Libyan Sugar

Michael Christopher Brown
Libyan Sugar

Photographs: Michael Christopher Brown

Publisher: Twin Palm

412 pages

Year: 2016

Comments: Hardcover without jacket as issued, 26 x 18,5 cm, colors photographs. Designed editing by Michael Christopher Brown. In very good condition.

In the short essay that opens his book Libyan Sugar, Michael Christopher Brown offers a succinct but poignant written description of what it felt like to be in Libya during the revolution:

In the desert there would sometimes only be a smell of metal, of smoking scraps of tanks or rockets, and there would sometimes be a feeling that at any moment the place where one stood might vanish.

That sensorial evocation lays the first bricks for the remarkable sense of place that Brown builds throughout his entire body of work. The world of Libyan Sugar is vividly real and tense, a masterful vision of war that is also close and personal. The intimate details Brown sprinkles throughout the text immerse us in his experience: as readers, we feel that we are growing alongside the photographer as he explores his new milieu. Meanwhile, the penetrating simplicity of Brown’s camera-work—the entire book, save one image, was shot on a smartphone—place us firmly on the front lines. Page after page, we slip into that rarified view behind the lens.

Excerpt from the text of Coralie Kraft