Taken along US Highway 14 in the Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming
These are photographs taken during the fourteen months that I lived in southeastern Alabama while attending the U.S. Army’s Flight School at Fort Rucker.
Coming from Minnesota, it was a culture shock moving to the South. I wanted to capture the scenes that stood out to me. The most notable difference was the environment and the empty storefronts and buildings.
Memoria is the continuation of my senior exhibition for my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. I first began this project during my deployment to Afghanistan in 2012 with the Minnesota National Guard. While in Afghanistan, I shot thousands of images of the people and scenes that I saw every day. When I came home, I began looking at images that my grandfather took when he fought in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. I began to notice similarities in what he saw with what I saw in Afghanistan.
Memoria aims to show that no matter the decade, or location, war hasn’t changed that much. And for those on the ground, the sights and sounds remain essentially the same. I paired images my grandfather shot in Korea and Vietnam with images I shot in Afghanistan.
These are images I shot while deployed with C Company, 2-211 General Support Aviation Battalion, of the Minnesota Army National Guard. Nicknamed “Northstar Dustoff”, C Company is a medical evacuation unit. We would fly into a combat zone to rescue the wounded and return them to the critical care that they needed to survive. These images represent what I saw during my 9 months in Afghanistan as a UH-60 crew chief with the Northstar Dustoff.
What is real? Is it possible to separate what is staged and what is truly spontaneous? This series is an exercise in determining fact from fiction. Photography is unique in that it can capture a fake moment and convince us that it is authentic. Which of these photographs are staged and which are not?
“My favorite subjects are people who accept themselves. They can stand in front of my huge camera and let themselves be, unchanged, just as they are, in a natural state. The Japanese have a word for this pose of total naturalness and total attention - sonomama”
-Elsa Dorfman
