Moises Saman’s new book “Glad Tidings of Benevolence” attempts to unwind 20 years of covering war in Iraq.
” starts off with this banger of a quote from Walter Benjamin: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”If anything, “Glad Tidings” recognizes the futility of photography, born as photojournalism, to give a completely accurate rendering of, in this case, war. That is impossible.
This is not to say that bearing witness in the moment is a dead end in and of itself. No, that remains a vital thing. But in this book, Saman seems to recognize the complexity of representing “reality.”“Glad Tidings” feels like a disjointed ride through Saman’s memory banks. And that is on purpose. Isn’t that what reality is really like? Things rarely play out in an orderly, predictive fashion. Instead, life comes at us in snips and snaps.
The book is full of deftly made images Saman produced in the 20 or so years he kept returning to Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003 after al-Qaeda’s catastrophic attack on New York’s twin towers. But of equal importance, and maybe even of more importance, are the jarring juxtapositions of lists and lists of names of battle operations interspersed with training manuals.Saman’s photos show his experience of the things, planned and unplanned, those documents prepared soldiers for.
“The haunting work of Moises Saman is unique in this respect. These images are flashes from the underworld that much of Iraq has become in the last few decades. Windows unto a land/visual/scape disfigured by years of dictatorship, debilitating sanctions, and the visceral echoes of shock and awe. The constellation of photographs and documents creates a site for a dynamic and active memory, rather than a passive one. Words at times offer bridges to the visual frames.
Saman’s book is a vivid reminder that the work of understanding the why’s and what’s of the world is an ongoing and never-ending process.
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