Gloria Crespo MacLennan This is a very rigorous and ambitious reportage executed inside the classical documentary tradition, carried out with the same amount of sobriety as emotion, that manages to express the terrible and painful consequences of the past history of Iraq. It is this difficult equilibrium that the photographer has managed to attain, which in my opinion makes the work so powerful.
With estimates running from 250.000 to 1 million people, Iraq has the largest number of missing persons in a single country. The Iraqi desaparecidos are the victims of 4 decades of dictatorship, wars, genocide and terrorism. The teams of Mass Graves department and Legal Medicine have been traveling all over Iraq in the past 13 years, from Basra in the South to Sinjar in the North. Their journeys were the most painful and challenging missions ever: excavations of mass graves and exhumation of dead bodies.