Touching Seeing: Farhad Ahrarnia’s US Soldiers as War Photography

In 2008, as Barack Obama was pledging to withdraw combat troops from Iraq as part of his presidential campaign, I began curating an exhibition about photographic responses to the ongoing conflict - and American and British involvement - in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps influenced by my position as a female civilian, I decided to show alternatives to conventional war photography, with its emphasis on dramatic moments of frontline combat captured ‘objectively’ by heroic male photojournalists. The resulting exhibition, Bringing the War Home, included the work of ten artists and was shown at Impressions Gallery in Bradford in the autumn of 2010. Farhad Ahrarnia’s series of stitched photographic canvases entitled US Soldiers (2006-2008) was a key component of the show. This work, full of ambiguities and contradictions, complicates and expands our understanding of what might constitute a ‘war photograph’. In the following discussion, I explore what is at stake in Ahrarnia’s method of turning photographs into stitched, cloth objects, and consider how his ‘touching seeing’ offers potential for an enhanced emotional engagement with war photography.