Unique Artist Books & Journals
Holidays in Baghdad
A small selection of page layouts from of the book.
Date: 2013-14
Artwork type: Unique book
Medium: Photo, ink, collage, drawings, leather
Dimensions: 34cm W x 26cm H x 2.5cm D
Binding Type: hand sewn
Author
Stephen Dupont (artist)
Origin
Australia
Description
The artist’s original diary from his trips to Iraq.
Collection
Artist’s private collection
Stephen Dupont’s Journals
A small selection of page layouts from of the journals.
Date: Various
Artwork type: Unique books
Medium: Various
Dimensions: Various
Binding Type: Various
Author
Stephen Dupont (artist)
Origin
Australia
Description
A selection from the artist’s private journals.
Collection
Artist’s private collection
Day Of The Dead
A small selection of page layouts from of the book.
Date: 2016
Artwork type: Unique book
Medium: Original 4x5 Polaroids, postcard, ink and stamps
Dimensions: 21 cm H x 13 cm W
Binding Type: Concertina
Author
Stephen Dupont (artist)
Origin
Australia
Description
Portraits of people participating in the annual Day of the Dead festival parade in Mexico City. This is part of the artist’s project called “The White Sheet Series”.
Collection
Artist’s private collection
A photographer’s journal and photo album, 2007 - 2009
- LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Collection
A small selection of pages
Title: [A photographer's journal and photo album, 2007-2009]
Creator(s): Dupont, Stephen, photographer
Date Created/Published: 2007-2009.
Medium: journal 1 volume (239 pages) ; 21 x 13 cm.
Collection: Library Of Congress, USA
Summary: Photojournalist Stephen Dupont's journal consists of handwritten text, notes and photographs of his travels in Thailand (2007) and Afghanistan (2008 and 2009). Initial entries describe his work on a "Bordertown" project in Thailand near the Myanmar border. In April 2008, Dupont and Australian journalist Paul Raffaele accompanied Afghan police, soldiers and civilians on a drug eradication trip. Entries describe a suicide bomb explosion and its aftermath in Khogyami, Nangarhār Province, which occurred during this journey. In 2009, Dupont embedded with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Second Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, Delta Company at Forward Operating Base Castle, Khan Neshin, in southern Helmand Province. He describes daily life and conditions, foot patrols, weapons searches, supply runs and the Afghan people. Included is a series of photographs entitled "Weapons Platoon portraits," instant Polaroid images of Marines including medics and officers, along with their handwritten responses to the question "Why am I a Marine?". Other photographs depict the Marine base including the Khan Neshin castle ruins, Dupont's "home and darkroom," container crates, the landscape and barbed wire.
Reproduction Number: ---
Rights Advisory: Publication may be restricted. For information see "Stephen Dupont,"(http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/640_dupo.html)
Access Advisory: Restricted access; Served by appointment only.
Call Number: LOT 14041 (H) [P&P]
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Notes:
Title devised by Stephen Dupont.
Journal includes 52 instant polaroid photographs, most b&w some color. Ephemera pasted in journal Includes Singha Lager beer labels, Operation Enduring Freedom card with map of Afghanistan and a photomechanical print of Afghan president Hamid Karzai with "Can he survive?" written on it.
Copyright by Stephen Dupont.
Purchase; Booklyn Artists Alliance; 2010; (DLC/PP-2010:195).
Exhibited: "War/Photography : Photographs of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 2012-2013 ; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2013.
Vender : Brooklyn Artists Alliance.
Subjects:
Format:
Collections:
Bookmark This Record:
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010652050/
View the MARC Record for this item.
Axe Me Biggie
A small selection of page layouts from of the book.
Date: 2006
Artwork type: Unique book
Medium: Ink Jet Prints
Dimensions: 18 cm H x 14.5 cm W x 11cm D
Binding Type: Accordion
Author
Stephen Dupont (artist)
Origin
Australia
Description
“First the big picture, and on March 13, 2006 – the day Stephen Dupont made the ninety-three photographs in this volume – the big picture in Kabul is more bombs, more drugs, and more poor. It’s an old story by now: the foreign promise unfulfilled, the failed reforms, a country immune to money, schools, and eight-part programs, always reverting to its savage nature. It doesn’t help that Stephen and I spent the better part of the last three weeks in a mental hospital. Whatever other effects that may have had, it turned this city into a sort of violent burlesque and in my mind’s eye I see, as undoubtedly he does too, a kaleidoscopic cascade of junkies, electroshock patients, and amputees.
This volume is not about the big picture. It’s about all the small ones, the ninety-three particular, like-no-one-elses you see here. As journalists we use individuals as emblems, symbols, small faces to make big judgments. But obviously, any single Afghan, any single story, is more ambiguous, more murky than that.
[…]“Axe Me Biggie” — a crude Anglo phonetic rendering of the Dari for “Mister, take my picture!” — is Stephen’s answer to the plea he’s heard all over town the previous three weeks. It seems to mean something in English, “axe” being just a more visceral and violent version of the camera verb “to shoot,” returning all its original aura of surrender. And because Stephen has that pulverizing Aussie-rules rugby body, “Axe Me Biggie” also seems a request addressed to him personally. Stephen is Biggie. And on this day Biggie finally answers them all, en masse, saying, “Yes, alright. I will axe you, shoot you, take your bloody picture. Have a seat!” — Jacques Menasche, New York, August 2006
Collection
Boston Athenaeum, MA, USA
Prisoners of War
Date: 2016
Artwork type: Unique book
Medium: Collage, Ink, Natural Pigments, C-Type print, Photo, Rubbing
Dimensions: 12.1 x 12 in
Binding Type: Accordion
Price: USD$5,600 (OUT OF PRINT)
Authors
Stephen Dupont (artist)
Marshall Weber (artist)
Origin
Australia and USA
Collection
Boston Athenaeum, MA, USA
Description
A meditation on war, interminable war, which is formed of photographs by Stephen Dupont that are collaged with rubbings and ink painting by Marshall Weber.
The photographs are sourced from 100s of APs of Dupont’s Generation AK photo book which was printed by Gerhard Steidl in 2015. The photos are of Afghanistan throughout the war years of 1993-2012. The cover photo is of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the revered Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated (allegedly) by Taliban agents.
Weber edited a stark series of 12 of Dupont’s images and bound them into this accordion fold book. He then rubbed military insignia and memorial texts from plaques on the grounds of the Australian War Memorial Museum and Police Memorial (in Canberra) onto the photographs and onto the backs of the photographs. These collages illustrate the persistence of colonial conflicts across the centuries. The found and cut-up text and ghostly images from these memorials form the poetry that intertwines with the photo collage and evidences the linkages between global indigenous liberation struggles.
In a final cohering layer Weber meticulously brushed ink and turmeric pigment throughout all the pages of the book merging the imagery and highlighting various images and texts creating both an epic frieze and an intimate accordion fold book.
Prisoners of War is a part of Weber & Dupont’s Dark Illuminations series along with The Lion of Panjshir, Who Served, Sought Peace, and Kill Them All. Prisoners of War is the first in the series.
Kill Them All
A selection of pages from the book
Date: 2017
Artwork type: Unique book
Medium: C - Type prints with freehand wax and ink
Dimensions: 11 x 9 x 5 in
Binding Type: Accordion
Authors
Stephen Dupont (artist)
Marshall Weber (artist)
Origin
Australia and USA
Collection
Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Description
If one is ignorant of why the Taliban was able to completely recapture Afghanistan in 2012, this book will provide an instant and visceral explanation. The book poetically and bluntly documents the brutality of the United States of America’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the American and British government’s delivery of the entire country’s economy to arms dealers and private mercenary forces masquerading as ‘security’ and ‘development’ corporations. The callousness of the war criminals who championed this supposed War on ‘Terrorism’, such as Joe Biden and Dick Cheney, is only matched by the crass ignorance of the Trump administration, which dropped over 7,000 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 alone, and whose 2017 Muslim Ban all but guaranteed the delivery of Afghanistan to the Taliban movement.
The photographs of war-torn Afghanistan used in this provocative accordion fold book were taken in Afghanistan from 1993 to 2012 by award-winning Australian photographer Stephen Dupont (Robert Gardener Award, W. Eugene Smith Award) and collaged by American artist Marshall Weber (Herzog August Bibliothek Artists Book Prize, National Endowment for the Arts).
This is the last available book in their Dark Illuminations series of five unique artists’ books about Afghanistan, which includes Prisoners of War, Sought Peace, The Lion of Panjshir, and Who Served. Kill Them All is the only book in the series that was also published in an inkjet edition, which was printed and bound at Momento in Sydney, Australia. All the books were designed by Weber who also bound all of the unique books. Most of these books pay homage to, and feature photographs of, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan political and military leader and popular hero best known for his successful military campaigns against both the Soviets and the Taliban. Massoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda agents in 2001 two days before the 9/11 attacks in NYC. Today his son Ahmad Massoud continues to fight against the Taliban theocracy to gain freedom for the Afghan people.
The original unique version of this book is at the Library of Congress.
Dupont chose about 300 photos from his massive archive and gave them to Weber, who then edited this and the four other books in the series. For Kill Them All, Weber choose 14 of Dupont’s photographs and constructed an accordion fold book. He then illuminated the photographs with stenciled red wax letters forming a poem written by Weber specifically for the book. Weber then meticulously brushed Sumi and other inks throughout the pages of the book (which the wax lettering resisted) merging the imagery and texts creating both an epic frieze and an intimate accordion fold book. On the other side of the book are red wax and ink paintings by Weber and a quote (written in freehand red wax crayon) derived from Buddhist teachings. The poetry offers an emotional perspective on the complicity of those who benefit from the ongoing wars in developing nations prosecuted by the United States of America.
The original unique books of the Dark Illuminations series are in collections across the United States of America:
1. Prisoners of War is in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum, MA
2. The Lion of Panjshir is in the collection of Bucknell College, Lewisburg, PA
3. Who Served, the third book in the series, is at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN,
4. Sought Peace is held by Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT
5. Kill Them All is at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
KILL THEM ALL
Empire of tears
built on salt bricks
of sons and daughterswho desired these oceans of suffering
who would deny loveWe brought the towers down
upon ourselves
and turned the earth to dustall suffering is caused by our everyday actions
— Marshall Weber, Brooklyn, 2017