Comprised of around 50 etchings on plywood, “When Photographers are Blinded, Eagle’s Wings Are Clipped” is an anti-monument to the American War in Iraq. Each plywood panel is attached to a wood structure with velcro, and the arrangement of the panels can vary depending upon the available space.
“When Photographers…” was conceived after Heyman heard a talk by photo-journalist Michael Kamber at Princeton University, who, after years of being embedded with US Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan, explained that all photos of the war needed to be passed through military censors before leaving those countries, and because of this, the American public was ignorant of the true nature of the war, as “the photographers were blinded” by the censors. Boots on the ground lead to returning military amputees as deformed birds with missing wings fly overhead. A soldier, upside down and pierced with arrows like a modern day St. Sebastian, spits out the worms of lies he has been made to swallow, his third eye a plea for enlightenment.
A second version of the same image was printed at CR Ettinger Studio in Philadelphia in 2010, and exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum in 2010, and published in Le Monde in France in 2021.
Exhibitions:
Swarthmore College, PA; Wesleyan University, CT; Brown University, RI; De Paul University, IL; Flagler College, FL; Loyola Marymount University, CA; Hood Museum of Art, NH Collection of Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
The wood version of When the Photographers are Blinded, the Eagle’s Wings Are Clipped is part of the permanent collection of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.