The Pretend Villages by Christopher Sims. First edition (2021). First impression. Medium format hardback in new condition. No markings, this is a brand new book. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
About The Pretend Villages
So the Pretend Villages documents the inhabitants and structures of imagined, fabricated Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of US military bases. Situated in the deep forests of North Carolina and Louisiana and in a great expanse of desert near Death Valley in California. These villages serve as strange and poignant way stations for soldiers headed off to war, and for those who have fled from it. American troops encounter actors, often recent immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan, who are paid to be »cultural role players.«
Christopher Sims photographed in these surprising and fantastical realms over a 15 year period. As US wars abroad fluctuated in intensity. With this book, he presents an archival record of »enemy« village life that is as convincingly accurate and comically misdirected as it is mundane and nightmarish.
Artist Bio
Christopher Sims was born in Michigan and also raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University. As well as a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also has a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.. Also in communications for a number of non profit organizations. He currently is the Undergraduate Education Director at the Center for Documentary Studies. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor of the Practice at the Sanford School of Public Policy, both at Duke University. At Duke he also teaches in the Duke in Berlin summer program and in the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts graduate program.
His recent exhibitions include shows at SF Camerawork, Cambridge University, the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Related Links
So, more books by Christopher Sims
here.
More books by KEHRER
here.
