The Architecture of War: A Look at Saddam Hussein’s Palaces

Adda Birnir on FlavorWire has a fascinating interview and slideshow with photographer Richard Mosse, who has been in Iraq producing a photo essay of Saddam's palaces as they are now:

CLICK HERE FOR A SLIDESHOW OF HIS WORK>>

Photographer Richard Mosse has recently returned from a month-long trip to Iraq to photograph what remains of Saddam Hussein’s dozens of palaces, now used by American soldiers as make-shift combat headquarters. This month, the American army is set to handover the last of the palaces back to the Iraqi army. Mosse, who has previously photographed war-torn areas of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, sat down with us to discuss his latest project and the deeply disturbing, though darkly humorous, aspects of the ongoing war in Iraq.

Richard Mosse: I used to read out-of-date New Yorkers at the gym while I was a graduate student at Yale. I would sweat over the periodicals and carry some four year old magazine back to the Stairmaster. I chanced upon Jon Lee Anderson writing fresh from the US invasion of Baghdad way back in 2003. Anderson describes the US invasion in superb detail. I think his correspondence from around the time of the invasion is some of the best war literature I’ve encountered. Anderson described wandering through one of Saddam’s palaces and recounted a grand vision:

Children’s scooters lay on the floor in some of the downstairs reception rooms. In one bedroom, there was a brand-new McCulloch chain saw on a sofa next to the bed, its yellow box on the floor. There were four more chain saws, still in their boxes, in a walk-in closet.

[from ‘The Collapse’ by Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, April 21, 2003]

I thought to myself, for fuck’s sake, take a picture!

(read the rest of the interview here)