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• Wives pray for their husbands stationed in the Gulf at the Enon Chapel Baptist Church, Jacksonville, North Carolina, March 26, 2003.
Truths missing in action
Anthony Sau is an American photographer based in Europe who has documented events affecting the lives of those in Rwanda, Chechnya, Ethiopia and the former Soviet Bloc. His previous books have won several awards and he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Now he has turned his lens on events closer to (his former) home. There is some irony in the fact that the most powerful pictures that have come out of Iraq since the invasion have been snapshots from personnel whose role in the zone had nothing to do photographic reportage. But Sau is not competing with these to get his story across, it is not events in Iraq that he is reporting but another war, of propaganda, being played out on the home front. The wall-to-wall images, principally in black and white, are sequenced chronologically to tell the unwinding story of government spin as war in the Gulf looms, and the developing public response, both pro and anti-war, as events unfold and the body bags begin to arrive home. The few words, by New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges, another Pulitzer winner, add chronology and context; but the pictures tell it all and a very powerful story it is too. Writing on the back cover, P J O’Rourke sums up their effect: “Here are insightful far-sighted sights - the pictures of conflict that aren’t often taken. War is fought on the home front also. Ideas die, opinions get wounded, truths are missing in action. Those of us who support the US policy in Iraq need to take a careful look at our domestic battlefield. So do those who oppose it.” Thoroughly recommended.
Fear This: A Nation at War, photographs by Anthony Sau, published by Aperture, £13.95, ISBN 1 931788 53 7. Distributed in the UK by Thames & Hudson.
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