The initial impression of recognizing style and subject matter very soon gives way, however, to doubt about the authenticity of the representation. Various elements suggest that the image is artificial to a certain degree, even though a strong effect of realism that could almost be described as tactile is always maintained.
Ventura’s photographs were not in fact taken in Iraq but in his New York studio. The soldiers are dummies and the world surrounding them is a model constructed by the artist. The artist’s installations are a sort of condensed vision of all the images of war imprinted in the collective memory. Rather than showing the scene of military operations in photographs taken there, he describes it with images that stem from his imagination but are as though extracted and distilled from the daily flow of war images transmitted by the media.
Ventura used dummies to expose the horror of war also in previous series such as War Souvenir (2005), based on his grandmother’s memories of World War II. The artist’s works thus confront us with the fact that no image can ever capture the reality of war. Though aspiring from the very outset to achieve the greatest possible degree of objectivity and authenticity, photography does not appear capable of representing war as it really is.

Paolo Ventura (Italy, 1968)

Paolo Ventura’s latest series addresses the way the recent war in Iraq was presented by the western media. His photographs do not show actions of conflict directly but images that are partial or contain only indirect references, from which the viewer can formulate possible hypotheses about how the events developed. Nor are the images accompanied by the customary journalistic commentary explaining their content and situating them in a specific context.
Ventura’s images seem almost familiar to the viewer, communicating a sense of déjà vu because they encapsulate the subjects, perspectives and photographic style to which we have in a certain sense become accustomed, for example through the photographs of embedded reporters attached to military units.