Sean Thomas Foulkes

As a photographer (and an Iraq war veteran), I explore our complex relationship with modern conflict through the consumption of mass media. By accumulating and curating a staggering amount of video footage (all of it recorded from actual conflict participants and uploaded to media outlets like Youtube and Liveleak), my composites and video stills portray not only a domestic perspective of American policy enforcement, but account for opposing perspectives: some images are taken from videos shot by insurgent groups while engaged with the coalition forces. Using photomontage, I explore how the public’s reception of conflict imagery distills and ultimately masks our understanding of war– not through experience but through new media sources found intimately in soldiers’ personal footage. The resulting images avoid the traditional concept of an authentic visual document. I build my images by merging video stills together to create a larger dynamic landscape, leaving visual evidence in the form of digital tears or artifacts that not only reference the passage of time of the original footage. These fragments of engagement serve to keep the viewer at a tension-inducing distance from an ultimately inaccessible event.