Nina Berman: Purple Hearts

A Purple Heart, the honour given to US soldiers for their wounds, is one that many cling to when faced with the realities of both the return home and their time at war. Accompanying the images are first person interviews with the soldiers as they discuss why they enlisted and their experiences in the second Iraq war, as well as their lives now and the prospect of living as disabled veterans.

The images are accompanied by first person interviews with the young soldiers who discuss their lives, reasons for enlisting, experiences in Iraq and their prospects as disabled veterans, some of them blind, some without limbs, others brain damaged and wheel-chair bound.

The words and photos make for a complex portrait of American youth, their values, their dreams, the lack of opportunity facing them upon high school graduation, and the myths of warfare which informed their decisions to join.

One soldier explained that he always wanted to be a hero and thought the military would be fun. He never imagined an RPG attack in Fallujah would leave him a cripple unable to care for a wife and two children. Another described calling the recruiting station after he saw an MTV-style Army commercial on TV. An immigrant from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury, a fair trade in his mind, a leg for an American passport. Yet another soldier left a crime, drug ridden neighbourhood in Alabama, only to return 100 percent disabled back where he started but now bedridden.

The photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author and editorial writer for the New York Times, and Tim Origer, a Vietnam veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet offensive. He came back a 19 year-old amputee.
"I've been a documentary photographer since 1987 working in a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, India and Vietnam, but most of my time has been spent traveling the USA trying to understand the American Way of Life."

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist and educator. Her work explores American politics, militarism, environmental issues and post violence trauma. She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, (Trolley, 2004) portraits and interviews with wounded American veterans, Homeland, (Trolley, 2008) an examination of the militarization of American life post September 11, and An autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer, 2017) a story told with a survivor of sexual violence which was shortlisted for both the Aperture and Arles book prizes. Additional fellowships, awards and grants include: the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, the Open Society Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship and the Aftermath Project. She started her photographic career in 1988 as an independent photographer working on assignment for the world’s major magazines including Time, Newsweek, Life, the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, German Geo, and the Sunday Times Magazine. She covered a range of issues, from women under siege during war in Bosnia and Afghanistan, to domestic issues of criminal justice, reproductive rights, and political process. Her work has been exhibited at more than 100 international venues from the Whitney Museum Biennial to the concrete security walls at the Za'atari refugee camp. Public collections include the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of the City of New York, the Harvard Art Museums and the Bibliothèque nationale de France among others. She has participated in workshops around the world for young photographers and writes frequently on photojournalism for the Columbia Journalism Review. She is a tenured Professor of Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she directs the photojournalism/documentary photography program.