Hello Camel

＂In my experience, the two most significant characteristics of war are horror and absurdity,＂ says Christoph Bangert, the German photojournalist who has been documenting crises for international publications such as the New York. Following his examination of the way our society deals with graphic images in his critically acclaimed book War Porn (Kehrer 2014), in his new book he confronts the bitter absurdity of war. He opposes our clichéd notion of modern war as a dynamic, dramatic, and heroic experience with his calm and composed, but equally odd and alien images of the wars in Afghanistan, Gaza, Darfur, Lebanon, and Iraq.

Christoph Bangert was born in a rural part of Western Germany in 1978. He studied photography at the Fachhochschule Dortmund and at the International Center of Photography, New York. He graduated from ICP in 2003. Bangert was a semi-professional rally driver for four years. In 2002 he shipped an old green Land Rover from Germany to Buenos Aires and in six months, drove from Argentina, 22,000 miles to New York City. The journey resulted in his first book titled Travel Notes.
Bangert has worked in Palestine, Japan, Darfur, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, the US, Lebanon, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Iraq, where he spent about nine months in 2005 and 2006 on assignment for The New York Times. His work from Iraq is collected in IRAQ: The Space Between.
His pictures have been published in leading international publications and he regularly photographs on assignment for The New York Times, Stern Magazine and Neue Zurcher Zeitung. Christoph Bangert exclusively works for editorial clients. He does not shoot handbags or watches.
Bangert won awards from World Press Photo, POYi and others and participated in the Joop Swart Masterclass. After completing a 14 month long overland journey with his Land Rover across Africa he published a book called Africa Overland with National Geographic Germany in 2013. In recent years he started to compete in motorsports events again, particularly desert off-road rallies. Currently he is working on a long term project about the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
His book War Porn was released in May 2014, and is now in its 3rd edition.
Christoph Bangert lives in Cologne, Germany together with his wife Chiho - a Japanese photographer and graphic designer he frequently collaborates with - and their two daughters.