In the weeks following the attacks of 9/11, Kate Brooks, a 23-year-old photographer living in Moscow with her boyfriend, got a four-day assignment from People and took off for the Middle East armed with just a small backpack, her camera, a film scanner and $800. Thus began a 10-year odyssey that resulted in the publication of her first photography collection, In the Light of Darkness.
The collection juxtaposes the stark and harrowing aftermath of the battlefield against the haunting beauty of the birthplaces of civilization. It also serves as a testament to Brooks's loss of innocence and subsequent disillusionment with war, in an environment that tests survival skills as much as it does a budding photojournalist's abilities. The book explores, too, Brooks's experiences as a Western woman in a society where women are neither seen nor heard, and the fear and fascination she feels because of the contrast to her own background, her loss of sense of place and belonging, and how the fragmentation of war seems to lead to her own personal fragmentation.
As she is leaving Afghanistan in late 2010 to cover the unraveling of the Mubarak and Qaddafi regimes in Egypt and Libya, a military officer tells Brooks that "there is nowhere else where the beauty of God and the folly of man are so evident." Through her, we are all witness to the global aftermath of 9/11. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant