War

I've been working hard and literally shooting every day to get photos together for my "war" assignment. At first I had been considering ways to address the theme in a less direct way, but in the end I realized I really just wanted to meet it head on and have been constructing scenes as if war had broken out in contemporary America - suburban Florida even in my case. Throughout history war has been something, for Americans anyway, that is fought elsewhere, in foreign countries. There has not been real fighting for hundreds of years on American soil, and I wanted to address the hypothetical reality of that. I am not focusing so much on the guts and glory aspects of war, the dramatization you see on TV and in movies, but the very real and very human aspects of those left behind, those in the margins and on the sidelines, their lives turned upside down as their cities, their homes, are invaded by enemy forces. In my photos, this unknown enemy is never seen or brought to life except in its obvious presence and effect on those being documented. Their emotions, their frailty or panic or resilience - these are the things I am thinking about, the things I think will provoke a response and make the images wholly relatable.