We’ve heard about how difficult the transition from the military to the civilian world has been for many post-9/11 veterans. But sometimes statistics and unemployment percentages don’t convey the grave situation to others the way that a work of art can.
For the past eight years, Brooklyn-based photographer Jennifer Karady has been traveling throughout the United States to capture arresting images of soldiers returned from combat. She spends time with each veteran to learn his or her story and then composes a scene that conveys their emotions. As Karady’s website notes, “she works with real people to dramatize their stories through both literal depiction and metaphorical and allegorical means.”
When Karady spent time with former Marine Corps Sergeant Jose Adames, for example, she learned that he was struck by a mortar when he was in a convoy — resulting in shrapnel wounds, plus 17 fellow Marines in his unit also sustaining injury. When he returned home to Brooklyn, Adames found he was terrified of garbage trucks because they sound similar to exploding mortars. Karady depicted Adames in his uniform on the streets of Brooklyn, crouched and covering his ears as a garbage truck rumbles along behind him.
Karady spoke about her project, “Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan,” with the PBS NewsHour. She says that she interviews the veterans extensively before photographing them: “through those interviews, we are looking identify a moment from war that’s come home with the person into the civilian world. So we talk about both that memory of war and then also the way that memory manifests itself in the present.”
She continues, “In each photograph, the veteran is in uniform and we’re restaging this memory from war, but that moment is recontextualized in the civilian world. So you get this sense of a collision or collapse between these two worlds, and trying to represent something that’s invisible, something that’s unconscious, something that’s emotional, so what it feels like for the veteran to come home and sometimes experience two different realities at once.”
Karady travelled to the Omaha Nation reservation in Nebraska to photograph Shelby Webster, a single mother who left her kids to serve in Iraq. Her first convoy was attacked, which caused her to worrying about her kids. But she heard her deceased grandfather say, “Well, you’re going to be all right,” and she smelled burning cedar. She later learned that the Omaha people held a prayer meeting for her at which they burned cedar. In the photograph, Webster is on the ground, pointing her gun, while her children cling to her and her brother performs a cedar ceremony in the background.
In the coming years, Karady plans to publish photos from her project in a book and exhibit the portraits in galleries, accompanied with text or recordings of the soldiers telling their own stories.
Through Karady’s images, we can understand a little better the haunting memories that run through veterans’ minds when they return home.
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Tag: photography
Meet a Veteran That Uses a 19th Century Art Form to Capture Today’s Soldiers
What do you know about tintypes? Chances are, probably not much. After all, it’s a photography technique that was popular during the Civil War, involving reactive chemicals, metal plates, and a large-format camera.
Photographer and former gunner on combat search-and-rescue helicopters Ed Drew took artistic inspiration from this old format, setting up photo sessions with his fellow soldiers, which he’d have to abandon whenever he was called out on a mission. Still, he had time to capture plenty of striking and evocative portraits.
“I like tintypes because it’s not just something simple…you have to set it up and you have to be really physical with it, you can’t just click,” he told Scott Shafer of the PBS NewsHour. “You’re basically making a photo on a piece of metal. You’re exposing it, developing it and fixing it all right then and there.”
When Drew learned that he would be deployed to Afghanistan last year, he packed his camera. According to Shafer, Drew’s tintypes were the first to be created in a combat zone since the Civil War, when families typically would use them to capture a final memory of a loved one before he went off to war.
Once Drew left the military, he struggled to find his purpose, eventually deciding to use his photography to show the beauty of people. Now he attends the San Francisco Art Institute and works with The Garden Project in San Bruno, California, with a program for at-risk youth. The Air Force veteran now makes tintypes of young people learning job skills through organic farming.
“I think the imperfections of tintypes is what I really enjoy,” Drew told Shafer, “and I think it’s a great analogy for life, life is not perfect whether they have a little speck on them or a little streak of silver that just kind of went awry, you accept the image just like you accept the person.”
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Shooting For Hope: How One Photo Changed This Foster Teen’s Life
“A picture is worth a 1,000 words,” is a maxim that’s taught us the power of imagery. But that doesn’t always resonate when a picture fails to capture its subject.
For a 16-year-old foster child, that seemed to be part of the problem. Deon, a teen born and raised in Yakima, Washington, has spent most of his childhood in and out of foster care since the age of 5. Last year, he gave up finding a family, expecting his final years in the foster care system to wind down.
In most states, foster children become responsible for themselves when they turn 18. While some agencies provide job training programs or workshops to build resumes, most of these children are thrust into adulthood without any support or stability. In fact, more than 27,000 of the 400,000 children in U.S. foster care leave the system without any family or support, according to U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Children’s Bureau.
“It’s pretty frightening for them because they really are just pretty much on their own,” said Amber Louis, a recruitment and outreach specialist for the Northwest Adoption Exchange in Seattle.
But that all changed for Deon, who thanks to a photographer’s eye, found a new outlook on life.
Jennifer Loomis, a family photographer based in Seattle, was scrolling through photos of children on adoption sites when she realized how poor their quality was.
“I was so blown away by how bad the photos were that I thought, ‘Oh my God, these photos don’t show these kids at all,'” she told CNN. “I can’t get a sense of who these kids are.”
Loomis contacted the Northwest Adoption Exchange, and Louis quickly responded. Loomis enlisted another photographer, Rocky Salskov, arranging a two-day photo shoot to capture the spirit of seven children between ages 9 and 17 who are looking for a home. Deon was fortunate enough to be selected.
“I wanted photos where you could look into their eyes and see into their soul a little bit better, where you could be like, ‘Wow, Deon, what a guy,’ ” she said.
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It worked. Joanna Church always wanted to adopt an older child and she began her search after her husband, Sean Vaillancourt, a sonar operator for the Canadian Navy, agreed. Church first spotted Deon’s old photo on a website and skipped past it, but after seeing his newfangled shot on the Northwest Adoption Exchange, she was captivated.
“You saw…personality in the face, like you saw it coming off the page and it was enough to get us to stop and open that profile and look at it it, and want to get to know Deon better,” Church said.
Deon moved in with Church and Vaillancourt in October, and the adoption process soon followed.
“They’ve really given me a new look on life,” he said. “Instead of feeling just like that I’m all alone, I actually feel like I have somebody there for me.”
Church and Vaillancourt are helping Deon with obtaining Canadian citizenship to prepare for their move to Victoria, British Columbia, in August. Deon, who had trouble in school, has since improved his grades, joined the track team and is learning to drive. The couple is also dedicated to ensuring their new son keeps in touch with his biological family — including his great grandmother who has taken care of him over the years.
When you give someone a chance, it can change their life forever, Deon said. “You are basically saving a life.”
As for the new parents, the relationship has led Church to become an advocate for adoption, sharing her good fortune to raise awareness about older kids waiting for homes. She often hears that parents are nervous about the uncertainty that comes with older children, she adds.
“And my response is always, you [don’t] know what kind of kid you’re going to get when you birth them,” she said.
Vaillancourt contends it’s about giving someone else a chance.
“We’ve all had our chances, from our parents, from somebody looking out for us, and these [kids] have nobody looking out for them.”
This Moving Photography Series Combines Portraits of Prisoners With Letters They Penned to Themselves
We’ve all heard the phrase “hindsight is 20/20.” It’s never been truer or more poignant than in these letters, written by prison inmates to their younger selves.
As part of photographer Trent Bell‘s project called REFLECT: Convicts’ Letters to Their Younger Selves, 12 prisoners at a Maine correctional facility were asked to write letters to themselves, as well as sit for a portrait session. The resulting images — photographs of the inmates’ superimposed with their scrawling handwritten notes — are nothing short of heart-wrenching. From tales of regret to inspired pieces of advice to the realities of life behind bars, these men open up in ways that anyone can appreciate, and their words will make you think hard about your own life.
“In reading most of the letters I found myself feeling surprisingly similar to these men,” Bell told Fast Company. “But I also realized that either their situations were different than mine or that they had made incremental decisions that led them to these situations. The whole experience really made me look at my own life and reflect on why I’m ‘me.’”
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About a year ago, Bell, who is mostly known for his architectural images, was shocked to find out that a close friend of his had been sentenced to 36 years in jail. This friend was a professional, husband and father of four. The man was someone who never thought he would find himself behind bars. For months, Bell says he was haunted by the reality that just one bad decision can change a life forever. He kept thinking that it could have been him. “There were times when my son would look up and smile at me, and the finality of my friend’s situation would rush into my head,” he wrote on his website. From this, the idea of REFLECT was born.
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At first, Bell intended for REFLECT to be solely a photography project, but then he and his team realized that it wouldn’t capture the prisoners’ emotions in the same way. Of all the inmates they approached, only 12 agreed to be included in the project. The final images, which debuted at the Engine Gallery in Biddeford, Maine, in January, are powerful in their simplicity. But really, it’s the inmates’ words that truly move their viewers. “Our bad choices can contain untold loss, remorse, and regret,” Bell says. “But the positive value of these bad choices might be immeasurable if we can face them, admit to them, learn from them and find the strength to share.”
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This Photographer Is on a Mission to Make People Rethink What Makes a Woman Successful
Denver photographer Suzanne Heintz, a self-described “spinster,” hauls mannequins all over the world to pose in self-portraits that she hopes will have people rethinking how they view single women.
Heintz was tired of people asking whether she was going to ever get married and have kids, according to Jenna Garrett of Feature Shoot. In her ongoing project “Life Once Removed,” Heintz depicts herself with an ecstatic smile enjoying a cup of coffee in a café with her second-hand mannequin husband, standing with him and a mannequin daughter in front of the Eiffel Tower, delirious with joy, serving them Christmas dinner, and hauling them on a toboggan up a mountain.
Heintz told Garrett, “For women, the path to fulfillment is not through one thing, it’s all things—education, career, home, family, accomplishment, enlightenment. If any one of those things is left out, it’s often perceived that there’s something wrong with your life. We are somehow never enough just as we are. We are constantly set up by our expectations to feel as though we are missing something.”
“I’m simply trying to get people to open up their minds and quit clinging to antiquated notions of what a successful life looks like,” she said. And her photos just might do that, while giving everyone a laugh.
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This Former Drill Sergeant Wants to Introduce You to Homeless Vets
True to drill sergeant form, Jerry Tovo wants to be seen and heard, loud and clear. A 68-year-old veteran and photographer, Tovo hopes to give faces to the mere facts and figures of veteran homelessness in the U.S. So far, he has photographed more than 100 veterans in Chicago, Indianapolis, Nashville, Washington D.C., and New York City. Tovo has undertaken the project as part of his nonprofit, They May Have Been Heroes: The Homeless Veterans Project.
An exhibit of the photographs, called “I Was a Soldier,” is on display at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, but Tovo hopes to gather enough support and acclaim to display it at the Newseum in Washington D.C. Tovo has invested more than $35,000 in the project and isn’t stopping there — he’s also working on a book about his travels. Any money donated to his campaign goes to his travel costs and to National Veterans Homeless Support. Tovo wants people to see what these veterans go through and doesn’t want anyone to assume the worst about them. “People tend to generalize that these guys are all just a bunch of drunks and alcoholics,” Tovo told Florida Today. “That they’re happy where they are. But every one of these people, every one of them, have their own story. There’s a reason why they are where they are.”
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