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Design and production of iApp publication
'Why Mister Why?' by photographer Geert van Kesteren 

Featuring more than 400 images, Why Mister, Why? is a compelling account from photojournalist Geert van Kesteren. For the most part of 2003 and into 2004, van Kesteren made these images in a struggling Iraq, intertwining them with his personal experience of the situation in diary-like notes.
On May 1st, 2003 president Bush addressed his controversial ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on the flight carrier USS Lincoln, 20 miles out of the cost of San Diego. In this speech, broadcasted worldwide, the war on Iraq was sold as a success story; the Saddam regime was ousted and major combat operations had ended. That same day Geert van Kesteren arrived in Baghdad as independent photojournalist to start working on his now legendary photo report ‘WHY MISTER, WHY?’ in which he bared witness of a complete opposite reality.
The cynical policy under the leadership of Bush and Cheney derailed Iraq completely. American soldiers and Iraqi society paid a high prize for it, with casualties and consequences that last to this very day. Over the past ten years, gradually more and more disturbing details about the occupation of Iraq came to surface. A war with half a million causalities, that will cost the US tax payer 4 trillion dollar, and did not established the so desired democracy to the Middle East.

Ten-years-after seems a right moment to reflect on the catastrophic consequences of the war on terror that started in Iraq. This extended digital re-issue of the WHY MISTER, WHY? bookpublication, first published by Artimo in 2004,  won international prestigious awards and became an instant-classic. Van Kesteren adds 166 images to the original 237 photographs of the book.

'Colonel Hickey is eccentric; wearing cowboy boots with an American eagle embroidered on them, in evening he shoots ducks over the Tigris river. Apparently intimidated by the U.S. Army’s heavy presence around Tikrit, more and more guerrillas are stashing their weapons and keeping a low profile. Col. Hickey is trying to flush them out and hunt them while he can. One tactic Hickey and his team uses is to make themselves the bait. ‘This is RPG alley’, he says, ‘I will drive the Humvee up and down to try to attract fire from locals armed with rocket-propelled grenades. If they shoot at me, that is when I catch them.'
Fragment from Geert van Kesteren’s documentary-app WHY MISTER, WHY? - IRAQ, 2003-2004.
This is the most compelling new book to deal with war in the last ten years.
Martin Parr, Best Ten Photo Books of the Decade.  British Journal of Photography December 2009.

“What I saw, and what Geert recorded over the next 48 hours with his camera, I will never forget. As the two of us hustled from house to house in the middle of the night, joining U.S. soldiers as they busted down doors looking for insurgent ‘cells’, the suspicions I had long harboured in Washington began to coalesce, like the dust and mud on my feet, into a concrete reality. I realized that the Bush administration truly had no clue what it was doing in Iraq.”
Michael Hirsh, senior editor of Newsweek, 2004.

‘Why Mister, Why?’ restores one’s faith in the capacity of photojournalism to engage, reveal and comprehend. Lasting photojournalism is not just about great images but about context and meaning.
Colin Jacobsen in ‘Photo8’. (former picture editor of the Independent Magazine and the senior lecturer in photojournalism at the university of westminster)

Already, what is being regarded as the second’s Gulf War’s equivalent to Vietnam Inc. has been published. ‘Why Mister, Why?’ by Geert van Kesteren... ...is a photo book in the best concerned photographer tradition... ...’Why Mister, Why?’ is a damnin indictment of what at that moment showed every sign to be another Vietnam.
Gerry Badger (writer, curator, photographer) and Martin Parr (photographer & collector, Magnum Photos) in ‘the Photo Book: A history Volume II’.


'That same day, May 1, 2003, I arrived as unembedded independent photojournalist in the besieged city of Baghdad. I remember that first week. I met old friends, sat on a chair that belonged to the dictator at large and tried desperately to find back the marbled room where I had photographed Uday Hussein, Saddam’s notorious son, for Stern magazine back in 2000. The room I could not find back, it was destroyed by ‘bunker busters’. A laser guided bomb that counts floors until the bomb breaks through the desired numbers of concrete floors before it explodes. In the same palace where Uday fed his lions by hand American soldiers found an enormous safe. The unit blew it up with some explosives. A few minutes later a soldier walked in, happily, with the key in his hand. Now I look back at it, I can say it was an indication, an omen, for what was about to come. '
Geert van Kesteren
Review by Joerg M. Colberg - Conscientious - www.jmcolberg.com

There are two ways we could look at photobooks. We could either say that they’re these incredibly special, limited-edition objects that we all wish, I’m sure, larger audiences would have a chance to see. Or we could say that our definition of the photobook usually excludes those books that do reach a larger audience, mostly for reasons of, let’s face it, snootiness (“But, my, those are coffee-table books!”). The reality might lie somewhere in between, and it’s actually a bit more complex than I made it sound.

With prints runs usually being very low for most photobooks (around the order of up to 2,000 or 3,000 copies), one way to possibly reach larger audiences is to produce an electronic version in the form of an “app” for a tablet computer (such as an iPad or whatever other devices are available). Compared with physical books, which are very costly to produce and distribute, apps come with relatively low up-front costs. They can thus be sold for much less than a photobook, making them potentially attractive to people who don’t want to spend $60 to see one (or can’t – people in the art world love to ignore the fact that many people have to think carefully about their spending). Plus, it really makes no difference in up-front costs whether you sell ten “copies” of your app or 10,000. Storage also isn’t a problem.

That said, apps aren’t photobooks. They’re apps. Unless you want to be dogmatic about it, one isn’t necessarily better than the other. They’re two different experiences with photography in general. The same is true for pretty much everything else that can be experienced (or consumed) on a tablet computer. You can watch a movie on your iPad, say, and that’s really not the same as watching it on the movie screen. It’s a different experience. Nobody will kick your chair, and you can bring in as much of your own popcorn as you want. But then, it’s a pretty small screen, which comes nowhere close to the one movie theaters use.

I bought an iPad (the “mini” version) last year to have a look at how useful the technology might be. I’m now using it for some things, while it’s no replacement for others. For example, I enjoy looking at magazines on my iPad, and I don’t miss the paper copies (in fact, I like not having to recycle all that paper). I enjoy reading some books on the iPad (the ones that I either use professionally – it’s so easy to mark text and use it later, or books I’m sure to only read once); but most books I still read on paper (and assuming there continue to be paper copies I won’t switch to the iPad for those).

Photography-wise, the iPad with its backlit screen is a very different experience for a lot of images. To give you one very obvious example, I saw some work by Daido Moriyama in the iPad version of the British Journal of Photography, and I was struck by how different I perceived them compared with seeing them in a book. I don’t own that many of Moriyama’s books, but the ones I have are more or less the complete opposite of what I experience on the iPad. Given that most photographers and/or publishers think very carefully about how photographs and/or photobooks are being printed, the fact that iPad apps are all backlit already results in possibly one major change in experience.

Needless to say, this might not matter for a fair amount of photographs, in particular those that are already mostly seen on computer screens, such as photojournalistic work. This brings me to Why Mister, Why? by Geert van Kesteren. With this book and Baghdad Calling (see my review here), van Kesteren single-handedly not only produced the two most relevant photobooks about the United States’ Iraq war, but he also raised the bar of what the medium photobook could do for photojournalistic work.

Why Mister, Why? now exists in the form of an app, which adds 166 images to the 237 photographs in the book. The organization of the app follows that of a book, with various details being adapted to the medium tablet computer. Books have pages. An iPad is always just that, a flat shiny thing. The viewer gets from one “page” to the next by swiping to the left or right. Thankfully, whoever developed the app resisted the temptation to add fake pages (Issuu style). An app is not a book, so why pretend there are virtual pages? Swiping left/right from a chapter’s main “page” will bring you to the Arabic/English language introductory essay (the app is fully bilingual), neatly mimicking how Arabic and English are being read from right to left and left to right, respectively (it’s taking care of details like this that seems to set apart Dutch photobook/app designers from the rest).

Each page displays a single photograph. For each image, there is a caption that can be accessed by pressing where it says “caption” on the screen. If you look at the gallery of images, you can see the various details I’m referring to – the images are all screenshots from my iPad. In a physical book, you either have a caption, or you don’t. Here, it’s the viewer’s choice to see it or not. In other words, you can decide how you want to engage with the app. The way the app is organized wastes no space for something that people might not want to see right away (you can’t do that with a book). Furthermore, vertical images are displayed just like horizontal ones. To properly see them, you need to turn your iPad. There are relatively few vertical images, so that’s not a big deal at all.

To navigate between chapters, you swipe up or down when you are on the very first page of any chapter. You cannot do that when you’re in the middle of a chapter. Again, this is not only simple and intuitive, it also makes sense: Since each chapter deals with a specific part of the story, you can’t create your own stories. If you’re in the middle of some chapter, and you want to go back to the main index, touch the screen where it says “Index”.
Why Mister, Why? thus is intuitively simple, while at the same time allowing for probably the best experience of the body of work on the iPad. The app brings a second life to the book (which is sold out), while, at the same time, making it available for – hopefully – a much larger audience.

But the app also shows that photojournalism does have a very good electronic future. Photojournalism should not be about reaching audiences first (by trying to be cool or hip) and about possibly having some sort of story second. Instead, it should be about well-produced stories first and then about trying to reach audiences with those stories. In a day and age where some people confuse taking Instagram pictures with photojournalism, Why Mister, Why?, the app, demonstrates what can be done with new media without sacrificing what made the profession in the first place.

Highly recommended!

 
Why mister, Why? by photographer Geert van Kesteren
Text and editing: Geert van Kesteren
App design and interface: Yvo Zijlstra (Antenna-men) / Software development iApp: Marcel van der Zwet (Antenna-men)