Unseen Iraq

My friend Andrea Bruce just posted a new image with a heartbreaking story on her blog posting at washingtonpost.com. Andrea's an amazing photographer. Like many photographer friends of mine, I knew her work before I met her. I first came across her photography when she was doing this great photo column at The Concord Monitor of little slices of life. A couple running out of gas on the side of the road or a little boy relieving himself in his front yard (it was funny, trust me). Andrea has since moved on to make some of the most human images of global conflict in the past decade. Her work from Iraq deviates from most by concentrating on the way that every day Iraqis are trying to live amidst all the war. Her conflict work is powerful for the same reason her work beyond the conflict is. It's always about the people whose lives she's there to document.

Visit her blog on the Post's site. The sum total of her postings reveal a side to the Iraq War that's so rarely seen or understood. They are the stories that drive so many journalists to work amidst totally irrational circumstances and even less rational rewards. It's hard to get this work published in many places besides those of the pages of a newspaper as the few pages that magazines devote to content is precious space and tends to be dominated by the immediate stories of the week as opposed to more in-depth, probing work.