Orion over Baghdad by Jason Lazarus


About the work:

Orion over Baghdad project is a dimensions-variable installation of thousands of titles of images taken by US soldiers of their tour of duty in Iraq (as posted to Flickr). The snapshot titles found in soldier Flickr photo accounts are navigated one-at-a-time, and the text found in the ‘title’ field is manually copied, as entered by each soldier, into a growing archive.

As the war in Iraq has coincided with the mass availability of point and shoot digital cameras that are highly transportable, instantaneous, and omnipresent, Flickr provides a continually updated, soldier-mediated archive of thousands of individual soldier photo-narratives of their tour of duty experience.

By creating a continually growing archive of image-titles gleaned from individual soldier Flickr accounts, this project aims to explore the intersection of the conventions of the snapshot, the ubiquity of digital point-and-shoots cameras within a context of conflict, the individually mediated and transcribed experience of war, and the way in which contemporary titles of war snapshots are activated by the public consciousness of the history and tradition of images-of-war.

The archive is presented in two ways. The first features large vertical silver-gelatin photograms (50x84”) that present an uninterrupted field of thousands of titles. Each of these large photograms are float mounted, as photographic document-objects in 56x90” vertical frames. Each photogram text-field is a gesture in re-presenting for the viewer an archive of text that speaks not only to the community of moments that is constantly growing online, but one that is authored by the soldiers themselves, and whose meaning is propelled by our own collective consciousness of the notion of (this) war.

The second method is a selection of individual titles from the collection each printed as their own unique photogram, 16x20” each. This iteration of the archive underscores not only the experience of individual soldiers, but privileges individual moments as singular entry points to the soldier experience of the conflict in Iraq. This project represents a continued interest by the artist in the practice of ‘snapshot writing’ and the potential of titled snapshots as a visual language unto itself.

www.jasonlazarus.com