Monica Haller: Riley and His Story

Monica Haller’s project Riley and His Story presents the daily life of the Iraq war, as lived and photographed by Riley Sharbonno, an army nurse who served at Abu Ghraib prison from 2004–2005. Riley used his camera as an almost prosthetic device to record the events his memory suppressed; on other occasions he used the camera to “store” overwhelming experiences with the aim of processing them later. Many of these images are indeed overwhelming—“these aren’t the photos we’re likely to find in grandma’s photo album 50 years from now,” he rightly observes— and the photo pages in this book are variously sized, creating intersection and overlap to mimic the unstable nature of such memories and convey the blurry jumble of amnesia and trauma. Riley and His Story is an invitation to all, including war veterans, family and friends, to encounter the realities of warfare as related by one who was there.