For seventeen years, Claire Beckett photographed on American military bases where the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were rehearsed. Defense Language gathers work made between 2006 and 2023 at installations including Fort Drum, Fort Irwin, Fort Jackson, Fort Polk, Twentynine Palms, and the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. There she found costumed role-players, Hollywood-inflected sets, and staged tableaus built to simulate Iraqi and Afghan villages—an apparatus in which combat veterans often played enemy combatants, immigrants from the countries being simulated lent the scenarios verisimilitude, and local civilians filled out the artificial streets.
The book refuses the single register of the documentary image. Formal portraits stand beside landscapes of makeshift architecture and looser pictures of figures moving through the scenarios, so that the training environment is examined as an image-world as much as a place. Beckett’s own position is part of the subject: she has described learning, as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, to see herself as an American and to reckon with the reach of American power, and the project asks how Americans like her picture other cultures—and what assumptions of cultural superiority those pictures carry.
Printed matter is folded into the sequence: fold-out pocket guides issued to soldiers and Marines, language-training workbooks, and other materials made by the military, government branches, or contractors. Beckett found much of this literature on eBay. Though most dates from the project’s own years, some reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, a span that gives the book its historical argument about the durability of American biases toward Arab and Muslim people.
The design is quietly deliberate: 136 images across 192 pages in hardback. Because the material is recent, it is the book’s internal logic—image against document, portrait against set—rather than any external status that should draw a collector. Defense Language belongs with the small group of photobooks that treat military simulation not as spectacle but as a system of representation, and it is likely to be consulted for years as a record of how those fictions were staged and pictured.
