Eye Level In Iraq

Thursday, April 24 @ UGA Student Learning Center

originally published April 23, 2008

Kael Alford, Panos Pictures

Najaf, Iraq - August, 2004

Since 2006, photojournalist Kael Alford has been showing audiences across America photographs from the time she spent in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Alford was in Iraq before and during the American bombing campaign, and was there twice more afterward. In the process, she linked up with three other photographers and the group created a book, Unembedded [www.unembedded.net], whose title describes the nature of its creators’ presence in Iraq. The result is “a sort of ’from the ground’ view,” Alford says, displaying images from everyday Iraqi life in wartime. Her talk - in Room 214 of the Student Learning Center at 4:30 p.m. Thursday - is sponsored by the Georgia Review, which last fall featured her photos along with those of book collaborator Thorne Anderson.

Alford says one of her goals is to help show Americans how Iraq got to the point it’s at now. She says most people who attend her talks are already cynical about the war, but she particularly appreciates it when people of the opposite viewpoint show up. “I don’t see it like I’ve got all the answers,” Alford says. “I want to stimulate discussion about Iraq and what’s going on there.” What’s more, she’s heard surprisingly inaccurate statements come out of the mouths of Americans generally aware of events in Iraq, and has found that even those firmly opposed to the war may not have a good picture of “the reality on the ground,” though that’s beginning to change.

Meanwhile, the reality on the ground is far more grim now than it was when Alford was in Iraq. “It’s just gotten exponentially more violent since I was there - more violent, more difficult to work, go to school, go shopping,” she says. “Just day-to-day life is full of menace.” She adds, “I don’t know that Americans have a good grasp of how irreparably damaged the country is.”

Ben Emanuel

Defending the Beloved Land

A New History of the Oconee War

Sunday, April 27 @ Ciné Lab

originally published April 23, 2008

Ben Emanuel

Steven Scurry

After a few lunchtime lecture gigs at local libraries, local historian Steven Scurry is ready to headline a slightly bigger venue with his telling of the late-18th century turmoil in the colony (and state) of Georgia. Scurry’s independent research focuses on the Oconee War - the borderland conflict centered on the Oconee River basin, an area that for two decades was a contested zone between the Creek Nation and a growing Georgia. Much of that research has found written form in Flagpole over the years, most recently in an article that traced the roots of the Oconee War back to the period just before the American Revolution. Sunday’s talk will span the period from the last British-Creek treaty in 1773 to 1796, when an American treaty established the Oconee as Georgia’s western boundary. New to this talk will be brochures featuring a timeline to help the audience follow along, poster-sized maps and portraits of key players in the period, and some traditional flute music and perhaps an old Creek story from Muscogee Creek John Winterhawk, who lives in Farmington.

At this point in his studies, Scurry says he’s beginning to see the Oconee War as a prism for understanding the whole early history of Georgia, from the founding and siting of UGA to Elijah Clarke’s short-lived Trans-Oconee Republic, the Yazoo land fraud, and even Georgia’s adoption of the U.S. Constitution. And this talk’s title, he says, carries real meaning with regard to his approach: the word “beloved” is key to understanding the Creek relationship to the land where Athens now sits. “That was an honorary title, and they extended it to things that were of an extraordinary nature… things that stood apart.” Scurry’s talk is scheduled from 6–9 p.m., with an intermission, in the “lab” off the lobby at Ciné. A $3 donation is suggested.

Ben Emanuel