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Photographs by Christoph Bangert
Text by Jon Lee Anderson
Photography / Current Events
Hardcover
10.25 x 10.25 inches
128 pages
74 four-color photographs
ISBN: 978-1-57687-400-4
Photographs by Christoph Bangert
Text by Jon Lee Anderson
Photography / Current Events
Hardcover
10.25 x 10.25 inches
128 pages
74 four-color photographs
ISBN: 978-1-57687-400-4
“For me, this book is about distance. It describes the gap between different peoples and cultures in Iraq. It attempts to show the space between two wars, the American invasion and the Iraqi civil war, the space between us and them, my experience and your experience. The fear and mistrust between humans.”
—Christoph Bangert
During the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Christoph Bangert was still attending photography school. Only later, in the spring of 2005, when the Iraqi insurgency and sectarian violence reached its first peak, Westerners were kidnapped and beheaded, and most foreign journalists had left the country, did this intrepid photographer start to work in Iraq on assignment for The New York Times.
The overtly hostile environment in Iraq towards foreigners, without regard of the individual’s intention or affiliation, restricts the freedom of journalists, particularly photographers, who (unlike writers) must be physically present in order to get the story. Despite these conditions, Bangert remained in Iraq as one of the few Western photographers committed to cover the war throughout 2006 and early 2007. He has worked largely independently from the military, using Iraqi guards, drivers, and translators, but was also occasionally embedded with American, British, and Iraqi forces. Iraq: The Space Between, his second powerHouse book, records the distance he traveled as a civilian between worlds committed to destruction in the name of freedom.
Christoph Bangert, born in Daun, Germany in 1978, studied mechanical engineering at the Universität Karlsruhe, photography at the Fachhochschule Dortmund, and photojournalism at the International Center of Photography, New York. He worked as a freelance photographer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and covered the war in Iraq for The New York Times. His work has been published in Stern, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, GEO, Der Spiegel, Neon, PDN, VICE, Days Japan, Sports Illustrated, and Tagesanzeiger Zürich. He is part of the Regeneration exhibition and book project created by the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, and was chosen both as one of 50 young photographers worldwide, representing all genres of photography, to shape the future of the medium in the next 25 years and as one of Photo District News’ “30 Under 30”. Christoph Bangert is the author of Travel Notes (powerHouse Books, 2006), his account of a six-month long overland journey from Buenos Aires to New York. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
Jon Lee Anderson has been writing for The New Yorker since 1998. He has reported frequently from Iraq and has covered the conflicts in Afghanistan and Lebanon. He has also reported from Liberia, Angola, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, among other places. He has written numerous profiles of political and cultural leaders, including Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, Gabriel García Márquez, King Juan Carlos, Hamid Karzai, and Jalal Talabani. Anderson is the author of several books and his work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, The Financial Times, The Guardian, El Pais, and other journals. He currently lives in Dorset, England, with his wife and three children.
