Book Review: 'Unembedded' Humanizes War in Iraq Through Photography

By: Miki Johnson Many of the photos are a little out of focus or blurry from low-light exposure. Some of them could have been framed a little better. But every picture in the new photojournalism collection, "Unembedded," shows the viewer a piece of Iraq usually hidden from outside eyes.

"Unembedded," published this fall by the Chelsea Green Publishing Co., brings together work from four photojournalists who chose to chronicle the Iraq war by their own means rather than under the auspices of a military unit. The contributors: Americans Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson, Canadian Rita Leistner, and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi who deserted the army and now contributes to the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

In his introduction, Salon's Iraq war correspondent, Phillip Robertson, describes his experience as a non-embed crossing the U.S. cordon and the Mahdi Army lines on foot in August 2004 to relay information that was restricted by fierce fighting and military blockades.

"We crossed the lines because we believe it is more important to humanize a conflict than it is to trade in rhetorical truths, or to reinforce easy notions of enemy and friend, which are mere propaganda," he writes. "We were able to do this precisely because we did not carry weapons or claim allegiance to one of the warring parties."

It is ultimately the impressive access and unflinching honesty of these photos that sets them apart from the average war image that reaches Western eyes.

In one, a member of the "Jerusalem Army" stares out through the eyeholes in his suicide bomber costume. In another an Arab foreign fighter grips his gun to the Koran, which he reads in a bunker while U.S. planes bomb Falluja. Several pictures look up at funeral cloths as they are brought down on rough-hewn caskets or into rooms occupied by inconsolable mourners and tiny, limp bodies.

But beside the unavoidable images of blood and chaos and destruction, there are glimpses into everyday lives that are affected but not yet stopped by the war. Women, so often invisible or hidden under robes, frolic in the river while bathing or smile from passing cars in a wedding party or cry against a tile wall in the Rashad Psychiatric Hospital in Baghdad.

Along with their captions, the photos are accompanied by excerpts from the photographers' letters, journals, and feature stories. In one, Anderson describes a few days he spent traveling with American soldiers, and its comparison to his work "embedded with the Iraqi people" captures the impetus for the book: "From the American humvees I could see the Iraq that I know, but there was no interaction with it ? They may have an occasional chat with some random Iraqis who pass by, but the American soldiers don't make Iraqi friends over time, they don't eat in their homes, visit their mosques, play with their children, go to weddings, play dominoes, or take afternoon naps with them."