A Marine’s Disposable War

Project statement

One camera. Fifteen photographs. A sequence made more than two decades later.

The photobook draws fifteen images from A Marine’s Disposable War, the larger photographic project made with one disposable camera Kenny Bass carried as a young Marine infantryman in Iraq in 2003. The photographs move through murals, work sites, improvised vehicles, resting Marines, weapons, industrial structures, damaged machinery, and spent casings. Their color, softness, flare, and uneven exposures belong to the original consumer camera and to the conditions in which it was used.

Bass returned to the photographs more than two decades later. The book does not try to summarize the war or turn the archive into an illustration of his biography. Its sequence builds meaning through recurrence: bodies inside systems, machinery in landscape, ordinary pauses beside instruments of force, and material before and after use. Isolated images can be read as incidents. In the book, they accumulate into a more unsettled account of proximity, participation, and what remains.