Artist Statement

War, despite its potential for horror and intense, often unrelenting violence, is filled with long periods of boredom and monotony. "Don't get complacent," everyone would say. Supposedly the instant you did, your number was up. But after running convoys two or three times a day and interacting with the local population on a daily basis, trying to maintain a sharp awareness of the present moment is an extremely difficult thing to do, and in that tension, you find yourself inhabiting a strange place between today and tomorrow where nothing really seems to exist. It didn't take long for Afghanistan to disappear. It became a nameless blur, an indistinct miasma of culture flickering past a bulletproof window.

These photos were an attempt to maintain a connection with what was happening around me, to prevent the sometimes inevitable downward spiral into blindness that often comes with getting used to a place and seeing everything in tactical terms. I wanted to see people, not "targets," "civilians," or "potential threats." I wanted to see mountains and valleys, not "positions," "dead space," or "cover and concealment." I wanted to remember that I really was in a place called Afghanistan, that I wasn't just a ghost with a rifle and a nervous dream of going home.