When Janey Comes Marching Home
Tuesday August 24th, 2010
Our Richmond-based photographer Sascha Pflaeging has just had his work featured on the Huffington Post, from a book he did with author Laura Browder called When Janey Comes Marching Home.
Captain Clarisse Scott, US Army (Photo by Sascha Pflaeging)
The book is about women who served with the US Military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Browder explains the theme in her Huffington Post interview by pointing to the media representations of female soldiers:
The Army’s first story about [Jessica] Lynch was that she tried to fight off her captors, then was taken prison and needed to be rescued. Their version of events was pure fiction. And it embodied this stereotype of women in the military: the damsel in distress. Or, with [Lynndie] England, you have the sexually depraved torturer. Those photographs made clear just how much she enjoyed her role. She was everyone’s worst nightmare of the female soldier. For me, what those two stories meant is that there were 235,000 female soldiers whose stories weren’t being told.
(You can read more about the story of Jessica Lynch in this article from The Guardian.)
Though many of these stories are heartbreaking, Browder also points out that “things have changed,” recalling that “until the late ’70s, women in the Marines had to take etiquette classes. They had make-up class in basic training, and they were encouraged to wear gloves whenever they went into town because they needed to present the right image.”
Sergeant Chalina Seligson, USMC (Photo by Sascha Pflaeging)
An exhibition of the photos is currently showing at the Arlington National Cemetary (pictured below). You can learn more by visiting the project’s website.
-Asad Haider
