Reportage
When I began reporting from Iraq in 2002, I was still a wild and somewhat naïve twenty-four-year-old kid. Five years later, I was battle-weary. I had been there longer than the American military and had kept returning long after most members of the "coalition of the willing" had pulled out. Iraq had become my initiation, my rite of passage, but instead of granting me a new sense of myself and a new identity, Iraq had become my identity. Without Iraq, I was nothing. Just another photographer hanging around New York. In Iraq, I had a purpose, a mission; I felt important. I didn’t want to go back, but I needed to—and for the worst possible reason: I wasn’t ready for it to end. After twelve months away, I had a craving that only Iraq could satisfy.
(...)
Covering the war used to make me feel like I was doing something important, but I have grown to accept that Americans will not stop dying because I take their pictures; sectarian violence won’t end because I photographed one woman’s death; and abuse won’t stop because I witnessed the aftermath of one interrogation. I’m just recording history now, documenting the decline, in the hope that the people who don’t recognize it now may one day look back at my pictures and see the war for the mistake-riddled quagmire it was—and is. In the meantime, I’ll continue to struggle with how to define the conflict in Iraq without letting it define me.
