World Witness: The Photography of Andrea Bruce

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, September/October 2006

For Andrea Bruce ‘95, vision is everything. And at that moment, in June 2004, riding in a Humvee with soldiers from the U.S. Army 1st Infantry Division through the streets of Baquba, Iraq, she had lost it. Dark was all around her, and pieces of shrapnel flew from a roadside bomb that had exploded five feet from the vehicle she was in. She could see very little, but she soon recognized the sounds of a firefight. Insurgents were shooting at the soldiers, and soldiers were shooting in every direction with night goggles to aid them. Two men riding in the unarmored vehicle behind hers were badly injured when hot debris hit their faces.

She hoisted her camera to the black sky above her and blindly clicked, clicked, clicked.

And then there were the suicide bombings, which happened almost every other week. She would go to the scene where body parts lay, the charred remnants of citizens who, hoping to get precious work with the Iraqi police or army, had stood in line for days. The emotions of the Iraqi citizens would boil over, spilling onto her. Angry, looking for someone to blame for the atrocities that had taken their fathers, their sons, they would express their rage and confusion by targeting the nearest Westerner. Bruce, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Indiana native, was slapped, hit, pushed around by heartbroken Iraqis. A friend was once hit with a metal bar. She learned to leave such scenes quickly, to avoid the mobs, to avoid one person yelling at her turning into one hundred yelling at her, the scene turning into a nightmare that she had never seen in the job description.

Most of us will never know the kind of harrowing moments and aching introductions to despair that Bruce, a staff photographer for The Washington Post, experienced during the nine months she spent in Iraq to document the conflict for the newspaper. She knows this. But she also knows that American society remains more interested in caricatures who chomp insects for prize money and the lightweight lives of socialites than the war their country has waged and its heartbreaking aftermath. We wish not to be bothered. But Bruce wishes to bother us.

That, she says, is why she can’t wait to go back to Iraq. It has changed her to the bone. Changed her vision. Changed her world.