They Came to Baghdad, 2012
Mike Mandel & Chantal Zakari, USA
| Mike Mandel & Chantal
Zakari, Eighteen Publications, Watertown, MA, USA, 2012 "Baghdad is the chosen location for a secret superpower meeting" in Agatha Christie's They Came to Baghdad. The book has been translated into more than 30 languages and has been published continuously since it first appeared in England in 1951 when Iraq was under British mandate. In our artists' book, Multi-National Force:Iraq, in Agatha Christie's "They Came to Baghdad", Christie's 40 book covers conjure an exotic site for diplomatic, as well as personal romantic intrigue. They parallel the second chapter, excerpts and images of the 40 countries that have participated in the Multi-National Force deploying troops to Iraq between 2003 and 2011. In our third and final chapter, the invasion continues; it's an index of corporate logos of the contractors and subcontractors hired for the reconstruction of Iraq and the major foreign investors involved. For this project we have embraced a studio practice based entirely on websearch, not only from traditional media sources such as the New York Times, Associated Press and the BBC, but also from alternative sources that have now entered the public sphere such as militaryphotos.net, flickr, myspace, Wikipedia, stuff.co.nz, and faruppereastsider.com, to name only a few. We used Google Translate to find articles by bloggers from around the world and have collected information that would not have been typically accessible to us. In the making of this book we have had the opportunity to weave together the book cover imagery, the photographs and attendant stories and graphs all electronically, cutting across a range of hierarchical voices from the corporate to the personal. Mike Mandel, an American photographer, has published nine photo-based books since the early 70's, including Myself: Timed Exposures, 1971, Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston, 1974, the Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975, and Making Good Time, 1989. In 1977 Larry Sultan and Mandel authored Evidence, a photo narrative comprised only of found images that has been recognized as a seminal artists' book and a precursor to subsequent postmodern strategies of photographic practice. Evidence was re-published in 2004 by D.A.P. In 1989 Mandel authored Making Good Time, counter pointing photographic efficiency studies made for industry by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in the early part of the 20th century with his own time/motion photographs. Mike Mandel has been a recipient of several NEA grants and a Fulbright Fellowship. In 2005 his work was exhibited in the Berlin Biennale and recently in 2009, at PhotoEspaña in Madrid. He currently teaches within the photography program at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Chantal Zakari is a Turkish-Levantine artist and a recent U.S. citizen. She was trained as a designer and an artist. She published The Turk & The Jew, in 1998 with Mandel, a book based on the web-narrative by the same title, which was launched in 1996. In 2005, using a pseudonym, she self-published webAffairs, a documentary of a web community. She has had solo shows of her work in the U.S. and in Turkey. She has given book readings in the form of performances in the U.K., Netherlands, Canada and the U.S.Zakari is a faculty member at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where she chairs the Text & Image Arts Area. In 2010 the couple authored and self-published The State of Ata, a visual book about the social themes that define contemporary Turkey and that specifically examines the imagery of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, its revolutionary leader after World War 1. During the 15 years which led to the creation of this book there has been an emergence of political Islam everywhere in the world, including Turkey. Their work seeks to recognise the complex dynamics of a culture that is 99% Muslim, but is committed to secularism.The State of Ata is a portrait of both sides of the body politic: that of the secular revolutionary hero as well as the Islamic scarf. Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches. Medium: print-on-demand book, 100 pages, hardcover www.thecorner.net mike@thecorner.net chantal@thecorner.net |