Vietnam Deprimed
(2012)

Vietnam Deprimed is an experiment in visual association, produced for the London College of Communications NAM research project and later exhibited as part of Media and Myth in London, and at FORMAT Festival in Derby. The book concerns itself with questions of image and compassion fatigue, the blurring of millitarism and entertainment, press censorship and the gradual dissociation of weapons from their violent effects on human bodies.

The first half of the book explores these ideas in essay form. The second half of the book attempts to more directly counter these things, by visually reconnecting images of Vietnam era weaponry, most of which remain in use today, with medical archive photographs of wounds caused by those same weapons. The intention of Vietnam Deprimed is to visually disarm a viewer, shocking them out of their accustomed way of viewing weapon and wound as disconnected things, and returning them to the status of cause and effect.