All of Which I Saw captures the United States Marine Corps during some of the most dramatic and important moments of the Iraq War. The book takes the viewer across the Pacific aboard ship, into the Battle of Najaf and Second Battle of Fallujah—where Read took his now-iconic photograph of a wounded Sergeant Major Bradley Kasal—and beyond into the bloody streets of Ramadi and the darkness of the Haditha massacre . . . only to return to the light of homecoming. During the Iraq War, no other photojournalist spent more time with the Marines, and this is a singular, stunning, and indispensable record of the conflict and the Marine Corps at war. Throughout, the book also contains Read’s own contemporaneous accounts that tell the stories behind the photos and capture the grim truths about the war in all its violence, tragedy, heroism, and sacrifice.
Lucian Read is an Emmy-award-winning director, cinematographer, and photojournalist. His photojournalism work during the wars for publications such as Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, and Rolling Stone garnered a World Press Photo Award in 2006.
"This book is an embed. The adrenaline and the boredom, the fear and the pain, the valor and the moral vertigo that Lucian Read saw during almost 4 years of deployments with US Marines comes through with an intensity I found traumatic- which is to say I found it true. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to know the reality of what America did in Iraq." --Quil Lawrence, Former Baghdad Bureau Chief, NPR
"Lucian Read takes photos so arresting they remain imprinted on your mind long after you've seen them, haunted by the intensity, intimacy, violence, ugliness and beauty of a Marine deployment." --Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
"All of Which I Saw" paints a psychological portrait of young men doing their nation's bidding in harm's way. Images of young Americans and even younger Iraqis fill the pages as Lucian wades through the humanity of people caught in a clash of cultures. Hopefully this book will become dog-eared by future politicians as they ponder how to best resolve tomorrow's challenges. --Charles Grow, Interim Director, National Museum of the Marine Corps
"Lucian intimately captures the experiences of our wars and deployment in Iraq. Whenever someone asks me what it was like over there, I wish I could just hand them a copy of "All of Which I Saw." --Zach Iscol, former Marine and Co-founder of Task & Purpose and the Headstrong Project
Foreword Indies Award, Silver, Photography Category (2020) - Short-listed [United States]
