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BEIRUT CAMP / DEBAGA, Iraq – The American photographer Brian McCarty wants you to see the horrors of war, but through the eyes of a child
A drawing of an Iraqi child shows two siblings fleeing next to a dismembered body, next to a photo taken in the old city of Mosul , in Iraq, in this document obtained by Reuters on July 9, 2018. REUTERS / Brian McCarty / Document distributed via Reuters / Manila Bulletin
There are no blood or mutilated bodies. Instead, there are pink dolls and blue chariots. A bird in a video game represents bombs falling from the sky. An elephant symbolizes a lost brother.
McCarty's most recent work was established in Mosul where thousands of civilians were caught in the fight to overthrow the Islamic State. Social workers say that children who have witnessed the violence will be traumatized for years.
He uses art-therapy drawings and interviews with children to illustrate their accounts with the help of toys
an audience that normally could not watch, "said McCarty, 43
Children get the horror, the loss, and the harm that they have suffered.More often, their stories are presented with symbols that McCarty then recreates with toys.The result is a mixture of realistic and absurd, with a hint of pop culture.
McCarty describes it as "a reality with a dose of sugar."
"It's that innocence of childhood , this very pure place to tell the story but not to tell the story, and that is what is so powerful, "he said.
"People will connect to that. Especially for Western audiences where it's so easy to throw people into war zones … like "the others," said McCarty in an interview in Beirut
"This goes because these are just toys . These are just plastic totems of real people. "
A boy attending a session near Mosul in May drew an adult elephant with two calves.While he colored the parent and one of the calves, he refused to color the second which, according to him, represented his dead brother.
In his recess, McCarty placed an elephant toy in a dirty water basin behind a calf, then superimposed a faded image of the second calf to represent the dead brother.
"A step from reality"
A recurring image in children's drawings is the yellow "Angry Bird", a deadly character in a popular video game. For children, it is safe for children. McCarty said it was "just a step from reality."
A girl who saw Islamic State militants stoning a woman portrayed the scene while drawing the shape of a woman only to bury her with circles until she herself Barely visible.
McCarty portrayed her with a doll dressed in a scarf and a dress painted with stones. A shadow of a man in the foreground represents his executioner.
McCarty said that the process of visualizing drawings takes days. Once he chose an image and found the toys to recreate, his field work sometimes endangered him.
On his first visit to Mosul in 2017, McCarty said the ISIS snipers were trying to shoot him two bullets.
His last visit to Mosul was in May
"I did all this editing in the old city, the smell of death everywhere." When we finished, we realized that "I have not seen it! there was a skull and a body at one meter, the beard still intact. "
" I did this toy photo next to an ISIS fighter still dead in the rubble … that's the weird, weird … the reality of the project. "
McCarty said the initial motivation for his work came from his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War who rarely spoke of the war. His work, which began in 1996 in Croatia, has also led to Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq.
"I went into this project from a very academic, artistic point of view and everything came out the window.I saw a little girl color puddles of blood for the first time."
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