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A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War
University Of Chicago Press
November 2007
On Sale: November 1, 2007
260 pages ISBN: 0226293254 EAN: 9780226293257 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Photography
Arriving in Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion,
unaffiliated with any newspaper and hoping to pick up
assignments along the way, Ashley Gilbertson was one of the
first photojournalists to cover the disintegration of
America’s military triumph as looting and score settling
convulsed Iraqi cities. Just twenty-five years old at the
time, Gilbertson soon landed a contract with the New York
Times, and his extraordinary images of life in occupied Iraq
and of American troops in action began appearing in the
paper regularly. Throughout his work, Gilbertson took great
risks to document the risks taken by others, whether dodging
sniper fire with American infantry, photographing an Iraqi
bomb squad as they diffused IEDs, or following marines into
the cauldron of urban combat. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gathers the best of Gilbertson’s
photographs, chronicling America’s early battles in Iraq,
the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that
erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to overtake
Falluja, and ultimately, the country’s first national
elections. No Western photojournalist has done as much
sustained work in occupied Iraq as Gilbertson, and this
wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a
photographer is the first of its kind. Accompanying each
section of the book is a personal account of Gilbertson’s
experiences covering the conflict. Throughout, he conveys
the exhilaration and terror of photographing war, as well as
the challenges of photojournalism in our age of embedded
reporting. But ultimately, and just as importantly, Whiskey
Tango Foxtrot tells the story of Gilbertson’s own journey
from hard-drinking bravado to the grave realism of a scarred
survivor. Here he struggles with guilt over the death of a
marine escort, tells candidly of his own experience with
post-traumatic stress, and grapples with the reality that
Iraq—despite the sacrifice in Iraqi and American lives—has
descended into a civil war with no end in sight. A searing account of the American experience in Iraq,
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is sure to become one of the classic
war photography books of our time.
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