THE WOUNDS OF WAR
Loyola University Maryland’s Humanities Symposium Series
CLIENT
Loyola College of Arts & Sciences
One of the challenges presented by the creative brief was to not glorify war or exploit the horrors of war. The pair of events each needed a unique image that shared a creative approach. I chose grainy black-and-white photography and a common typographical solution. Faced with no budget I read Philoctetes and Redployment and started exploring free resources on the internet.
The deliverables were: posters, digital signage, postcards, fliers, website graphics, social media graphics, event signage, and shuttle signage.
THEATER OF WAR
Dramatic reading of Sophocles' Philoctetes
A big fan of Homer's Illiad—I recommend reading Alexander Pope's translation if you have a free month—reading Philoctetes brought home to me a very distant and hidden side of the Trojan War. Sophocles' play delves into the deep emotional wounds of discarding injured soldiers and keeping them hidden from society.
Searching for imagery on Unsplash, I came across a photograph by Matt Cannon of two surfers on an island. When I converted it to black and white, added some grain, and a little photoshop seasoning its mood changed. The figures became Alberto Giacometti-inspired characters exploring the shore. The island morphs into a mythical windswept limestone tooth with jagged razor-sharp ridges breaching the sea.
During the performance, the piercing wail of Frankie Faison's character's acute pain and aging despair was forceful. His character's pain became my pain, the audience's pain. His performance spoke to the torment of abandonment, the cyst of broken promises.
THE WOUNDS OF WAR
Keynote Address by Phil Klay, Author of Redeployment
One of Klay's short stories, Money As a Weapons System, addresses the challenges a Civil Service engineer faces while failing to get a water pumping station to work in Iraq. This story is poignant because of the bureaucratic hurdles that made it impossible to meet the most essential needs of the Iraqi people the engineer has been sent there to help.
I chose a NASA photo of Lake Qadisiyah northwest of Baghdad. In black and white, the Euphrates River appears like a tectonic crack—two mute forces grinding against each other. The water flows black like oil, confusing the motivations for the war and the most basic unmet needs of humanity.
My client and I agreed to add a description of the photo, a detail many would miss but some kindred spirits would spy. It reads:
The Haditha Dam is on the Euphrates River, northwest of Baghdad, creating the reservoir Lake Qadisiyah. Greatly reduced water flow caused by dams upriver in Syria and Turkey has exacerbated the effects of severe droughts in the already arid climate.
