Two Donkeys in a War Zone
Clément Lambelet's Two Donkeys in a War Zone looks for signs of ordinary life in the drone footage that armies publish of their own strikes.
The book began with a U.S. Army video on YouTube showing a drone strike on an ISIS camp. Between two explosions, a pair of donkeys crosses the infrared frame. Lambelet then went through videos released by the American, Afghan and British armies, cropping and reframing them to find what the operators were not looking at: civilians, animals, people going about a day near the fighting. RVB Books published the result in Paris in 2017 as a large softcover of 54 pages with 38 photographs, in French and English, in a first edition of 800 copies.
Antenne Books describes the project as a search for traces of life inside pictures of death. The book was among the titles in the running for the 2018 Prix du Livre at the Rencontres d'Arles.