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They Came to Baghdad

They Came to Baghdad

Multi-National Force: Iraq

by Chantal Zakari and Mike Mandel
Publication Date: 01/03/2012

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"Baghdad is the chosen location for a secret superpower meeting" in Agatha Christie's They Came to Baghdad. The book has been translated into more than 30 languages and has been published continuously since it first appeared in England in 1951 when Iraq was under British mandate.In our artists' book, They Came to Baghdad, Christie's 40 book covers conjure an exotic site for diplomatic, as well as personal romantic intrigue. They parallel the second chapter, excerpts and images of the 40 countries that have participated in the Multi-National Force deploying troops to Iraq between 2003 and 2011. In our third and final chapter, the invasion continues; it's an index of corporate logos of the contractors and subcontractors hired for the reconstruction of Iraq and the major foreign investors involved.For this work we have embraced a studio practice based entirely on websearch, not only from traditional media source, but also from alternative sources that have now entered the public sphere. From ebay and amazon, blog entries around the world translated through Google Translate, flickr and myspace all contributed to our visual narrative.
ISBN:
9780918290113
9780918290113
Category:
The arts
Publication Date:
01-03-2012
Language:
English
Publisher:
Eighteen Publications LLC
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
228.6x152.4mm
Mike Mandel

Mike Mandel (b. 1950) moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area in 1973 to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. During this time he met fellow artist Larry Sultan, with whom he collaborated on Evidence (1975-77), a sequence of found photographs from government and corporate archives that has been recognized as one of the most important photographic books of the 20th century. From 1973 to 1990 Mandel and Sultan also developed a series of enigmatic public billboards that rupture the conventions of advertising culture.

Mandel's most recent personal projects have been in collaboration with his wife, Chantal Zakari. Their book, The State of Ata, (2010) speaks to the clash between Islam and secularism in Turkey. They Came to Baghdad, (2012) is a response to the Iraq War, and Lockdown Archive (2015) is a record of all the images uploaded to the web that relate to the military occupation of Watertown after the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. He currently lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, and teaches at Tufts University, in greater Boston.

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