Journalism As Healing — Literally

Photographer Jennifer Karady is deliberately blurring the lines between journalism and therapy in her series, now on exhibit at SF Camerawork in San Francisco, “In Country: Soldiers Stories From Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Karady met veterans of the wars and asked them to talk about their most traumatic moments in the theater, in several conversations over long periods of time. Then she staged those moments, peopling the pictures with the soldiers and their family and friends, staging a vignette from Iraq or Afghanistan but setting it in the soldier’s hometown — in a classroom, a garden, their kitchen.

Here’s how she explains her idea to the New York Times: “This thing is replaying visually in the person’s head, and we really have no idea what is going on,” she said. “But the idea, conceptually, of taking that moment and recontextualizing and placing it in the civilian world, is based on a therapeutic model.”

From the sound of the story, her subjects responded to the latter. “It helped me slow the whole scene down,” one participant said. “And think about why things happened the way they did and why I’m still dealing with this.”

It’s quite a literal embodiment of what we talk about here and elsewhere in the Society. It even seems to me these photographs might be all Three Acts at once….

So what do you folks think? Good idea? Good art? And what kind of due diligence does a journalist need before walking people through a process described here as therapy?