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Duke University Press Books
October 2011
On Sale: October 14, 2011
120 pages
ISBN: 0822351668
EAN: 9780822351665
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Photography
Selected by William Eggleston as Winner
The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book
Prize in Photography Benjamin Lowy’s powerful and arresting color photographs,
taken over a six-year period through Humvee windows and
military-issue night vision goggles, capture the desolation
of a war-ravaged Iraq as well as the tension and anxiety of
both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. To photograph on the
streets unprotected was impossible for Lowy, so he made
images that illuminate this difficulty by shooting
photographs through the windows and goggles meant to help
him, and soldiers, to see. In doing so he provides us with a
new way of looking at the war—an entirely different
framework for regarding and thinking about the everyday
activities of Iraqis in a devastated landscape and the
movements of soldiers on patrol, as well as the alarm and
apprehension of nighttime raids. “Iraq was a land of blast walls and barbed wire fences. I
made my first image of a concrete blast wall through the
window of my armored car. These pictures show a fragment of
Iraqi daily life taken by a transient passenger in a Humvee;
yet they are a window to a world where work, play, tension,
grief, survival, and everything in between are as familiar
as the events of our own lives. . . . [In] the ‘Nightvision’
images . . . as soldiers weave through the houses and
bedrooms of civilians during nighttime military raids, they
encounter the faces of their suspects as well as bystanders,
many of whom are parents protecting their children. . . . I
hope that these images provide the viewer with momentary
illumination of the fear and desperation that is
war.”—Benjamin Lowy
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