US photographer shows grim face of troops wounded in Iraq

NEW YORK (AFP) - When a suicide bomber attacked US Marine Sergeant Ty Ziegel's unit in Iraq, the heat from the blast melted the skin on his face while the explosion shattered his skull and destroyed one arm.

His burns left him with no nose, hair or ears. He has a plastic dome for a skull and a toe grafted onto his right hand to replace a thumb. The other arm is amputated just below the elbow. He is also blind in one eye.

And while Ziegel is one of the most tragic subjects in a new exhibition by photographer Nina Berman at New York's Jen Bekman Gallery, he is by no means alone.

Berman began taking portraits of US troops wounded in Iraq shortly after the 2003 invasion, choosing to shoot them not in hospital wards but in their homes, often in small town America, far from the media glare.

Ziegel's portrait shows him on his wedding day, his bride in a traditional white dress, clutching a bouquet of red roses and wearing an impenetrable expression that could be sadness, anger, fear or resignation.

Her 24-year-old groom wears his dress uniform and looks across the frame, but it is hard to discern any emotion on his heavily-scarred features.

Berman said she was first spurred into taking the portraits out of frustration, sickened by the early media coverage of the war.

"I started working on it out of exasperation at not seeing any visual representation of the human cost of war. In the press you kept hearing reports or reading reports about wounded but never seeing any images," she told AFP.

Berman said she was most interested not in her subjects' physical wounds but the psychological scars hidden beneath.

"I photograph them alone, mainly in their rooms, which to me feel like little cages," she said. "I see them alienated and dispossessed."

Paratrooper Randall Clunen's face was peppered with shrapnel when a suicide car bomber attacked his unit. Back home in Ohio, he seemed to long for Iraq.

"I liked it. The excitement. The adrenaline. Never knowing what's going to happen," he told Berman. "Now it's nothing. You just watch the news or you watch the war movies on TV."

Berman says that although she sees herself as a neutral observer, the photographs are almost inevitably anti-war.

"I think it's very hard to stomach the idea that war is acceptable when you see the damage to human beings," she said.

Although her images mostly deal with individual soldiers, she has also focused on the broader impact of such devastating wounds.

"For the families it's a huge thing. It doesn't just happen to one person, it happens to an entire family," she said.

Added to the horrific injuries is the sense of utter futility.

"One of them, who lost both of his legs, was delivering ice to fellow soldiers. Another guy was out taking a piss and he stepped on a mine. War's not full of glory," Berman said.

Although few of her subjects express regret, there is a sadness to them.

"Someone joins the military with certain fantasies and dreams and hopes and they dedicate themselves to those dreams and then out of nowhere -- because they were really in the wrong place at the wrong time -- all of that is finished," said the photographer.

She says she is glad that the photographs have been well received, but surprised that people find them shocking, four years into a war that has left more than 27,500 US troops wounded and a further 3,700 dead.

Robert Acosta was wounded in Baghdad when an Iraqi teenager threw a grenade into his Humvee. He lost his right hand and the use of his left leg. Berman photographed him outside his California home wearing his prosthetic arm.

"Nobody really knows what the soldiers are going through. They see on TV, oh yeah, two soldiers got wounded today and they think yeah he'll be all right. But that soldier is scarred for life both physically and mentally."

"They ask stupid questions like, 'Was it hot? Did you shoot anybody?' They want me to glorify war and say it was so cool. The reality of it is, seeing all that crap f---s you up in the head, man," he said.

"I can't sleep at night. It sucks. It really sucks."

But the most tragic of her subjects, she says, is Sam Ross, a 21-year-old who was blinded and lost a leg in an explosion while disposing of surplus US munitions.

Berman photographed him near the trailer where he lives alone in rural Pennsylvania, his prosthetic leg sticking out of a pair of rolled up jeans.

Since returning from Iraq he has tried to commit suicide several times.

"I lost my leg just below the knee. Lost my eyesight. I have shrapnel in pretty much every part of my body," he said. "I don't have any regrets. It was the best experience of my life."

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