Shane Lavalette

Casualty, Fort Polk, Louisiana, 2005 [from "Theater of War"]
© Christopher Sims

Big congratulations to Christopher Sims for receiving this year’s Baum Award For Emerging American Photographers. The award offers support in mounting a solo exhibition and a generous $10,000 grant. I was honored to be among the 50 artists who to be nominated by 25 contemporary art curators; I can only imagine how difficult it was to select the recipient!

I first took notice of Chris’ series Theater of War not too long ago, when jurying Photolucida’s Critical Mass. Even though it immediately called to mind Claire Beckett‘s very strong Simulating Iraq series (set in California rather than Louisiana), I remember thinking it was also an interesting project with a lot of depth.

Here’s his statement and a few images from the series:

In recent years, I have been making photographs within fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases, places largely unknown to most Americans. The villages are situated in the deep forests of North Carolina and Louisiana, and in a great expanse of desert near Death Valley in California. Each base features clusters of villages spread out over thousands of acres, in a pretend country known by a different name at each base: Talatha, Braggistan, or “Iraq.”

Graffito, Fort Polk, Louisiana, 2005 [from "Theater of War"]
© Christopher Sims

The villages serve as a strange and poignant way station for people heading off to war and for those who have fled it. U.S. soldiers interact with pretend villagers who are often recent immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan, who have now found work in America playing a version of the lives they left behind. The remainder of the village population is drawn from the local communities near the Army bases, including spouses of active duty soldiers as well as military veterans of America’s wars in Vietnam and Korea, some of whom are amputees and who play the part of wounded villagers in their new identities.

Jihad Lamp, Fort Polk, Louisiana, 2006 [from "Theater of War"]
© Christopher Sims

The villages are places of fantastic imagination. The actors continue playing their roles as police officers, gardeners, and café owners during the long stretches of day between training exercises. Some villagers plant crops that they harvest months later for food for their lunches and dinners. Others pass their leisure time painting murals on the interior walls to beautify their surroundings, or making arts and crafts to trade with other villagers.

Mother with Babies, Fort Polk, Louisiana, 2005 [from "Theater of War"]
© Christopher Sims

Sometimes I visit the villages with access provided by the military’s public affairs office; other times I am a role player myself, playing the character of a war photographer for the “International News Network.” Here, backstage in the war on terrorism, I see insurgents planting a bomb in a Red Crescent ambulance; American soldiers negotiating with a reluctant mayor; a suicide bomber detonating herself outside of a mosque; and villagers erupting in an anti-American riot. The designers and inhabitants of these worlds take great pride in the scope and fidelity of their wars-in-miniature. By day’s end, hundreds of soldiers and civilians lay dead—the electronic sensors on their special halters indicating whether friendly fire, an improvised explosive device, or a sniper’s bullet has killed them.

See more from Theater of War here.

And, again, congrats Chris!

[from "East Tennessee"]
© Mike Smith

About a year ago I had the pleasure of meeting Mike Smith and viewing a stack of prints from his East Tennessee series. I came across his website recently and realized I never mentioned his work here. The selection on his site is fairly limited in terms of the scope of the project, but still worth a look.