website update (iraq 2008)

Very impressive from beginning to end. There were times I was nervous for you just looking at the pictures. Great combination of moments/portraits with landscapes to set the tone. Top notch.

I would love to hear you discuss some of the experiences you had there.

Evocative and well done, front to back.
Hope you have been well
Jeremy

Hi, Moises.

Thanks for the update.
Great to see as always.

Best reagards,

youme.

Moises— congratulations on the work. I was unclear from the Times as to whether this was a commentary on what is going on in these cities, ie reporting, or more a general reflection of the mood? There were similar questions from readers on the Times blog I think. Would you consider clarifying your intent and choice of words, as in general the pictures raised more questions than answered them for me. I don’t mean to sound critical…its just that everything about Iraq raises questions for me.

it’s always a distinct pleasure to see your work moises. my only question is, i don’t know when i’m looking at baghdad, basra, or mosul? perhaps that’s your point? great stuff regardless.

Thanks Lancer, as usual, the simplest reaction is often best— that was what I was trying to say.

For me Gilles Peress “Telex” book redefined conflict photography— but it was intentionally ambiguous and had those absurd telexes to Nan with the photos so it was clear that this wasn’t just a report that one might see in US@WR or TIME. I think there is some Telex in Moises fine work, but it isn’t really put into context. News? Editorial feature? Perhaps and more likely “opinion?” I am not sure, and I think it takes something away and definitely frustrates to see. The war is so political I find myself wanting the didactic, whether that is the defacto embed stuff, or what Zoriah was doing, or Eros Hoagland on the Iraqi oil which was somewhere inbetween (but very informational and thank you Eros for that) in other words as a media consumer I want to know how to draw my own conclusions— so wider, less filtered, is more, although as a photographer I admire what Moises has done.

dear andy, lance…..i really appreciate your comments and questions…..as you know a smaller edit of the 3 cities was published recently in the NYT baghdad bureau blog, the photo editors at the NYT offered me the chance to come up with a very personal edit that would somehow express the mood, more than a journalistic day-to-day account of my travels in iraq while on assignment for them…..i used the 3 cities as the anchor to base the story but by no means i pretended to answer the incredibly complex nature of what is going on in iraq at the moment….
thanks,
moises

Thanks Moises, that context makes it easier for me to understand and appreciate your work— which I really admire.

m:

you cannot imagine how important it is that you continue….

that when i first saw the work, i thought, quite simply, there there are still those who sing, wobbly and broken, against all that is thrown against them….this is the importance, for me, as a photogapher, as a writer, as person, of your work….

and so, drunkenly, i write this for anothe friend, an ocean or 2 away, but maybe this makes sense to u too..

My home is the place where my body, the shell and flesh and aging thoughts of this poorly planned life, meets the soil of all that I least expected to find as nourishment but provides the simple character of this: bread and breath. Let me speak to you that I have rarely had much expectations for my life nor for too long felt the cool rush adrenalin of believing that what I did with my life would amount to something significant or unsurmountable. I always felt that I would live, the way my childhood was defined, adrift. Nor had I ever dreamed that I would find a home, a physical geographic point that i could finger-fuck like a warm assurance. My life was not bequeath such certainty. I have know travel, from the time I was a child. I have known exploration and restlessness. I have known uncertainty and fear. I have known sorrow and sadness and screaming parents. I have knowing parents who howled into the long end of a day when i didn’t even have the luxury to know yet what it meant to howl from love and sadness. I saw my mother break apart in front of me. I saw my father divest himself to help her. I saw the landscape of my childhood, homes friends places light time language geogrpahy, pass in front of my life as if a kalidescope of beauty and wreckage. I was convinced that I would never find a home and spend the entirety of my life, the entirety of my peripatetic life defined by that: plant, excavate, run, plant, excavate, run.

I was wrong. My parents, in their human frailty, their restlessless, their wreckage, taught me that home meant, often, little about geographic categories but something less dissolvable.

what is it that we have marked as the place that we have live and how to render that……

i love love this story about Iraq….

and i love love ur work…

exhausted..
b

ps….

it makes me sad that i can not drag you up here to speak, to show your work, to let it quelch all the nonsense that still abides….

if there is one, one sadness that i feel about this year, it is that i could nto show you and teru and Balazs….

for me, 3 Cities will be, eventually understood or not, seen as among THE seminal work, the seminal excavation of what we wronged, what countenanced as for 21st century life…it is that important…

b

dude do a book this work is epic