Side Gallery
Future Exhibitions
Saturday 4 July - Saturday 22 August 2009
Soldiers on red carpet, New York City.
Human target practice, “All America Day” at Ft. Bragg.
HOMELAND
Nina Berman
Capturing the culture of civic paranoia that took hold across the United States after the attacks of September 11, Berman took these photographs between 2001 and 2008, the very term ‘Homeland’ unfamiliar to her before George W Bush’s War on Terror. “In my photographs, Homeland is where Air Force bombers entertain sunbathers on summer weekends; happy families step through the suburbs clutching anti-nuke pills...evangelial Christians dress in Afghan burqas; senior citizens become extras in a War On Terror script; and military recruitment spectacles transform children into would-be killers. “There are simulation drills costing millions of dollars and involving thousands of participants: Islamic terrorists with nuclear bombs, Islamic terrorists hijacking planes, bioterrorists, chemical terrorists, school bus terrorists and shopping mall terrorists. There is even a camp for wayward youth to help them learn how to respond to terrorists… Rather than continuing to focus on the evidence of war it seemed important to show the fantasies of war.”
MARINE WEDDING
Nina Berman
Retired Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel, severely wounded in Iraq by a suicide bomber.
Ty Ziegel, with his bride Renee Kline, the morning of their wedding.
Contrasting with the bizarre and territory of Homeland, in Marine Wedding Nina Berman focuses on the human costs of war in this painful and personal portrait. Ty Ziegel is a former US Marine Corps Sergeant who was seriously injured while serving in Iraq. During his second tour of Iraq in 2004, his unit was attacked by a suicide bomber and he was trapped in the burning truck. Losing his left forearm and three fingers of his right hand, he was blinded in his right eye. Widespread burns led to the loss of his ears and much of the tissue on his face. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.
After over 50 operations, he had recovered enough to leave hospital and Ziegel married his girlfriend Renee Kline in 2006. They lived together in Illinois up until their separation shortly before their first wedding anniversary.