The american photographer, Jessica Hines, is the Grand Prize winner of the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards 2010 with a series “My Brother’s War”. More than 6,400 submissions have been received from photographers in 47 countries. The intention behind “My Brother’s War” is Hines attempt to gain a better understanding of what happened to his brother, Gary, when he was a soldier in the Vietnam War. Drafted, he served two years and returned home a victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ten years later, he took his own life.
Jessica Hines work can be viewed and will be for sale at MEET THE ARTISTS NIGHT at the Spéos Paris Institute of Photography 16 November. Collectors can see and buy photography from many of the participating portfolio review artists. More than 100 participating photographers will also be showing and selling their photographs for this 2-hour free event open to the public.
My Brother’s War, photographs and text by Jessica Hines
“In 1967 my brother, Gary, was drafted into the US Army during the American war in Vietnam. Because our parents were ill and Gary was our caretaker, I was sent to live with relatives. On November 4th, my brother arrived in Qui Nhon, Vietnam. I rarely saw him again until I was grown.
Gary wrote many letters home while he was stationed in Vietnam. Pictures arrived. Although in his letters he spoke of his living quarters and described the helicopters he flew into the front lines, he rarely discussed the dangers. Discharged from the army in December of 1969 with a “service connected nervous disorder”, we later came to know his problem as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My pre-war brother, a normal and well-adjusted person became, according to the US Veterans’ Administration, 50% disabled. He took his own life ten years later.
Twenty-five years after his death, I discovered among his belongings, a memo pad that revealed the names and addresses of his wartime friends, some of whom, with diligence, I managed to contact – 35 years after the war.
Through the remembrances of his wartime friends and through my own journeys to Vietnam in 2007 and 2008, I retraced Gary’s “footsteps” using his letters and photographs as guides. I continue to make discoveries about wartime in Vietnam as experienced by its veterans. The visual record of those experiences continues to unfold.”
Jessica Hines
Tuesday 16 November 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Spéos Paris Institute of Photography
8 rue Jules Valles, 75011Paris.
Jessica Hines, Grand Prize, Portfolio category / Lens Culture international exposure awards 2010
