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Tuesday, May 22, 2012
October 20, 2007

Not Just Our Wounded

Saif

(click for full size)

In photographing Iraqi war injured, photographer Farah Nosh’s main motivation was to highlight how Americans only see physical damage inflicted on their own.  The image above is included in Iraq’s Brutally Wounded, a photo essay of Nosh’s images produced for Alternet by Nina Berman and co-sponsored by BAGnewsNotes.

One thing Nosh’s images do is highlight the absence, or far more rudimentary nature of Iraqi prosthetic devices.  It is a sobering comparison, given the radically more natural looking and more high tech appendages available to wounded American vets.

Beyond just the physical, however, most of Nosh’s subjects are photographed at home.  Not so much home alone, though.  Four of the seven shots in the Alternet piece are family portraits in one form or another, as are two more in the “Wounded Iraq” portfolio on Nosh’s website. Nothing makes these images more accessible than their familial impact.  Take the photo above, for example.

On May 5, 2003, then twelve-year-old Saif Yusif Hanoun from the Al-Amil district of Baghdad was taken to the hospital with a fever.  On the way, he was injured by American gunfire and lost his left leg from below the knee.  To the right, and set back, is his younger brother.  According to Saif’s mother, Saif will hit his brother out of envy for having both legs.

Of course, there are elements here which elaborate Saif’s anger and depression, the most vivid being the relegation of the prosthetic to a position opposite his damaged leg and facing away.  More universal, however, are the physical dynamics between the siblings.  The younger boy — who earns no named in the presentation — hugs the wall (as if in a characteristic backing off).  At the same time, though, he puts his nearest leg forward (demonstrating the instinct to be closer?), and rests his hand just above his own knee (while retracting his left one), as if in symbiotic and empathetic connection with his brother’s predicament.

Besides binding two brothers together, this slice of life helps tie the brothers to us.

Photo Essay plus Farah Nosh interview here.



(image: Farah Nosh/Getty.  March 2006.  Baghdad, Iraq)

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  • http://www.reciprocity-failure.com Stan Banos

    This should be mandatory viewing for every American at every age in every school, home and workplace.

  • http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/ Kevin Hayden

    And how many are there? Hundreds of thousands. There are tens of thousands of Americans wounded, too. I wonder why no photos of Iraqi women though?

  • http://home.comcast.net/~sfs73/index.html MonsieurGonzo

    ref : “photographer Farah Nosh’s main motivation was to highlight how Americans only see physical damage inflicted on their own”
    …do they?
    ie., are Americans actually aware of “physical damage inflicted on their own” troops, or even ~ the damage being done [by the War] to themselves?
    => cross-posted from juancole.com :
    ref : “Edward Luce of FT argues that Iraq has faded as a campaign issue in the 08 presidential election. He attributes this lower profile for the issue to a drop in US military deaths in Iraq and to the rise of Iran as an issue instead… I do not disagree with that assertion.”
    Unless you had lived through it, or been a part of it, yourself ~ it’s easy to forget that America did not “lose” the Vietnam War per se, rather ~ the U.S. military ceased to function as an effective or cost-efficient fighting force : “Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be ‘on patrol,’ a practice dubbed “search and avoid” missions.”
    ie., lacking any other clarity of purpose, that is ~ translatable down to the level of day -to- day operations by ground troops (once fine assault troops you must remember) reduced to ‘convoy guards’ and ‘wander in armored neighborhood patrols until shot at’ bait, then The Mission becomes survival, pure and simple…
    …ironically, survival is the same Mission as their supposed enemy (the Iraqi peoples being occupied), as with no Old Glory apparent : the only metric of ‘progress’, or not, now being cited is that of attrition of our Service Men and Women :
    the horror is that our troops now realize this, even if our electorate does not :-/

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