“I wanted to answer the question, ‘What if my family took a left turn, instead of a right turn?’” Lori Grinker said. “What would my life be like today if my great-grandfather hadn’t left Lithuania and I hadn’t won the lottery by growing up in the suburbs of New York?”
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfa
In Peter van Agtmael’s “2nd Tour Hope I don’t Die” and Lori Grinker’s “Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict,” two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.
Five years was about how long Lori Grinker thought it would take document the stories of former soldiers; she was only off by a decade.
Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict (de.MO), a 248-page collection of intimate color portraits and searing first-person accounts of postwar existence was published in March, 2005 — 15 years and 30 countries after she began the photographic odyssey.
