Julie Dermansky: Inside the Belly of the World
by: Jessica Kinnison | posted: Apr 2, 2009
American photographer Julie Dermansky is calling from a military phone in the lobby of Saddam Hussein’s former hunting lodge, part of the Al-Faw Palace Complex on Camp Victory in Baghdad. It’s 1 a.m. there and things are quiet.
Dermansky, 43, is traveling through Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard and filmmaker Phinizy Percy, Jr.
Dermansky spends her days looking at the insides of pigs, humans, military vehicles, and memorials while documenting what it means to be human; what it means to carry a past, a present and a future in one body.
Dermansky herself has been photographed in a gory scene, in one instance standing in blood from the goats and sheep that were slaughtered for an Iraqi feast. The elders of the Rash Al Emara Village gave her enough meat to feed five people and then plopped an animal’s head next to her plate.
Dermansky’s bunk is in what was once one of the finest rooms in Baghdad. The room now sleeps five; a rotation of journalists, military, and some dignitaries.
“I’m not sleeping enough. After shooting, I have to edit and write quickly to get the work out and share it with those I'm taking pictures of,” she says.
In addition to taking photos for her own projects, she and Percy are working on a documentary about the Louisiana National Guard and shooting segments for Fox 8 News Channel in New Orleans.
Today, Dermansky photographed a memorial to one of the dogs that sniffs out bombs and his handler, both killed when a bomb exploded. “It was a personal memorial,” she says. She shot it for her “Dark Tourism” series.
Before realizing her childhood dream of becoming a war photographer, Dermansky traveled to Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Hong Kong, New York City, Los Angeles, New Orleans.
In the U.S., she has covered Ground Zero, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and objects lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Abroad, she photographed the clothes of genocide victims in Murambi, a Roman Catholic church in Ntarama, where 5,000 people, mostly of Tutsi ethnicity, were slaughtered in 2004, and the Armenian genocide memorial in Yerevan. The Armenians, who were at the time observing the 98th anniversary of the post-World War I Turkish massacre of Armenians, were “happy to tell their stories, just like victims of Katrina, and invited me into their homes to photograph,” she said.
Dermansky often relates the suffering and devastation she witnesses in Iraq to that of Hurricane Katrina. Her book about the Louisiana National Guard, Under the Radar: The National Guard Patrolling the Streets of New Orleans, won her the trust of the men; when she wanted to go to Iraq with them, they made it happen.
“Violence fascinates me. It is part of our culture–always has been. It is hard to understand where man’s inhumanity comes from,” says Dermansky. “How will one ever know anything about himself by not looking?” Dermansky reminds us that when a person isn’t looking, “the violence is still there. Photographs can make people aware. A great reason to take them.”
She has been photographing “Dark Tourism” on her own dime. In 2005, she sold her 45-acre farm in Deposit, New York near the Catskills, and embarked on the journey that brought her back to New Orleans and then to Iraq, living the life of an artist again after seven years of producing furniture fabrication and metalwork out of a storefront in New York City.
“Life in general is pretty surreal if you keep your eyes open. What seems unusual at first can become commonplace. I like to be on the move as then everything is new—interesting,” she says.
She gave away everything she owned. She keeps hard drives as memories now. She planned to spend three weeks in Iraq; now she has been there three months, and may go to Afghanistan next.
“All I want is to be out and about working—to make great pictures, to capture the story as I find it with powerful images. Often I find the story in small details. I'm in Iraq hunting for good images. I came with no preconceived ideas of what I'd find—just started by shooting Christmas portraits of the soldiers for the soldiers. There are tons of untold stories here. And even the told ones—well, my eye is a bit different,” she says.
When the other are photographers were looking at the officials during the Iraqi election last fall, Dermansky was photographing the purple ink-soaked right index fingers of those who voted. When others might have taken one look into Iraq and run, Dermansky was unafraid to look at the cracked floors; the open skulls and teeth and fingernails.
“Isn’t it all relative? I'm curious in general so anywhere I haven’t been before is of interest to me. More people than [who] let on are drawn to all things grotesque. Why do you think there is traffic on the opposite side of accidents? People want to see,” says Dermansky.
“What do I see when I look inside a human or animal body? I see form and science. I marvel at how things work. I see color. I hunt for good composition when shooting. And, most of all, I always find some humor—if not in the images than in the situation.”
The New York-born Dermansky was showing professionally in New Orleans before finishing undergraduate school at Tulane, and after college, she won a fellowship to study monumental and architectural sculpture for a year.
Dermansky says she plans to rent in New Orleans when she returns from Iraq, because she is trying to get Tulane’s Natural History Museum open to the public.
“I live to work so I’m always up to something. I have a couple of big topics that I am drawn to—like natural history, dark tourism and sign painting. So, if I see a hand painted sign while working on another story, I will shoot it,” she says.
“Like here in Baghdad, there is a war memorial Saddam had made honoring the soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. I plan to shoot it for my ‘Dark Tourism’ project.” A self-published version of the project is already in circulation and a new, expanded version is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.
The mind is hungry for truth, but as Dermansky’s photographs tell it, truth is an open belly—filled with the past, the present and the future.
“I’ve always been an artist. That’s what I do, who I am, I’ve known since I was a kid,” Dermansky says. “You don’t need all the bells and whistles to tell the story. Being a photographer is like being a hunter, you have to hunt down the image. You have to look for the details. You have to subject yourself to it.”
It is deep into the small hours for her by now but she is still animated, even laughing, on the phone in the lobby of Saddam Hussein’s former hunting lodge. The mind is hungry for truth if we allow it the freedom to search. Sweet dreams, Ms. Dermansky.
