Lorenzo Meloni's first monograph, published in 2022, gathers almost a decade of work in the Middle East and North Africa around the rise and fall of the Islamic State
The book is orange before it is anything else.
Orange is the color of the Guantánamo jumpsuit. Orange is what the Islamic State put on the prisoners it filmed, so the reference could not be missed. Orange is what Islamic State fighters were put into once they were the prisoners, in the crowded jails that held them after Baghouz. One color, three sets of prisoners. It is the cover of Meloni’s first book.
"History teaches, but has no students."
- Antonio Gramsci
Nothing is printed on the front — no photograph, no lettering. Someone in the prison beneath Raqqa stadium — a jail the Islamic State kept for its own members who had fallen foul of their superiors — had been scratching the days into a wall, and Meloni photographed it. The cover carries those hundred marks and nothing else, pressed into the orange cloth without ink. They go into the surface, as they did into the wall. The epigraph, a few pages later, is from Antonio Gramsci: History teaches, but has no students.
Meloni went out in 2011 to photograph what was expected to be a new era of democratization in the Middle East and North Africa, and did not stop for a decade. From 2013, the work narrowed onto a single subject: the rise, reign and fall of the Islamic State as a territory, across Iraq, Syria and Libya, until 2019. For the book, chronology was no use: a linear account would have implied that there was a beginning and end.
"You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end."
- Tim O'Brien
The word that kept coming back was fragmentation, and it came from the material before it came from the edit. Meloni was wounded by mortar shrapnel in Libya; much of the killing and maiming he saw was done by fragments. The societies he photographed had been fractured along sectarian, tribal, political and territorial lines by conflicts that long preceded the Islamic State. His own position had never assembled itself either. “I asked myself many times,” he writes, “if I had been born Iraqi and my family was killed by US soldiers, what might I have done?”
When he began working out how to construct the book, two literary references became important: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. What interested him was how both books give form to memory and testimony without resolving experience into a single continuous line. Levi proceeds through discrete, often thematic chapters; O’Brien loops and restarts, and states outright: “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end.” Meloni is careful not to claim an equivalence between his own experience and the trauma those books address: he chose to enter the wars he photographed. What he took from them was a way of constructing the narrative.
What he made is a hardback of 162 pages and ninety-one color photographs, built to interrupt itself. A lone man walking in the desert opens the book, and a second frame of a lone man walking in the desert closes it. In between, every sequence is broken by orange pages carrying what he picked out of the rubble as he moved with the advancing forces: an application form, printed in English, for those who wanted to join; a letter from an Indian fighter to his Senegalese superior, requesting permission to carry out a suicide mission, found in Sirte; copper coins from a currency the caliphate minted for itself. The captions are held in the last pages.
Set against the still lifes are sentences from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a founding ideologue of the jihad who preceded the Islamic State, and from Dabiq and Rumiyah, the Islamic State magazines published in English. Nothing on the page identifies them either. A passage on the Sykes-Picot agreement and the colonial hands that drew the region’s borders — the same grievance Meloni had set out to photograph in 2011. A sentence, from an article titled ‘Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You’, insisting that the group is not a set of monsters acting without logic but is waging a calculated war. A line observing that in wartime, worry spreads and hearts climb into throats. Each can be read with agreement for a moment, before the reader recognizes who wrote it.
"Wars feed on the wars before them, in Meloni’s account, by a mechanism of revenge that converts memory into retaliation."
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There are five battles here, for one war: Kobane, where Kurdish fighters handed the jihadists their first major defeat and the United States entered the Syrian war; Palmyra, where the Islamic State blew up the ancient monuments and the counter-offensive, rarely photographed, was fought by the Syrian regime with Russian and Iranian support; Sirte, Gaddafi’s birthplace, the caliphate’s African capital and its only coast; Mosul, where the caliphate was proclaimed from a pulpit and where the city was then taken apart street by street; Raqqa, the administrative capital, where the leadership and the foreign volunteers sheltered.
Wars feed on the wars before them, in Meloni’s account, by a mechanism of revenge that converts memory into retaliation. One of the sentences the book lifts from al-Zarqawi reads: history repeats itself, and the logic throughout the ages does not change.
"I know that I'm not the first one that started to cover this topic, and I'm afraid I'm not going to be the last one."
- Lorenzo Meloni
Which leaves the title. Baghouz, spring 2019: the last of the territory was a strip of ground on the Euphrates, Islamic State fighters in front, the river and the Iraqi border behind, coalition aircraft overhead. In the final days, the American special forces cleared the line of foreign journalists, and Meloni, who had known these men for years, was told to go. The commander of the unit he was with, Adel Judi of the Qamishli brigade, spoke almost no English. He put his arms around him and said: We don’t say goodbye.
It was meant kindly, between two people who expected to meet again. Meloni has kept the other reading too. Within days the caliphate would cease to exist as a territory, which is not the same as the disappearance of the ideology that produced it. “I know that I’m not the first one that started to cover this topic,” he says, “and I’m afraid I’m not going to be the last one.”
The afterword refuses war as a definitive resolution of hostilities. The book extends that refusal to the photograph: it begins to undermine the decisive moment — not because decisive images are absent from it, but because no single image is allowed to explain the war.
Discover Meloni’s project The Kabuler on Afghanistan with Cristina De Middel here.
Explore a selection of fine prints by Meloni on the Magnum Store here.