Pink bunny

Jesse McKinley has an article in The New York Times about surreal images of war and peace:

During her yearlong tour of duty in Iraq, Major Elizabeth A. Condon saw all manner of horror and heartbreak, from dead bodies in the street and memorials for fallen friends to “little babies with holes in their backs".
But it was a moment of tenderness, she said, that stuck with her most. It happened when she was helping to care for a young Iraqi woman, whose belly had been left ripped open and infected from an amateur cesarean. “The eldest women in the room took my hand, and started kissing my cheek and then all the other adult women each came over and kissed my cheek too,” said Major Condon, now 43 and living in Loudonville, New York. “It was a very warm, wonderful, wonderful feeling. I don’t know if I saved the woman or whatever. But it was very, very emotional.”
Major Condon’s experience is one of ten such moments— each drawn from an instance of high drama in a war zone— that have been given a surreal twist by the photographer Jennifer Karady for In Country: Soldiers Stories From Iraq and Afghanistan, an exhibition opening at Camerawork, a downtown gallery in San Francisco.
In Country is the result of five years’ work by Ms. Karady, who interviewed dozens of veterans and asked them to talk about their most traumatic war moments. She then overlaid those memories onto their present-day lives, in the suburbs, back at school, and, in one case, on the streets. Ms. Karady, 43, described a process that she called equal parts journalism and psychotherapy. “This thing is replaying visually in the person’s head, and we really have no idea what is going on,” she said. “But the idea, conceptually, of taking that moment and recontextualizing and placing it in the civilian world, is based on a therapeutic model.”
The portraits are striking. In one of the large-format color prints, which measure four feet square, a soldier ascends a dark flight of stairs, armed with nothing more than a pair of textbooks held like a rifle. In another, a smiling ranger sits on the edge of a placid lake, camping, as two buddies— each wearing googly-eyed glasses and bloody fatigues— smile back. In a third, a sergeant sits bolt upright in a burned-out house with no other company other than a giant pink bunny.
Adding to the photos’ emotional impact for the subjects is the fact that many of the models used to create the images— a little boy holding a gun, a young woman holding an IV, a mother holding a bouquet of lilies— are their friends or family members.
For Andy Davis, 29, a former Army staff sergeant who served two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, that meant enlisting two other Iraq War veterans and his wife. The moment he chose involved a thirteen-day firefight, in which a fellow soldier was shot in the eye by a sniper.
Mr. Davis said it was his reaction to the shooting— laughter and gallows humor— that haunted him. “How quickly we were dealing with it with humor made me feel sick,” said Mr. Davis, who now works as an outreach and training coordinator for the New York State Division of Veterans’ Affairs. “It made me feel like we were laughing at a car accident.”
Ms. Karady, who has done freelance photography for The New York Times, approached Mr. Davis last year when she was at Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and began general conversations about his experiences. Slowly, Mr. Davis recalled, those chats “started getting more specific”. They talked, he said, “about things you still think about daily, very specifically: the smells, the sights, the thoughts, and the feelings.”
In the photograph, shot last fall at Saratoga Lake, Mr. Davis sits bloodied with an awkward smile, while his buddies sit nearby, also washing off blood and wearing those novelty glasses with their eyes bulging out. In the distance, it seems, is Mr. Davis’s more serene current reality, with his wife, Jodie, sitting next to a small pup tent. Mr. Davis said the photograph — and the process leading to its creation— was remarkably therapeutic. “It helped me slow the whole scene down,” he said. “And think about why things happened the way they did and why I’m still dealing with this.”
Major Condon echoed that sentiment, saying her photograph— which includes her mother and three-year-old daughter, seemingly praying— helped bridge a distance she felt from her family. When she hung a copy in her home, “something just clicked,” she said. “I don’t know how, but I really enjoy being with my daughter now. It was very painful, but very healing.”
Dr. Jonathan Sherin, the chief of mental health for the West Los Angeles V.A. Medical Center and an informal advisor to Ms. Karady, likened the photos to “exposure therapy”, in which veterans are asked to revisit painful experiences. “Working with her, going through the staging, spending a lot of time reliving and remembering has been, for them, very helpful,” Dr. Sherin said.
Ms. Karady’s pictures have a heavy emphasis on symbolism. In a 2006 portrait of Steve Pyle, a former sergeant who was badly injured in a mortar attack, she put two of his children on a trampoline, to suggest the feeling of flying he felt when the mortar exploded. Likewise two other children are shown kicking a ball, a nod to a violent beating Mr. Pyle received after the attack.
A more recent picture— depicting Jason Lemieux, a former Marine— required her to buy dozens of bags of cheese puffs, which were relabeled with Arabic script to match a memory of Mr. Lemieux in which an unarmed civilian was killed coming out of a storeroom.
Ms. Karady says she is conscious about not pushing her subjects too far. She consults with them on what details they want to include. “I always ask: ‘Do you think you’re going to be okay?’ and ‘Is this going to bring anything up for you?’” she said. She also emphasizes that many of her subjects are adjusting well to life after war, with or without the photos. One of those is Starlyn Lara, a 33-year-old Army veteran who now works at Swords to Plowshares, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that offers assistance to veterans. The group helped Ms. Karady get in touch with some of the veterans she photographed. Ms. Starlyn’s photograph, taken in February on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, shows her sitting up in bed in a charred room, with a pink bunny gazing at her. The image comes from a recurring dream she began having after a bomb exploded under her Humvee in Iraq. “I’m laughing in the dream, going, ‘I can’t believe this pink bunny!’” she says in an interview published in the exhibit catalog. “And I stop, and the pink bunny gets hit by my Humvee. I see myself in the vehicle, and I realize that the pink bunny is the bomb.” In an interview, Ms. Starlyn, whose bubbly demeanor belies her past life in the First Infantry, said she was initially skeptical of the process— “I thought it might come off as weird”— but actually found it cathartic. “At first I thought, ‘Who wants to talk about this stuff?’ But this really was an opportunity for me to blossom,” she said. She now keeps a copy at her office. “People ask, ‘What’s with the bunny?’” she said. “It really created a great reason for dialogue.”