Saddam Mania
By Teun Voeten (photography) and Sharoz Makarechi (design) | 2006
When Voeten arrived in April 2003 in Baghdad, just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, he was fascinated by a cult of personality he had not seen before. Saddam portraits were omnipresent. The ousted ruler had taken on multiple persona like a stern yet benevolent ruler, a macho army leader, a pietous sheik, a succes full diplomat, even a sexy playboy. Within a week of his fall, most of his portraits were defaced and ultimately destroyed. Voeten managed to photograph as many of them as possible. In a ground breaking and controversial show in 2005, New York based creative director and curator Sharoz Makarechi exhibited most of the images larger than life at the gallery space of Think Tank 3 in Lower Manhattan. Saddam Mania is more as a catalogue: It is a smart social critic that reveals Saddam as a Super Brand in itself.
Details
Saddam Mania
Published in 2006 by Think Tank 3, New York, in a special custom made, hand signed edition of 12
Pages: 24, including 18 custom made giclee prints and an introductory essay by Sharoz Makarechi
Format: 15 by 22 cm, spray painted hard cover
ISBN: not available
Price: $ 500
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In 1994, Voeten started a photo reportage on the underground homeless in New York. This eventually became his first book. ’Tunnelmensen’ (1996) was published in Dutch by Atlas, Amsterdam. It appeared in an updated and translated version in 2010 in the USA.
Voeten made three photo books: ‘A Ticket To’ (1999), a dark, somber book with black and white photos from the conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. ‘Narco Estado, Drug Violence in Mexico’ (2012) depicts the horrible violence in strong color photos. 'New York, New York' (2005, 2021) features his architectural work he has been shooting since 1989.
After being nearly killed by doped up child soldiers in the civil war in Sierra Leone, Voeten wrote ‘How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone’ which appeared in the Netherlands (2000) and the USA (2002). A Chines translation is in the making.
His PhD research resulted in the academic publication ‘The Mexican Drug Violence Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty’ (2018). A Dutch journalistic version appeared the same year. In 2020, Small Wars Journal/El Centro published a completely rewritten, edited and updated version of this study.
In 2019, the city of Antwerp commissioned him to research drug related crime. This resulted eventually in ‘DRUGS. Antwerpen in de greep van de Nederlandse syndicaten’ (2020).
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Publications by Teun Voeten
