“Election (Lynndie)”

Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series (2004–2008), in which this photomontage is included, revived artist Martha Rosler’s anti-Vietnam War strategy of photomontage in the late 1960s and early 1970s to critique the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. This included outrage over torture and abuse by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, which parallel similar responses to the My Lai Massacre in 1968. Based on cut-and-paste collage rather than seamless Photoshop software, her new works raise questions about the connections between advertising, journalism, politics, sexism, and violence by juxtaposing images representing, on the one hand, the realities of the USA’s distant wars and, on the other, the materialist passivity of American consumer-driven domesticity.