Christoph Bangert

»In my experience, the two most significant characteristics of war are horror and absurdity,« says Christoph Bangert, the German photojournalist who has been documenting crises for international publications such as the New York Times for ten years. Following his examination, in his critically acclaimed book War Porn (Kehrer 2014) of the way our society deals with horrific images, in his new work hello camel he now confronts the bitter absurdity of war. He opposes our clichéd notion of modern war as a dynamic, dramatic, and heroic experience with his calm and composed, but equally odd and alien images of the wars in Afghanistan, Gaza, Darfur, Lebanon, and Iraq. Simultaneously, hello camel is a documentary of human striving to create something approximating normality in the face of violence and chaos.