BLACK – WATER is an ongoing large format project that attempts
to draw connections between seemingly disparate cultural
phenomena in a post 9/11 world, examining conflict through a
mythological lens with a view to uncovering how we are changed
by these events. The project to date encapsulates the sum of
fifteen years of ubiquitous violence and creeping fear, including
photographs made in UAV control stations in Nevada, training
camps in Kuwait and California, and Air Force bases in
Afghanistan.
I chose to distance this work from the sensational style in which
war is typically photographed, focusing instead on a meditative
and analytical observation of extraordinary events that have
become quotidian.
The project makes no claim to authenticity, interspersing
documentary photography with constructed imagery, but
instead breaks scenes down into a series of set-pieces: a
manufactured narrative of conflict in the media landscape, as if
the viewer finds herself backstage.
