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Mike Kamber |
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WAR ZONES |
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April 13th-May 10th, 2004 |
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Artist Statement: Over past several years I’ve spent a large amount of time with soldiers. Some were cartoonish, living out their very own action movie in bandanas and sunglasses, amulets and tank tops. With names like General Born to Kill, they imitated Sly Stallone imitating them and saw more action in a day then a movie star does in a lifetime. A few of the soldiers that I knew were children--some who joined after their parents were killed, and for whom the older soldiers were a surrogate family. Others, kidnapped in front of movie theaters and forced to fight, walked barefoot through the dust, dragging their AK-47’s behind them. The American special ops soldiers in Iraq were thorough professionals. Bristling with weapons, they fought next to paunchy middle-aged reservists on leave from local police departments all over America. The special ops guys couldn’t get enough of it. The reservists couldn’t wait to get home. Regardless of motivation or nationality, what all these men (and a few women) have in common is that they do the bidding of leaders who have decided that political ends are arrived at by pulling a trigger and taking a life—the life of someone’s father or sister or son. The violence fascinates and repels me, as I think it does many of us. I photograph it in an eternally futile attempt to make sense of the violence and to try to understand these soldiers. I hope that, at the very least, there is some value in bearing witness to what happens when the trigger is pulled. |
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About The Photographer: Michael Kamber was born in Brunswick, Maine in 1963. He has worked as a New York City-based freelance photographer and journalist since the late 1980’s. In the United States, Kamber has covered immigration, homelessness, labor issues and the environment. He has made numerous trips to Mexico to document the mass migration of laborers to the United States. He has also worked extensively in the Caribbean, covering politics, conflict and social issues in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In Pakistan and Afghanistan he has focused on the plight of long-term Afghan refugees and the future of a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Kamber spent 2003 photographing for the New York Times in West Africa and the Middle East, covering conflicts in the Ivory Coast, the Congo, Liberia and Iraq. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and Europe and is featured in two recent collections of journalism; The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 (Houghton Mifflin) and Brooklyn: A State of Mind. Kamber is a former Revson Fellow at Columbia University. He has been nominated for the World Press Photo award and the Pulitzer Prize in both photography and reporting. He is also the winner of the Mike Berger Award, the Missouri School of Journalism’s Lifestyle Award and the Deadline Club Award.
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This event is curated by Michelle Jackson |
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Previous exhibitions at The Half King For further information on these exhibits, please go here.
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