflict.

Underlying this junction of two visual histories is a profound skepticism of mass media images. War Primer notably drew attention to the didactic role of photojournalism that served war’s callous profiteers. The title deliberately recalled textbooks used to teach primary school children how to read, and the book, which used razor-sharp words to dismantle visual messages, effectively served as a manual, demonstrating how to “read” or “translate” press photographs – images that Brecht referred to as hieroglyphics in need of decoding.

In War Primer 2, Brecht’s pithy poems and choice of 20th-century images – bombed-out cities and battlefronts, Hitler and his henchmen, and wounded soldiers and refugees, among them – take on new implications when shrewdly juxtaposed with digital images and video screenshots of the Twin Towers attacks, torture in the Abu Ghraib jail, the execution of Saddam Hussain, and George W. Bush proudly offering up a Thanksgiving Day Turkey. When the artists’ book was first published it raised pertinent questions concerning the historical, political and social currency of mass-media images generated by conflict. Now, in an age of “fake news”, War Primer 2 probes the power of images not only to narrate but also to create history.

Publisher: Decode Books
Language: English

Photography: Suzanne Opton
Design: John Jenkins III
Essays: Ann Jones, Phillip Prodger

In the two series collected in this volume, Soldier/Many Wars, photographer Suzanne Opton (born 1954) photographs a range of American soldiers close up, laying their heads before the camera, and American veterans who are draped. The subjects of the Soldier series are all young, active-duty soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the photographs were presented as billboards in nine American cities from 2008 through 2010.

Reviewing them for The New York Times, photography critic Vince Aletti wrote: “The posture is vulnerable and startlingly intimate, as if these young men and women were facing someone in bed or on a stretcher… Opton catches soldiers both on guard and off, looking out and inward simultaneously, and we can only imagine what they’re thinking, what they’ve done, and what they dread.”

The project received extensive press coverage and even sparked a heated debate about America’s image of the military.

The Many Wars series presents portraits of veterans from American wars over the past 70 years. Through interviews by the photographer, we learn how the wars have affected their lives. Both bodies of work were selected by Martin Paar for the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010.

Publisher:  Many Voices Press
Language: English

Photography: Eugene Richards
Story Research and Text Editing: Janine Altongy
Design Assistance: Sam Richards

By early 2006, the war in Iraq was entering its fourth year. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were reported injured and dead, more than two thousand American soldiers had been killed, and rates of depression and suicide were rising among American military personnel. Yet all the while, Congress and the media debated what the conflict was costing America in image and treasure, and costing the president in popularity. Troubled by the public’s growing indifference to the ongoing horrors in Iraq and critical of his own inaction, acclaimed photographer Eugene Richards began documenting the lives of Americans who had been profoundly affected by the Iraq war.

Bold and epic in scope, War Is Personal is a compilation of fifteen real-life stories that speak of what it means to go to war, to sacrifice, to wait, to hope, to mourn, to remember, to live on when those you love are gone. With heartbreaking photographs and texts, Richards records the funeral of twenty-two-year-old Army sergeant Princess Samuels and profiles veterans such as Tomas Young, who was shot in the spine and paralyzed four days into his tour in Iraq. Richards documents parents such as Carlos Arredondo, who grew so distraught upon hearing of his son’s death in combat that he attacked and destroyed a Marine Corps van, severely injuring himself, and Nelida Bagley, whose massively brain-injured son requires nearly round-the-clock care. Uncompromising and sure to be controversial, War Is Personal is a study of lives in upheaval and a chronicle of greatly differing attitudes, experiences, and understandings of what it means for Americans to go to war.

Publisher: 
Language: –

 

Photography: Kai Wiedenhöfer 
Design: –
Essays: –

 

Publisher: steidlMACK
Language: –

Photography: Collier Schorr
Design: –
Essays: –

The American photographer Collier Schorr has been working in Southern Germany for the past 12 years, compiling a documentary and fictional portrait of a small town inhabited by historical apparitions. For Schorr, the German landscape is a map of her own history, both imagined and inherited. Combining the overlapping roles of war photographer, traveling portraitist, anthropologist and family historian, the series Forest and Fields (Wald und Wiesen) tells the interwoven stories of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family. Forests and Fields is intrinsically about book making, an ongoing suite of artist’s books that utilizes traditional notions of category to create different points of view. Each volume is part diary, photo-annual, palimpsest, and scrapbook, and involves a process which constantly expands and contradicts the artist’s oeuvre through re-edits of the work to create new views through the material. The first two volumes will focus on Neighbors and Reportage. Subsequent volumes will include landscapes, architecture, flowers and sport. Each volume will share the same dimensions but each will be designed as an independent and unique work in itself. The final volume will be text based, a collection of commissioned and re-published writings inspired by the ideas explored in the pictures.

Publisher: steidlMACK
Language: English

Photography: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
Design: Catherine Lutman
Essay: Eyal Weizman

Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal.
The invasion of Beirut, the first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawal, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel’s major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance in Chicago, an artificial but realistic Arab town built by the Israeli Defense Force in the middle of the Negev desert for urban combat training.

Broomberg and Chanarin offer an original visual analysis of contemporary Israel beginning in Chicago and ending in a sniper’s lair. Nothing in this book is what it seems. A watermelon is revealed to be a suicide bomb; a tranquil forest becomes the site of a forensic investigation; a pastoral landscape becomes a warzone. Through this collection of simulated landscapes, buildings and objects, a new perspective on Israel begins to emerge.

Publisher:  Dewi Lewis Pub, 2002
Italian edition: Peliti Associati
Language: English

​Photography and text: Simon Norfolk
Design: Jonathan Towell

European art has long had a fondness for ruin and desolation that has little parallel in other cultures. Since the Renaissance, artists such as Claude Lorraine or Caspar David Friedrich have painted destroyed classical palaces and gothic churches, bathed in a fading golden twilight. These motifs symbolised that the greatest creations of civilisation – the empires of Rome and Greece or the Catholic Church – even these have no permanence. Eventually they too would crumble; vanquished by barbarians and vanishing into the undergrowth. The only thing that could last, that was truly reliable, was God. And man’s only rational response in the face of God’s power, was awe. The landscapes of Afghanistan are also ‘awesome’ (in the original sense of this word) but the feelings of dread and insignificance are not related to the power of God but to the power of modern weaponry.

Afghanistan is unique, utterly unlike any other war-ravaged landscape. In Bosnia, Dresden or the Somme for example, the devastation appears to have taken place within one period, inflicted by a small gamut of weaponry. However, the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan, means that the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other. There are places near Bagram Air Base or on The Shomali Plain where the front line has passed back and forth eight or nine times – each leaving a deadly flotsam of destroyed homes and fields seeded with landmines. A parallel is the story of Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the remains of the classical city of Troy in the 1870s. Digging down, he found eleven cities deposited upon each other, each one in its turn rebuilt upon the rubble of its predecessor and later destroyed.

Continue on: https://www.simonnorfolk.com/afghanistan-chronotopia