A photo of a young boy lying expressionless in a hospital bed hung behind Thorne Anderson.
“This is a boy who had a circumcision,” Anderson said. “It was discovered in that circumcision that he had a condition that would not allow his blood to clot.”
“Now, ordinarily this is very easy to treat. You can take regular dosages of a simple blood coagulant and then he can lead a relatively normal life. However, in Iraq, these blood coagulants, which are available everywhere in the third world, all over the planet, were banned from import under (the United Nation’s economic sanctions on Iraq). Because it was conceivably possible that they might be used as a precursor to a chemical weapon.” Anderson said.
“As a result, this 5-year-old kid died right in front me while I was making these photographs,” he said. “It was at that moment that I really became committed to covering the story in Iraq. Seeing this fraud, political conflict reduced to a human level created a frustration that made me want to tell this story.”
As part of a nationwide tour, photojournalists Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson came to the University on Tuesday night presenting a slideshow series of photographs they’d taken in Iraq as independents, not embedded with military units.
“This, for me, was the face of Iraq,” said Anderson, glancing up at the dead boy’s photograph one last time. “Yet this was the face I kept seeing on the newsstands.”
The next slide clicked and Saddam Hussein’s face appeared with a giant red X over it, a Time Magazine cover. Anderson couldn’t figure out why this cover seemed familiar.
“This is 2003,” Anderson said, pointing at Hussein on Time. “This is 1945.”
The next slide was a Time Magazine cover with the same red X over a face. Only this time, the face was Adolph Hitler. The crowd tried to muffle their gasps.
Anderson’s highlights of the evening included issues of media bias. His first slide was the cover of Newsweek from about a month ago. On the cover, a man wearing a turban looks up off to the side, pointing a gun just above the camera. In huge letters across the cover, it reads “Losing Afghanistan.”
After a brief analysis of the war in Afghanistan, Anderson delivered the catch.
“You might not recognize this cover, unless you happen to live in Europe, Asia or Latin America,” said Anderson. “Because in the American edition that week, they ran this one.”
The next slide projected. The U.S. edition read “My Life in Pictures” with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and her children on the cover. He said American magazines have one goal: to sell magazines. Real news rarely sells, he said, but entertainment, movie stars, etc. – they sell.
Alford discussed some of her photos as well, some of the famous Saddam Hussein statue that stood in central Baghdad. The photographs Alford showed from April 9, 2003, when the statue came down, depicted children sporting nervous smiles and parents looking weary in the background. The subjects in these photos weren’t celebratory. Instead, meek faces crept out in fear.
“I didn’t see a lot of celebration. I saw a lot of cautious people jumping out in the streets with little white flags like, ‘don’t shoot me, Americans!’”.
Alford spoke of her experience as a foreign woman in Iraq.
“I became acquainted with this family who allowed me to stay for days at a time,” she said, smiling. “To have an American guest is lovely (for them). I’d sleep with the women, they gave me pajamas and put makeup on me. We went to the river and went swimming in the Euphrates.”
Being a woman in Iraq wasn’t as bad for her as people would think, she said. She explained that since she was a foreign woman, she could break social barriers and do things like swim with the men.
The event ended with questions from the audience. A woman asked about the situation in Iran and what the photojournalists had to say on the matter.
“It terrifies me to think about what a war with Iran would look like,” said Anderson.
University junior Alison Goin said she attended the event to get an insider’s view of Iraq.
“I definitely got that,” she said. “The visuals helped me to understand the impact.”
Sophomore Blake Hamilton was “pissed off that all the U.S. media was so positive.”
Hamilton said he learned that in reality, “it’s not that way at all.”
In an exhibition project entitled “Unembedded,” Alford and Anderson are traveling across the country, teaching and talking about their photography. The tour also serves to sell their book, “Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq”, which Alford and Anderson wrote with colleagues Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and Rita Leistner.
Associate Professor of Visual Communications Julie Newton said it was important to give students an opportunity to hear what these photojournalists had to say.
“Fortunately,” she said, “the journalism school supported it.”
Photojournalists shock audience with war slideshow
Daily Emerald
January 25, 2007
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