The Red and Black

Issue date: 4/25/08 Section: News

Media Credit: JON KIM Independent photojournalist Kael Alford speaks about her experiences documenting the current war in Iraq at the Student Learning Center Thursday. Along with showing her photographs, Alford also explained how her overall experience in Iraq has shaped her view of the war. [Click to enlarge]

Click. A wealthy Baghdad neighborhood lost in architectural rubble. Click. An 8-year-old girl, covered in blood, lies on a bathroom floor as her mother weeps over her limp body.

These were just some of the grim images that freelance photojournalist Kael Alford captured during her 2003-2004 coverage of the United States' invasion of Iraq. Alford, whose work has been featured in Time, The New York Times and Vanity Fair, now teaches documentary photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Alford's work was featured in the fall 2007 issue of The Georgia Review, Stephen Corey, editor in chief of The Georgia Review, said during Alford's "Eye Level in Iraq" presentation Thursday.

She was one of the few U.S. journalists who focused on the lesser-known side of the conflict - the Iraqi civilians.

Choosing to be a freelance photographer rather than an embedded one offered Alford freedom to choose where to go around the country, she said.

"I wanted to go to sites after bombings happened" to visually chronicle the stories of Iraqi families, Alford said.

Alford said her trip to Iraq before the 2003 bombings almost did not happen.

"During that time, Iraqis were not so eager with unfamiliar journalists and obtaining a visa was difficult," she said.

At the Jordanian embassy, an activist who did not show up for her visa had a similar name to Alford's, and the office allowed Alford the visa because of the similarities. Alford arrived in Iraq before the bombings of Baghdad, which she covered during their three-week duration.

"It was what I wanted to see, to be living under that fire power, to see what it's like to be attacked by the U.S.," she said.

As a photographer, she captured the anger that many civilians felt during the violence from U.S. occupation.

"Villagers would shout at the Americans [after bombings] and would say, 'Is this freedom and democracy? Is this what America has brought to us?'" she said.

Alford said the religious attitudes changed the opposition fighting into a holy war for many young Iraqi men, who had expressed their feelings about becoming resistance fighters to her.

"The 'death to all foreigners' message was not a concept here until the war," Alford said.

Alford said during her last trip to Iraq at the end of 2004, she tried to capture the mundane.

"I felt like I was recording a place that would be completely different if I ever got to come back," she said.

Alford, along with three other photojournalists, authored "Unembedded: Four Independent Journalists on the War in Iraq," a book that features their photographs from their work in Iraq.

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