IRAK (2003)

The Swiss photographer Matthias Bruggmann (b. France, 1978) comes from a family of politicians and diplomats. With this background, at an early age he became engaged with world politics and grew up with a feeling of guilt for the inadequacies of diplomacy in preventing wars and conflicts. He sees his photography as a means of showing the violence of war to the world, and in this way hopes to take a more active role in opposing it than diplomats can have, often bound as they are by rules and conventions. He sums up the war in Iraq, which Bruggmann photographed without interference from the American and British troops, as a conflict between ‘frightened, badly trained teenagers with rifles who are defending one of the oldest civilisations in the world against a group of frightened, badly trained teenagers with great firepower and a leader who had almost no conception of the consequences of his acts.’