Peter van Agtmael

2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die

Exhibition Opening and Artist Slideshow

Tuesday October 13
7:30 pm

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER:

Peter was born in Washington DC. He studied history at Yale, graduating with honors in 2003. After graduation, he received a Charles P. Howland grant to travel to China to document the social and environmental consequences of the Three Gorges Dam. In 2005, he covered the Asian Tsunami, then relocated to Johannesburg, South Africa and photographed the AIDS epidemic by following the story of Holly Moyo, an HIV-positive Zimbabwean refugee. On assignment, he traveled throughout Africa. In 2006, he traveled to Iraq twice, spending nearly half the year on embeds. In 2007 and 2008, he spent several months embedding in the remote American outposts of Eastern Afghanistan and working un-embedded in the north and Kabul. When not in Iraq and Afghanistan, van Agtmael photographed the war at home, following the recovery of wounded soldiers and the families of the fallen.

In 2008 he helped organize the book and exhibition Battlespace, a retrospective of largely unseen work of 22 photographers covering Iraq and Afghanistan.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have lost America's attention, and some would say, never really had it. Despite all the immediacy of new media, America's view of these wars has largely been sanitized, incomplete and remote. Photographer Peter van Agtmael aims to change our perceptions with his compelling new book, 2nd Tour Hope I Don't Die.

From 2006 through 2008, Peter van Agtmael was an embedded photographer who followed the sweep of the conflicts between Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States. He captured the range of the American experience, from chaotic night raids in Iraqi cities to long patrols through isolated valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan. The images are unsparing yet nuanced, revealing tense medical evacuations and graphic casualties of suicide bombings as well as moving portraits of young soldiers and their families recuperating, mourning, and suffering. In the end a delicate humanity emerges amid the chaos and brutality of combat.
 
The book distills - in van Agtmael's photographs and words - the complexity of that experience from the point of view of a young man seeing many others of his generation facing tough choices, grave responsibilities and unpredictable fates. By turns gritty, haunting, and deeply moving, the book is a cogent reminder of the stark and enduring realities of war.
 
Soldiers who sometimes initially voiced suspicion ultimately urged van Agtmael to show what was going on in their world because they recognized that, without pictures, it would be as if their experiences never happened.

The Half King photography series is curated by James Price and Anna Van Lenten

Previous exhibitions at The Half King