This is the English version
Baghdad Calling: Reports from Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Iraq is Dutch photojournalist Geert van Kesteren's 2008 photobook on Iraqi refugee life, published by Episode Publishers and designed by Mevis & Van Deursen. Across 388 pages, van Kesteren's own photographs of refugees in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey run alongside hundreds of mobile-phone and digital-camera images gathered from ordinary Iraqis, documenting places no journalist could reach.
The design does as much arguing as the pictures do. Van Kesteren's own photographs and his interviews with refugees are printed on ordinary photobook stock, cut narrower than the rest of the book, so the newsprint underneath shows through at the edges — a rough, grey frame that never lets you forget where the other pictures came from.
Those other pictures — sourced from the mobile phones and digital cameras of Iraqis themselves, from places no journalist could get near — are run through a rotary press onto actual newsprint, gripper marks and all. Low-resolution, pixelated, printed rough on rough paper: the technical failure becomes the point, evidence that looks like evidence rather than like art. Interview transcripts run in a flat typewriter face, no editorializing, just testimony. What comes through, image after image, isn't one register of horror — though there is horror — but also a graduation party, a picnic in a park, ordinary life insisting on itself in the middle of a war.
A book that trusts its readers with the full range of what a war actually looks like from inside it.