'What We Think Now' was born of modest ambitions. The project was initially conceived as a 10-image editorial submission for a fledgling youth culture magazine in Los Angeles, where I was living at the time. When I started photographing, George Bush had just been re-elected, the war on terror was not being won in Iraq, more and more soldiers were dying, my friends and family had turned out to the polls in droves, and judging from the ethos of the city, I knew I was not the only one who had misgivings about our nation's invasion of Iraq.
Though I was interested in documenting what people thought about the war and the way war affects certain demographics differently, I was specifically interested in recording what people my own age had to say about the issue as the burden of war would fall heaviest upon us. Only the young are asked to sacriï¬ce their lives, and those who survive are asked to spend the remainder of their lives paying war debts with their tax dollars. Before I shot my ï¬rst picture, I decided that my subjects would be 30-years-old or younger. Although opinions about the war seemed to abound on bumper stickers, television, and T-shirts. I wanted to create work which expressed the ideas of individuals, relying solely on their words. I also wanted their ideas to be incorporated in the image, so that persona and opinion were fused into one. In this way no one could question the veracity of the text.
So one Saturday afternoon in late November 2004 I set out with my camera, a stack of poster-board and some markers and began approaching people. One month later, I had accrued a small portfolio of images, which were all rejected by the magazine. My initial goal of getting the work published seemed insigniï¬cant, and my early outings only inspired me to keep working. Though my ï¬rst shoots all took place in Los Angeles, I decided that the work should be a survey of opinions representing people from a variety of demographics, so in the next six months I traveled to Santa Ana, the beach communities of Orange County, Palmdale, San Francisco and Berkeley. All of the photographs were shot on the street using natural light and whatever background was immediately available, sometimes yielding amazing compositions and arrangements of color. With the exception of a few opinionated friends, the majority of the subjects were strangers whom I approached, talked to, and photographed all in a matter of minutes.
As I continued working on the project, I realized how misinformed, ignorant and apathetic the majority of my peers were. The aim of my work was to give my generation a voice, but in doing so, I uncovered mass confusion. So many people misunderstood the connections between the bombing of the World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the in-vasion of Iraq. It would be easy to attribute this confusion to stupidity or laziness, but more likely, it seems that people have been duped by the government's rhetoric. In what other war has the American government used language so masterfully to supplant reason with emotion?
Ultimately these images reveal a nation and a generation in turmoil. The war in Iraq-despite the Bush Administration's assertion of "Mission Accomplished"-is not a war to be "won." Now that the U.S. has been engaged in the mission of establishing democracy in Iraq for more than three years, if the nation withdraws prior to building a new, democratic government, then the U.S. appears a truant. But if the U.S. stays to ï¬ght for years to come, sacriï¬cing thousands of lives and draining the ï¬nancial resources of the nation, it is likely that Iraq will become another Vietnam.
As I write, nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers have willingly sacriï¬ced themselves to the cause, and more Iraqis than we'll ever know have laid down their lives less willingly. George Bush has solicited 350 billion dollars from Congress to support this war, the Middle East is still rife with terror, and our involvement in Iraq continues. With that said, it seems premature to suggest that the tasks of asking questions and recording answers are complete. It might be a long time before we can afford to stop talking about the decision to invade and remake a nation.
Jonathan Hollingsworth
Alexander, UC Berkeley
Betty, Santa Ana
Lauren, West Hollywood
Katrina, Huntingdon Beach
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