Kenny Bass

Lives and works in Centerville, OH

Artist statement

A Marine’s Disposable War began with one disposable camera I carried as a young Marine in Iraq in 2003. Its fifteen photographs were made by more than one participant, and individual exposure credit matters. Twenty-three years later I fixed the sequence and began reconstructing what the images can actually establish, what surviving participants remember, and what remains uncertain. These ordinary scenes—a marketplace, vehicles, a covered position, spent casings—resist the familiar spectacle of conflict photography. I work with the camera’s material limits, authorship, recollection, provenance, book form, and accessible interpretation to ask when a private snapshot archive becomes art and public history. The work preserves gaps instead of filling them with confident stories. It invites viewers, including blind and low-vision audiences, to consider both the photographs’ forms and the limits of their evidence.

Artwork

• Spent, 2003. Color photograph from a disposable camera
• Tank and Palm, 2003. Color photograph from a disposable camera
• Marketplace, 2003. Color photograph from a disposable camera
• Foreign Armor I, 2003. Color photograph from a disposable camera
• Covered Position / Vehicle, 2003. Color photograph from a disposable camera
• Ammunition Bunker Interior, 2003. Color photograph from a disposable camera