Only The sky remains untouched
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Dates2015 - 2016
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Author
- Topics Portrait, Contemporary Issues, War & Conflicts
In my series Only The Sky Remains Untouched I've portrayed fifteen veterans in a dilapidated weapons factory at the Hembrug site in Zaandam. The place is a symbol of the suffering of former soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Only The Sky Remains Untouched consists of fifteen black-and-white photographs, all taken with a large format camera, showing fifteen combat veterans of varying ages. All of them took part in UN peacekeeping missions. Some were sent to the Lebanon, others to Bosnia or Afghanistan. Wearing camouflage trousers and bare-chested they lie on a wooden stretcher in the dismantled space of a former weapons factory in Zaandam, the Netherlands. Their partial uniforms show one half of their identity, a shared identity as proud members of the Dutch armed forces. Their uncovered bodies show the other half, that of a human individual, vulnerable and alone.