War Photography, Minus the War

Leafing through the new issue of the New Republic, eyes peeled for word on the progress of the magazine’s investigation into Scotty Beauchamp (there’s no mention), we came across a riveting series of photographs by Ashley Gilbertson–“An Iraq Album” as the magazine titled it. The magazine further explains:

Gilbertson, a freelance photographer for The New York Times, has been traveling to Iraq since 2002. A compilation of his war photography will be published as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War in October.

The pictures all appear to date from 2004, and many feature scenes from the most violent battle of the war–the battle for Fallujah–in other words, as grim as possible. But, unlike Scotty Beauchamp, pictures don’t lie, and some of the shots are extremely disturbing. Still, there was one caption that caused a bit of head-scratching here. The series leads with this picture of an Iraqi who “tried to extinguish a burning van on Baghdad’s Sadoun Street,” and clearly failed. The next line: “The incident appeared to be unrelated to the war…”

TNR_Van.jpg


From the new issue of the New Republic.

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