Ashley Gilbertson: Bedrooms of the Fallen

Powerful stuff. The old cliche, If it bleeds, it leads. You’re dealing with the bleeding of heart and spirit that doesn’t show and thus doesn’t lead.

All these kids. Your photos make the war much closer to home, figuratively as well as literally. It’s hard to feel it when looking at radar screens or even bloody explosions. I for one have never an explosion, but I’ve seen plenty of kids’ bedrooms. This brings the war close. Heartbreakingly close.

I recall these photos from when you featured them earlier. But, there is an element I would have missed without the narration you’ve added to the slide show. While I was cognizant that artifacts could have been added after the kids had gone, or had died – and, would expected there to have been… And, while I speculated that the artifacts had probably sunk to the level of background for the kids’ who inhabited these rooms as kids… I hadn’t considered the subliminal nature of the symbols with which the kids had surrounded themselves, or the possible effect of those visual stimuli on them. Revisiting these through the photographers eyes gave me a different perspective.

Please don’t call them kids; they’re not children. These were armed adults who voluntarily took part in an invasion of a country that was not a threat to us.

Their deaths are tragic in themselves, but they did not die defending America. One of the young men is lauded as having a great sense of patriotism because a wanted poster of Osama bin Laden peers out above the beer bottles. But this young man died in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks on September 11th.

We should distinguish between sympathy for the dead and kitsch. These memorials are a way to push away from us our responsibility for the violent way they died. They are not “the fallen” in the sense that some arbitrary tragedy befell them. They were in somebody else’s country as part of a political takeover.

Hey, DennisQ. Apologies if my shorthand vernacular offended you. I was using kids in lieu of children. They were photographs of some child’s bedroom in the parent’s home. I did not mean to imply a particular age with that choice of word, or particular level of agency. The men and women who once occupied those rooms were, and yet are, someone’s child. Someone’s kid. And, I can think of those men and women, in this context, as someone’s child, as kids from the “neighborhood.”

Photo sets like this always make me wonder what the opposite photo journalistic story would look like: the bedrooms of killed Iraqui’s, of entire families killed by errant or intentional fire, of “insurgent’s bedrooms.” Are we too scared to give the enemy a human face, or is it just too hard?

Alonzo – it’s not Iraq, but have a look at Kent Klich’s Gaza Photo Album:
http://www.kentklich.com/case.php?case_id=42

[...] explains the project while narrating against the backdrop of his bedroom photographs (video via BagNews). He singles out the stories of Jordan C. Haerter (Sag Harbor, NY) and Nicholas G. Xiarhos [...]

Alonzo, During my interview with Ashley, he mentioned that the bedrooms of Iraqi’s had similar items.

A bedroom is generally a private space (particularly so for young people living at home) and generally not designed for public display. The parents mediate the intrusion somewhat by editing or arranging the room. More than anything these shots signify the depths of parental grief; memorializing physical space is similar to precisely setting narrative and history in that they allow us to properly organize what might otherwise become random and meaningless tragedy.

What makes me most uncomfortable with the series is the voyeuristic presence, memorializing or not, of being in the intimate, familial, domestic spaces of people on the downside of advantage with respect to history’s configuration. And it’s a complaint of a photojournalistic genre rather than of these images in particular. It always seems easier to gain access to the personal space of vulnerable individuals and populations and document their deprivations, habits, hardships, and losses than it is to get past security and document the world of systematic exclusivity, entitlements and privacy where the decision-makers live.

Of course everybody, all of us, have nothing but condolences for the families, but don’t parents who lose children to car accidents do this as well? So how does parental grief contribute to the public discussion, and policy issues surrounding these wars? Perhaps the problem with the genre is that it seems to think that despair speaks for itself. But without a demand for justice it is in danger of being casually sentimental.

[...] entrevue du photographe sur VII Magazine et une autre sur Bag News Notes, je vous recommande particulièrement celle de VII. ( aucun commentaire | Tags: [...]