Purple Hearts:                                                    
by Nina Berman
Back from Iraq

I was watching the invasion of Iraq play out on television from the comfort of my New York City apartment and I realized that  the most devastating consequence of war – the human cost – was not being shown. I wanted to contribute to the overall conversation about the war,  and so I set about locating those  American servicemen and women who had been injured in Iraq and were now  back home.
 
There are now more than 30,000 servicemen and women who were wounded in combat in Iraq.  Tens of thousands of more were injured in combat support.  My work shows a small sampling of this population.

My subjects are from all over the United States.  I visited them in their hometowns, at veterans’ hospitals and at a military base.  I photographed them between 2003 and 2004 shortly after they had been injured in Iraq. When I met them, they were at a particularly complicated moment in their lives.  They were undergoing a physical and psychological transformation from able-bodied warrior to disabled veteran.

I hope people develop a more intimate understanding of service and sacrifice.  I hope people understand the difficulties many veterans face when they seek health care for physical and mental illnesses.  I hope people understand that wounds are not easily fixed and resonate outward to affect loved ones. And I hope people consider how it might be, especially for those who joined the military to seek escape from a violent home or community, to be returned back to a place they had sought to leave.

Several of the veterans told me that before being deployed, they thought war would be “fun.”  They said they watched the first Gulf War in television and it looked “awesome.” My latest work “Homeland,”  to  be published in October 2008 by Trolley,  looks at how war is visualized in our culture.

www.ninaberman.com
www.purpleheartsbook.com

Over the last 17 years, Ms. Berman has established a formidable reputation as a documentary photographer. Her work in war-torn countries including Bosnia and Afghanistan has appeared in the the world’s largest, most well-respected publications Including the New York Times Magazine,  Time,  German Geo and National Geographic.  During the Iraq war, she turned away from traditional journalism toward the utilization of portraiture to convey her subjects’ intensely personal traumas and psychological dislocations that result from war. This work lead to the publishing of Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq, with Trolley in 2004.

In 2007, Berman’s Marine Wedding portrait of Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline took 1st prize in the World Press Portraiture category. She has received numerous honors including: two World Press Photo Foundation Awards, several Pictures of the Year Awards, a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship and a documentary photography grant from the Open Society Institute.   Since 2001, has been a faculty member at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City and is a frequent guest lecturer.