Singer and photographer Bryan Adams’ new book Wounded is not an easy book to read. It isn’t meant to be easy. It is a beautiful book with beautiful people, but filled with the raw ugliness of the legacy of war. Like so many of us, I am very far removed from any of the experiences every single person in this book has faced. My day does not start with protecting innocent people’s lives or putting myself at incredible risk for thousands of others. After the first few pages of the book, you may find yourself closing it for a minute, putting it aside to process what you are seeing in the images and reading in the subjects’ own words. You start to feel a sadness for the loss these men and women have faced and a disgust for war. However these are but one side of the message Adams is attempting to convey in this incredibly powerful book.
The moment you delve deeper into Wounded: The Legacy of War and read the interviews and stories of their injuries it begins to be very hard not to put these soldiers on a very high pedestal. Corporal Ricky Furgusson stands defiantly straight, as if to say “Bring it on. I’ll take whatever you can throw at me.” Private Alex Stringer sits grinning in his wheelchair holding a cigarette in his only full limb left. Marine Joe Townsend does a horizontal handstand lifting his two prosthetic legs in the air and looking straight into the camera. It takes exceptional strength to face the amount of mental and physical injury they have endured. So much so that their injuries become less apparent as the book goes on and they simply become hugely admirable people.
The book contains 100 images of 40 soldiers. Bryan Adams has succeeded in the mammoth task of uniquely capturing each individual, showing their incredible bravery and insurmountable strength. General the Lord Dannatt said about the book, “These photographs are testament to the triumph of the spirit over the body, hope over doubt and sheer determination over self-pity.”
And there is no self-pity to be detected in the book. Throughout the shoot you can see the difficult moments, when talking about the past gets hard. Adams has brilliantly portrayed that those moments were exactly that – moments in the past, and that they are working now towards a better future.
by Justin van Vliet
Wounded: The Legacy of War is photographed by Bryan Adams and edited by Caroline Froggatt. Available November 11, published by Steidl, £50.
Proceeds from the book will go to charities BLESMA, Blind Veterans UK, Combat Stress, SSAFA and War Child.
Images from Wounded will be exhibited at the Terrace Rooms, Somerset House, Strand, London from November 12, 2014 til January 25, 2015