Published by Steidl. Text by Stephen Dupont, Jacques Menasche.
In Fucked Up Fotos, Australian photographer Stephen Dupont (born 1967) curates a career’s worth of mishaps—double-exposures, light leaks, X-ray clouding, corrupted computer files—and discovers spectacular beauty in the damage.
Spanning 30 years, five continents and more than a dozen countries, from Afghanistan to Papua New Guinea, from China to Romania, these eclectic images create a veritable catalog of everything that can go wrong in a photograph, whether through user error, mechanical malfunction or deliberate sabotage. At the same time, they return us to the primal magic of photography and its ability to capture something beyond what was intended. The result is a visual mediation on chance, and a celebration of the accidental, the unpredictable and the imperfect.
Generation AK, The Afghanistan Wars 1993-2012 is a retrospective selection of images of the country where Dupont has covered everything from civil war and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, to the launch of "Operation Enduring Freedom" and the ongoing war on terrorism. Dupont completed much of this work on self-funded trips and as part of one of the last small independent photographic agencies, Contact Press Images, of which he has been a member since 1997. In 2008 he survived a suicide bombing while traveling with an Afghan opium eradication team near Jalalabad.
Stephen Dupont: Generation AK, The Aghanistan Wars 1993–2012