Green Zone Iraq

Reading confusion in the work presented here, I would like to elicit a contradiction: Empires lie, sprawled and piteous under hefty, grinding oppression. Etiologically, are the walls invoking fear or is the fear driving up the walls? '...you don’t know I said. You can’t know and he said Yes. On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.' (Faulkner) I beg you, don’t parrot empire rhetoric- our complicated and diffuse globe merits the dignity of nuance and your refined sensitivity. One might ask: does a photographer not also colonize truth, settling on the frontier of incomplete moments? The institution is nothing more, and nothing less, than a state of mind. Military is a technique. Military instalments are rituals enshrined in cultural myth and historicity. I urge compassion, towards the military complex, such a rigid, pained and paranoid institution. I urge, do not lean on the comfortable old illusion of the impossibility of dialogue and openness. Do not discount the conceivability of shared context. All domination involves invasion. Caution, photographer, for I smell on you the very slight odour of a suspect neo-witchcraft. Perhaps, perhaps you have unwittingly bedded with the informatics of domination, lies young and supple. Beware the temptation of certainty. You are aligned in ways you may not even realize, for instance, you likely did not choose to be a cyborg and perhaps do not know that you are one. I believe that statused professionals have an ethical imperative to obtain to heightened and superconscious deliberacy in naming, engaging, and aligning both work and self; professional status makes us players in many games of which we are unaware. <>“...when I ask permission; the word “record” is less threatening...a recurrent theme...my attempt to present myself as...without an agenda....”>> In my (limited) knowledge of your past work, your theoretical motivation has been to: ‘try to see something for what it really is’, so, the word agenda is troubling. To secure permission, I understand that circumstances require a. So that you must. Communicate in a way that will. Trust me, I do understand the impossibility of. In a situation where no rights bumbling threat to the state bye one wrong word. I know, I know this, I don’t criticise. I want you to know that you can have an agenda of dialogue. Photography, a form of codification, is risky- business- if antidialogical. ‘Reality must be forged with and not for.’ (Freire) You did not use the word colonial, but its appearance in the comments did not surprise me. Implied on these pages is an agenda to document colonialism and I sense flawed methodology. Although it is extremely mild in comparison to the US invasion of Iraq, I note that your work and writing manifests a mild occurrence of ‘cultural invasion’ characteristic of antidialogical action. ‘In this phenomenon, the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the other’s potentialities....’ (Freire) This is operation of the ego as an immune system, recognising the Other, naming the Enemy, thus glorifying the American military establishment and validating immobile perception of an unjust social order. Those lone figures, mentally and physically walled in, ‘...if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions, but also to my own...I am not free while any woman is unfree...’ (Audre Lorde, 72) Dialogue- he said, “You have made me see a T-Wall in a completely different way.” Donovan Wylie, your work has (always) offered ‘the gift of extending one’s sense of possibility’ (Rich). Thank you, don’t lose sight, remember that you can do this.