The photographs in this provocative book were taken in Afghanistan from 1993 to 2012 by Stephen Dupont. The ink painting, rubbings, and book design were done by Marshall Weber.

Weber illuminated Dupont’s photographs with rubbing collages from memorials that illustrate the persistence of colonial conflicts across the centuries. The found and cut-up text and ghostly images from these matrixed memorials form the poetry which intertwines with the photo-collage and evidences the linkages between global indigenous liberation struggles.

Dupont chose about 300 photos from his massive archive and gave them to Weber who then edited the sequence and constructed an accordion fold book of the portraits. Weber then traveled around the world with the book for over a year, collaging the rubbings over the photographs (and thus embossing and debossing the photos as well). In a final integrating layer, Weber meticulously brushed Sumi ink, turmeric, saffron, and other inks and pigments throughout the pages of the book merging the imagery and highlighting various images and texts creating both an epic frieze and an intimate accordion fold book.

Rubbing sources include: Australian war memorial and Aboriginal history plaques in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney, Australia; Lyndale Park Peace Garden, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument, Crow Agency, Montana; Downtown Farmers’ Market plaques, Olympia, Washington; and the Wounded Knee massacre site and cemetery memorial monuments, on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, near Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

Who Served is the third book in Weber & Dupont’s Dark Illuminations series. The series is also comprised of Prisoners of War, The Lion of Panjshir, Sought Peace, and Kill Them All.