Artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky brings the war home by photographing reenactments of Iraqis at prayer or in reflection in American “backyards,” ordinary settings which reveal to us the depth of the grief that photojournalism portrays as part of a naturalized landscape of suffering. Aguilera Skvirsky presents each image next to its source: a New York Times photograph of an Iraqi woman with her arms raised, beseeching, amidst rubble, becomes eerily calm and yet even more devastating when it’s translated into America — the same woman, it seems, arms upraised, imploring God for relief or begging for vengeance or simply stretched out in despair; only now she’s surrounded not by rubble but by the parking lot of a Lord & Taylor in New Jersey. The awful irony of these images is that by taking her subjects out of their war-torn landscapes and placing them in ours, Aguilera Skvirsky allows us to “see” these people as most of us don’t when we look at them in journalistic media. There, they are pieces of an abstract narrative called “the news”; in Aguilera Skvirksy’s photographs, they are human beings, even if we know nothing more about them than what we think we see.

–Jeff Sharlet