Home Front cover PHOTO ESSAYS LIFE FORCE
The magazine of the photo-essay
Oct back 2016 issue
Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan
by Rita Leistner
A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine.  Fabulous! Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
In 2011, Rita Leistner embedded with U.S. Marines in Helmand Province Afghanistan as a team member of Basetrack - an experimental journalism initiative that used iPhones and Social Media to create connections from the deployment in Afghanistan to Marines' families back home. This experience was the jumping off point for Leistner's book, Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan, which she wrote as a reaction to the clash of technologies playing out in the theatre of war and beyond, inspired by Marshall McLuhan's most famous aphorism, "The medium is the message." Leistner argues that the retro apps in smartphones are a symptom of our yearning for historical permanence and human connection in an increasingly digitized, remote-controlled world and asks: What happens to the visual history of human kind if all the images we make live in the ephemeral world of the smartphone, the "digital womb"? In 2015, she teamed up with master printer Bob Carnie to create
permanent prints from the original iPhone files. The photographs in this gallery are created from scans of palladium prints with tri-color gum pigment over top. It is the most permanent color process known. The support is Arches paper mounted on aluminum, as can be seen in the cover image of this month's Life Force magazine.
Himalayas. View from airplane. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Little girls at a mosque. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Marines with dog. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Close-up Marine. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
View of old market, MusaQala. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Fuel measuring funnels. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Fuel dispenser, star logo. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
School teacher. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Helicopter over MusaQala. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Marine’s graffiti. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Machine repair shop. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Curtain close-up. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Toys and candy cart. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Marines personal-training. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Back blast area. Rita Leistner / Basetrack  — Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.
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