Ashley Gilbertson - In Frying Pan and Fire

War is hell, as General Sherman observed, but it’s many other things besides. Like no other earthly endeavor, war calls forth the best and the ugliest that humans can be: brave, brutal, petty, loyal and bored. The American venture in Iraq has summoned the whole range of human experience, from the hopes and hubris of the invasion’s first days to the dark and uncertain place the country is today.

Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer for The New York Times, has followed the war in Iraq from its beginning through its most singular moments. In his new book, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” published by the University of Chicago Press, he has compiled the best of those images, freezing the war’s most intense and dramatic moments, from the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 to the democratic elections of December 2005. The heart of the book, graphically and emotionally, is the battle of Falluja in November 2004, when 6,000 marines and soldiers went into what was then a contested jihadi stronghold. Those photos capture street-to-street fighting in all its manic ferocity. But the most moving of these images are not of fighting and violence but of the moments in between: a group of soldiers sunning themselves during a pause in the battle, a child hurling himself down a slide at a Baghdad playground, an Iraqi man and son standing frozen before an American soldier. Moments like these remind us just how human the experience of war really is. DEXTER FILKINS

Begin Slide Show »