On the day I talk to Adam Ferguson, an Australian photojournalist based in the US, he is in San Antonio, Texas working on a story on war dogs and their handlers for National Geographic. He’s been on this story for over a year, and this fourth visit marks the end of the journey. From Texas he’s heading to Sydney for Reportage. “I am very excited about exhibiting on home soil as I’ve never exhibited a set of my pictures at home. I am also excited about exhibiting this body of work that I’ve called Iraq’s Legacy”.
Ferguson has carved a name for himself as a conflict photojournalist, but he says after hitting burn out working in Afghanistan “I started to feel disillusioned with the whole military machine and the response from the general public about the presence in Afghanistan. The counterpoint to that for me was going to Iraq. I hadn’t covered Iraq during the occupation and I watched this whole community migrate to another war zone and there were so many conversations where people mixed up Afghanistan and Iraq. So I was thinking what more do I have to say and what impact is it having (the work in Afghanistan)? I didn’t have those answers. For me to make sense I decided to go to Iraq. I wanted to see what this landscape was like after the US’ departure.”
Ferguson “hassled the New York Times” for whom he shoots regularly, to send him to Iraq, and they finally capitulated. He spent a month on what he termed “a dream assignment. I had a road trip around the country and did my own thing essentially. I went back again just recently and did the same thing again for a couple weeks. Iraq’s Legacy was very much about navigating a landscape and a people and interacting with that to come up with a much more lucid narrative than the one around the military that I’d developed in Afghanistan. And it was looking at the toll and cost of war and this legacy a nation has post-US occupation”.
Asked what he hoped the audience would walk away with after viewing his work, he said “I hope they understand that the war wasn’t won, it was much more complicated than winning or losing. And I hope that I photographed enough intimate moments to get an insight into what it means to live in an environment where you have experienced so much trauma. And everyone in Iraq has witnessed an incredible amount of trauma. I think it is important that that’s not forgotten”.
We turn to one particular image in Ferguson’s photo essay that resonated strongly with me; that of a young girl with roller skates, evoking the sense that child’s play is universal. “Yeah in many ways it was kind of too good to be true coming across a scene like that,” said Ferguson. “Sometimes as a photographer I feel like we just pump out these kind of poetic clichés especially when we are focusing on people who have lived through a lot of agony. When I took this shot it was snowing and these two young girls were playing on the street. One of them picked up her roller skates and started making her way down this dirt road in the snow and to me it was a metaphor for the country really. Here was this young girl, with this kind of technology on her feet and not really the surface to use it properly in adverse weather conditions. And it was beautiful and kind of gracious”.
Reportage Projections – check the website for locations
Alison Stieven-Taylor
