Guantanamo: An American Place

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Photographer

Edmund Clark
Date of Photograph

2009
Technical Info

Hasselblad HD II 39 digital
Website

www.edmundclark.com

Guantanamo: An American Place Leased from the Cuban government since 1903 the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay is overshadowed by the detention camps occupying one corner of its 45 square miles. A population of over 6,000 lives surrounded by razor wire in the last enclave of the Cold War. This is small-town America with a high school, golf course, mall and fast food chains; a place chosen precisely because it was thought to be not America, somewhere where hundreds of men could be held beyond the protection of U.S. law. It is home to a community where I found echoes of a wider America traumatised after 9/11 by a new threat from a religion and cultures it does not understand.

Biography

Edmund Clark is an award-winning artist interested in linking history, politics and representation. His work traces ideas of shared humanity, otherness and unseen experience through landscape, architecture and the documents, possessions and environments of subjects of political tension. Recent works ‘Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out’ and ‘Control Order House’ engage with state censorship to explore the hidden experiences and spaces of control and incarceration in the ‘Global War on Terror’. Clark’s work has been acquired for national and international collections including, in Britain, The National Portrait Gallery, The Imperial War Museum and The National Media Museum. He was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service in 2011 and shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet for 2012 for the theme of Power.

Story

Guantanamo: An American Place

'Looking out from behind the wire
A terrorist lives a man tires
He struggles on his case not lost
Heâ€™s ready for peace jihad is the past
I love you my brother
Eyes of hatred and fire
Looking out from behind the wire'

Graffito by U.S. military personnel, lavatory wall, Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Leased from the Cuban government since 1903 the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay is overshadowed by the detention camps occupying one corner of its 45 square miles.

A population of over 6,000 lives surrounded by razor wire in the last enclave of the Cold War. This is small-town America with a high school, golf course, mall and fast food chains; a place chosen precisely because it was thought to be not America, somewhere where hundreds of men could be held beyond the protection of U.S. law.

It is home to a community where I found echoes of a wider America traumatised after 9/11 by a new post-Cold War threat from a religion and cultures it does not understand. A trauma which led, arguably, to a mindset trapped by a determination for protection and revenge at all costs, and to the policies of demonization, detention and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay.

These images seek to convey a sense of the American experience of Guantanamo Bay and to reflect the iconography of entrapment, religiosity, order and technology I found in the life of a community eclipsed by the events and consequences of 9/11.