| About the Exhibition
Amidst the ongoing carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Chechnya,
Columbia, and Sudan, the exhibition Afterwar
– Lori Grinker's fifteen-year project to document the physical and
psychological wounds that remain for the frontline war veterans of the
last century – is available for exhibition. Comprised of fifty-one
photographs, and excerpts from interviews that Grinker conducted with
the men, women, and children who fought in conflicts from the Great War
(1914-1918) to the most recent US-led deployment in Iraq, this timely
exhibition seeks to illuminate our culture of war as measured in its human,
personal toll.
With the exhibition and accompanying book Afterwar: Veterans From
a World in Conflict, (de.MO, 2005) produced together with Contact
Press Images, Grinker hopes to encourage viewers to reflect upon
the complex social, economic, and political conditions behind these conflicts,
and on the humanistic and philosophical aspects of war. If there is one
thing Afterwar reveals, it is that all wars
have a profoundly similar effect on their participants. |
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| Dani Shimoni, Tel Aviv,
Israel, 1995 |
It is not the politics of a particular war that most concerns
Grinker, but "the history and our culture of warring that rages against
humanity." As Lori Grinker states in the preface to Afterwar:
“Afterwar is not about the heroics of war, although many of
the individuals photographed and interviewed for this book have done heroic
things. Covering the entire range of combatants of the past one hundred
years, across boundaries of culture, geography and time, this project
is meant as a polyphony of voices revealing how people find themselves
in war, what happens to them there, and the marks that remain when the
fighting is over.”
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