Christopher Sims: Home Fronts, The Pretend Villages of Talatha and Braggistan

Sims’ images reveal a surreal world which is at once fake yet also disturbingly real, a world both Western and Islamic; banal and horrific; hi-tech and tawdry. These simulated Afghan and Iraqi villages, located deep within the forests of the American South and deserts of California, are used as military training environments to orient US soldiers prior to deployment. Remote sites of war are spectacularly relocated from ‘over there’ to ‘over here’. Theater of War dramatically calls into question the status of the war photographer as an objective observer, as well as the canon of war photography and the authenticity of the photographic document.