Rear Window

Continuing Melissa's post from earlier on Ben Lowy's work...

Lowy began photographing in Iraq in 2003 when he "crossed the berm" embedded in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne. He's been to Iraq and back several times and, while home between trips in 2005 he was asked a rather basic question: do you go shopping and stuff in town with Iraqis?

The short answer? No.

Then he got to thinking about how he gets to see Iraq when he's working in that country. The answer is a series of photographs he's collected from 2005 through his latest trip in 2007 (benlowy.com; select "Projects" then "Iraq | Perspectives"). Or, go here, for a different look at the gallery.

Right now, Lowy Said, "this is the only way people will be able to experience what Iraq is really like."

I began this project as a response to what I felt was the general inability of people back home to comprehend what Iraq is like (and I don't mean car bombs and night raids). Most people have never really seen or felt the effects of war. Iraqi landscape feels like the most dangerous place on Earth. Confronted by a level of violence so high that walking on the streets to photograph is tantamount to suicidal behavior, I found myself confined to working with American soldiers on embeds, spending most of my time going on various missions looking at the landscape of this broken country. My only view was through the inches-thick bulletproof window of an Army Humvee.

Do Iraqis see me through these windows? I don't know. But they do see the monstrous convoys of Humvees coming down the roads of their neighborhoods. Some stop to stare, some jeer, some cheer (rare), some just go about their business oblivious to the tons of destructive force driving by. This view of the Iraqi street is one so rarely seen by the American populace, but it is the most common sight for US soldiers. Do these soldiers see the Iraqis as they speed by? I'm not sure. My goal with the project is to provoke the viewer to continue to ask such questions and more.

Is it apathy towards the war that distracts the viewer at home? After all, the Iraq war was the most covered media event in the history of mankind, and now only 90 odd foreign journalists consistently remain in Iraq.

The decision to include the actual window in the images serves a literal as well as a metaphorical purpose. I wanted to create a visual technique to present Iraq to the public that is different from the usual images they have been inundated with and incite interest and curiosity. Metaphorically speaking, these windows represent a barrier that impedes dialogue. These pictures show a fragment of Iraqi life as a transient passenger on a Humvee. The images are not intimate - they often show a distant and detached perspective of a country so empty, so desolate and of a situation so dire.

This is Iraq: blast walls, barbed wire, poverty, and destruction.

So far it has been a two-year project photographing from the backs of U.S. military and military contractors' vehicles at how he sees Iraq outside of secured areas. And he has plans to continue working on it. The pictures first appeared in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine.

16 December 2007 by Rich Glickstein

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