Perspective

Back from Iraq

By JIM VERHULST, Perspective editor
Published September 2, 2007

'Marine Wedding' by Nina Berman, October 2006. Of this photo of Renee Kline and Ty Ziegel, Berman says: "I felt that it was a moment wher the entire enormity of what they've been through and all their struggle and pain was revealed as well as their love."
	[Nina Berman | Purple Hearts project]

Hours before their wedding in an Illinois farm town last fall, Renee Kline, 21, and Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, were posing for studio portraits when photo-grapher Nina Berman, who was on assignment for People magazine that day, captured this moment. The People profile, "Coming Home: A Love Story," chronicled their teenage romance, their engagement, his two deployments to Iraq, the car bomb that hit his truck - and the resulting explosion that melted his face, pierced his brain with shrapnel, blinded him in one eye, cost him his left arm (he's wearing his prosthesis in this photo) and three fingers on his right hand. After his long rehab, the couple decided to go ahead and wed.

The Marine chaplain who married them told People magazine that "once the hoopla dies down and friends and relatives get on with their lives, it will be up to Ty and Renee to make this marriage work."

People didn't publish this photo. But entered in the prestigious World Press Photo contest, it was judged the portrait of the year. "It developed a life of its own," says Berman. "Everyone brings their own thing to it."

It became part of Berman's Purple Hearts project, a series of photographic portraits and interviews with American Marines and soldiers wounded in Iraq. "Purple Hearts" has been published as a book and DVD and has been presented as an exhibit, most recently in New York, where she lives. The project's preface says it "gives an intimate understanding of the human cost of war through the experience of severely wounded soldiers." It began because she wasn't seeing images of the wounded and felt people - whatever their politics - needed to know.

Medical advances mean that wounded troops survive what would have killed them in earlier wars. The raw numbers are more than 3,700 troops dead, nearly 30,000 wounded and untold and unknowable Iraqi casualties. Behind each number is a human being, the point of Berman's work.

To see the photographs visit www.NinaBerman.com.

[Last modified September 4, 2007, 17:55:42]