This year, the United States will mourn the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a historic event that precipitated U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which barely register in the American public’s consciousness. No longer the cause célèbre driven by a desire to destroy Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, few may be aware that a May 21 deadline for complete U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will symbolically mark the end of the nation’s longest war. All but discarded as yesterday’s news, these wars have become an afterthought to the American mind, their consequences on foreign and domestic policy largely ignored.
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Yet their impact continues to resonate and inform the world in ways in a myriad of ways deeply and inextricably intertwined, a hallucinatory labyrinth of events and implications Magnum Photos member Peter van Agtmael seeks to explore in his latest book, Sorry for the War (Mass Books). “Sorry for the War is dedicated to the anonymous lives caught in the middle of America’s wars. Twenty years later, we hardly know a face or a name,” van Agtmael writes in the acknowledgments, a poignant reminder of the incalculable cost of war.
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Since 2006, van Agtmael has documented America at war at home and abroad, creating a hallucinatory picture of a nation willfully giving itself over to the numbing powers of cognitive dissonance. In Sorry for the War, van Agtmael takes us inside the belly of the beast, drawing damning parallels between the horrors of war and the fetid bliss of ignorance. Combing documentary photographs with images of mainstream media, van Agtmael explores the vertigo-inducing disconnect between reality and spectacle through a series of surreal images accompanied by annotated captions that provide at times deeply disconcerting context.
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