Fallout

I had talked about the above picture back in February of this year on Simplistic Art and thought that it was amazing on a number of aspects - love, a war that I never understood, women's ability to look beyond what lies on the outside and the institution of marriage - all very powerful qualities that was succinctly captured in this very compelling photograph.

Well, I will be going to see this photo and more of this kind at the Jen Beckman gallery tomorrow and look forward to this very much - as much for appreciating the artist’s (Nina Berman) vision in capturing the brief sparks of some wasted lives as for the underlying hope in the pictures that seem to spring from the most direst of times...

From the review in the Times…

‘The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.
Two years earlier, while in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, Mr. Ziegel had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber’s attack. The heat melted the flesh from his face. At Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas he underwent 19 rounds of surgery. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.’