Wounded: The Legacy of War is Bryan Adams’s portrait study of young British service personnel who sustained life-changing injuries in Iraq, Afghanistan, or military training. Its subject is not combat at the moment of impact, but what follows: scars, disability and disfigurement carried into daily life. By concentrating on individual sitters, Adams gives the consequences of war a human scale that statistics and distant reportage cannot provide.

The portraits are direct and intentionally demanding. Visible injury is neither concealed nor displaced by battlefield imagery; the body itself becomes the place where military history is recorded. Yet the sitters are not reduced to their wounds. Their presence before the camera also conveys endurance, self-possession and the effort required to rebuild a life after profound physical change. This tension—between vulnerability and resolve—gives the project its particular force.

Interviews accompany the photographs, connecting each image to a personal account of injury and recovery. The combination matters: the texts supply experience, chronology and voice, while the portraits hold the reader before appearances that may otherwise be avoided. Together, these elements keep the book from becoming an abstract survey of trauma. It remains a series of encounters with named lives and distinct circumstances.

Published by Steidl in 2013, the English-language volume was produced as a large-format hardcover. For collections centered on portraiture, military history or socially engaged photography, its relevance rests in the sustained treatment of war’s aftermath and in the dialogue between photographic confrontation and oral testimony. Wounded deserves attention not as a generalized statement about conflict, but as a historically specific record of British soldiers marked by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and of portrait photography used to make those lasting costs visible.