Photographs and Words

Michael Katakis has spent his life travelling with a camera and writing a journal. This is the resulting book. For the past 25 years he has collaborated with the social anthropologist Kris Hardin in work spanning continents and cultures. Their initial project was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, photographing and interviewing veterans and civilians alike, the result of which was a moving portrait of America’s strengths, sacrifices and errors during a profoundly divisive time in the nation’s history. A different and disturbing portrait of the country emerges in ‘Troubled Land: Twelve Days Across America’ where Michael Katakis sought to have a dialogue with ordinary people right after September 11, 2001. In between these projects were two periods of fieldwork in Sierra Leone documenting the people of a village before their bloody civil war began. His fine photographs were given an added, unintended significance by the awful events that followed.
 
Michael Katakis’s photographs are now held in the British Library’s collections.