Injured Soldiers and Marines: Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Well-known portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders was invited to make portraits of seventeen Iraq war veterans to accompany the 2007 HBO film, Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq. The film tells the story of ten of these veterans, exploring the emotional and physical price each has paid, as well as their patriotism and future ambitions.
Greenfield-Sanders built his career taking pictures of celebrities. He typically photographs politicians, famous artists, and cultural icons against a neutral background with minimal props. These simple compositions, with the portrait subject in a frontal pose engaging the viewer with a direct gaze, bring each individual’s personality to the fore.
He employs this compositional simplicity in his portraits of Injured Soldiers and Marines. Although these particular subjects have limited physical mobility, and in some cases emotional devastation—factors that complicated the photographer’s ability to interact with them and arrange their poses—Greenfield-Sanders kept his compositions simple and allowed his sitters to settle into their own poses against neutral backgrounds.
The resulting images allow the subjects’ humanity and physical energy to define their portraits. The images allow us as viewers to engage with the subjects’ eyes, expressions, and postures before we focus on their physical damage.
Portraiture has always served the purpose of recording individuals for posterity. We do not typically think of scars and prostheses as objects of beauty. Yet Greenfield-Sanders brings his talent for observing beauty —and humanity—to documenting these seventeen individuals and the significance of their sacrifice. These images are meant to highlight the physical imperfections of each sitter, yet ultimately Greenfield-Sanders communicates the strength, dignity, and fullness of each complex individual.
Rachael Arauz, Curator
Click here to download the gallery brochure for this exhibit. (PDF, 8.5×11, double-sided)
Click here to read the Brattleboro Reformer’s Thanksgiving Day 2008 editorial about this exhibit.
The portraits in this exhibit are on loan courtesy of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Björn Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
