Hardcover 1st edition
Trolley Books (2008)
196 pages
90 color photos
hardback 18,8 cm x 26,0 cm
english

Nina Berman, as an American photographer looking at America, delivers a caustic and surreal vision of the United States during the Bush years in her new book Homeland.

A product of seven years work, with images from across America, Berman gives us a peek into the bizarre manifestations of the homeland security state and the ideologies that have reshaped post 9/11 America.
In Homeland, happy families step through suburbs clutching anti-nuke pills. Small town police train to hunt Al-Qaeda. Recruitment spectacles transform children into would be killers. Military goats perform in war on terror scripts. And beneath it all stands the image of a warrior Jesus inspiring megachurch millions toward the end times. Looking at the pictures shot in a rich saturated technicolor, one asks, are the scenes real, or an elaborate state sponsored performance art designed to amuse a public desperately seeking a superhero ending in an age of empire decline?

Berman, an internationally acclaimed photographer best known for her ground breaking images of American military wounded in the Iraq war, Purple Hearts, (Trolley, 2004) once again pushes us to look at American power and myth as it plays out in the heartland.

With an afterword by Michael Shaw, visual critic and creator of Bagnewsnotes.com.

The exhibition of Homeland was shown at the 2008 Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, and at Jen Bekman, New York. More recently Homeland was exhibited at Side Gallery, Newcastle, from 4 July – 22 August 2009.