Description:
“Between 1995 and 2005 I photographed an emerging global service industry that existed just below the radar of public consciousness - the world of private military companies and the individuals connected to a free-market outsourced industry of conflict. What I photographed was emblematic of wider political, personal and social fears in an era that saw the uncertain embers of the Cold War finally extinguished and the flames ignited on another conflict of both imagination and violent reality, one that we have now come to know as the war on terror.
The images from this series depict groups and individuals preparing for conflict and other related threats but were not made on the battlefield. Instead they document the act of preparation in the readymade environments of familiar city streets, motels, parking lots and shopping malls. From the financial districts of major European cities to the urban sprawl of Australian conurbations, I shadowed men and woman who were busy preparing themselves against known and unknown threats. From North America to former Soviet satellite states, I witnessed men hunting other men through great swathes of city and the suburbia beyond whilst the public went about their business none the wiser.
Throughout, even though I witnessed exotic weaponry and orchestrated manoeuvres involving countless protagonists, I was often drawn back to the individuals and the uncertainties that their poses appeared to betray. In turning the camera onto this hidden world, I practiced that traditional documentary task of opening closed doors and photographing a contemporary industry but also enacted a form of reverse surveillance, and peered into the heart of a rapidly expanding privatised protection industry that appeared to be an allegory for local and global feelings of existential insecurity.”
Christopher Stewart
Publication Date: 2003
Publisher: Centro de Arte de Salamanca
Book Size: 11¾x9¼". inches
Pages: 76
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 10-849571941X
Description:
“Between 1995 and 2005 I photographed an emerging global service industry that existed just below the radar of public consciousness - the world of private military companies and the individuals connected to a free-market outsourced industry of conflict. What I photographed was emblematic of wider political, personal and social fears in an era that saw the uncertain embers of the Cold War finally extinguished and the flames ignited on another conflict of both imagination and violent reality, one that we have now come to know as the war on terror.
The images from this series depict groups and individuals preparing for conflict and other related threats but were not made on the battlefield. Instead they document the act of preparation in the readymade environments of familiar city streets, motels, parking lots and shopping malls. From the financial districts of major European cities to the urban sprawl of Australian conurbations, I shadowed men and woman who were busy preparing themselves against known and unknown threats. From North America to former Soviet satellite states, I witnessed men hunting other men through great swathes of city and the suburbia beyond whilst the public went about their business none the wiser.
Throughout, even though I witnessed exotic weaponry and orchestrated manoeuvres involving countless protagonists, I was often drawn back to the individuals and the uncertainties that their poses appeared to betray. In turning the camera onto this hidden world, I practiced that traditional documentary task of opening closed doors and photographing a contemporary industry but also enacted a form of reverse surveillance, and peered into the heart of a rapidly expanding privatised protection industry that appeared to be an allegory for local and global feelings of existential insecurity.”
Christopher Stewart
Publication Date: 2003
Publisher: Centro de Arte de Salamanca
Book Size: 11¾x9¼". inches
Pages: 76
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 10-849571941X