Sophie Ristelhueber
French, born 1949
At the end of the Gulf War, Sophie Ristelhueber traveled to Kuwait to record the physical traces of conflict on the landscape. Entitled FAIT, the French word for "fact," the resulting series of photographs depicts trenches and tank tracks, bomb craters, dense smoke rising from blazing oil wells, and battle debris scattered across the sand from aerial and ground-level points of view. While her images at first appear abstract, closer inspection reveals the remnants of an environment transformed by war.
Label from Anselm Kiefer: Beyond Landscape, November 17, 2013–October 5, 2014