WAR IS PERSONAL

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.

Tomas Young, Kansas City, MO, February 2006

ROSLINDALE, MASSACHUSETTS – MARCH 19: Carlos Arredondo grieves for his deceased son at his home on March 19, 2006 in Roslindale, Massachusetts. Twenty-year-old Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo, a Marine, was killed in combat in Najaf, Iraq on August 25, 2004, his father’s 44th birthday.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – MAY 2: Twenty-four-year-old Michael Harmon, a former combat medic with the U.S. Army, glances out the window of the small apartment he shares with his grandmother (pictured), his mother, and his stepfather on May 2, 2007 in Brooklyn, New York. Harmon, who suffers from PTSD, served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division in Al-Rashidiya and Baquaba, Iraq. A recipient of a Bronze Star, he received a general discharge under honorable conditions.