Kirsten Adkins

Army photographer captures her own death (2020)

A military photographer was killed alongside four of her Afghan colleagues during a bomb disposal training exercise in 2013. The image and caption describing ‘the moment of her death’ was released two years later by the US military. The original image represents the death of two other Afghan soldiers whose names and Identities I could not find. The picture also features an orange and gold explosion against a blue sky. It operates according to an aesthetic interplay between process colours, cyan, magenta and yellow, reminiscent of summer days, and slow-motion cinematic explosions. The image does not behave according to its descriptive caption. 

‘Army photographer captures her own death’

My intervention experiments with breaking and reformulating the image into its formal elements according to space, shape and colour. Cinematic explosions, frames and pixels are juxtaposed with my footage of an unfolding spring, blackbird song and cherry blossom against a blue sky. In her 2019 essay Medya: Autonomy of Images, Hito Steyerl describes ‘unintelligible’ criteria; shapes, colours, lines of random code and intermittent pulses of light, and she recounts a story told by the artist Rabbih Mroue of the man who was shot in the head. When he woke up, all he could see were shapes and colours. Army photographer captures her own death separates the picture from its rhetoric. Images are changed by words. My intervention exploits a gap between what the image does and what it says it is doing.