Last year my brother posted a story about some graffiti photos I showed to some of his supporters.
The photos were mostly taken of a graveyard of abandoned military vehicles from the old regime and ours. I have now published the photos at webshots and am linking you to the slide show here. I found the photos and the location highly significant, although I am not sure if my explanation of the signifigance is accurate, and I invite you to look for meaning as well in the photos, or perhaps just tell me So what?
The vast majority of the pictures I took at the Taji Boneyard was completed in two separate trips. The first trip I was just trying to capture photos that might have an interesting or compelling story. The second trip to the Graffiti yard, I tried to document as close as I could to 100 percent of all the messages that were left on the tanks. I failed in my mission. I have between 600 and 1100 photographs of separate and distinct graffiti messages, but that still only captured an estimated 30-40 percent of all the messages left in the boneyard. If my estimation is correct between 2000-4000 GI's have left their indelible "Kilroy was here" mark in this field of abandoned Iraqi Scrap.
What kind of messages are the soldiers leaving?
Far and away the largest number of graffiti messages are those of Love. Counting the "I miss yous" and "I love yous" quickly became an insurmountable task. You will also see names that hold meaning only to the writers, as well as expletive deletives, a porn site, peace symbols, political outrage, Holiday wishes, and many other strange expressions that possibly only hold meaning to the author. One of the guns was emblazoned with the indelible question: "Why R we here Bush?" The panel of this gun had birthday wishes to someone named Breane. The color of paint appear to be similar. Was this merely a father asking the President why does he have to keep missing his daughter's birthday? It should become obvious that at least to some of the message writers you are looking into their own personal photo collections from their tour in Iraq.
By far and away though the general nature of the collective messages deal not with political outrage, but with the pain of separation. With some soldiers, and marines now going on their fourth and fifth deployment one has to wonder what the long term effect this will have on America's military families.
This is a new form of media I am working with so if any of these links do not work, or perhaps you have a better way of accomplishing something in terms of media I am open to suggestions.
For those of you who want the short form and want to get to the point I have compiled a summarized slide show.
For those of you who want to spend more time looking through the Graffiti photos you can click onTaji1 Or, Taji2
This is not the complete set of photos that I took, but I think it is more than enough to convey any possible signifigance of the photos. The singular question that rolls though my mind when I first saw the Taji Boneyard was, Who wrote all this? Finding the Who in this graveyard is probably a next to impossible task. There are some clues though, that would at least give someone a starting point. In some cases, I do know first hand of someone who did leave some artwork behind, but I do not personally have those photographs, although I could get them, and would even be able to obtain permission from the artist.
In either way, the possibility that I could eventually return to the said location is at least remotely possible. If anyone knows of anyone at the location who might be willing to document the other side of the road, or knows of someone who might have sent them the picture "8 more Months" or anything else, I would be more than pleased to hear from them. My email is always open.