Fait.

Sophie Ristelhueber [b. 1949] has made several notable artists' books, but Fait is her most important work. She conceived this series about the first Gulf War in response to an aerial image of the Kuwaiti desert that appeared in Time magazine's February 25, 1991 issue. This image prompted her to think of Man Ray's 'Dust Breeding' photograph, taken in Marcel Duchamp's New York studio in 1920. After several months of trying, Ristelhueber obtained the necessary travel permissions, arriving in Kuwait in October 1991 after the fighting had ended. She joined United Nations forces and private companies who were removing land mines and used their helicopters and planes to take aerial photographs of battlefields, also working on the ground photographing debris and unexploded munitions. Often, this prompts an uncertainty in the viewer as to whether the image they are looking at was taken 20cm from the ground or 200m above.

'The Gulf War was brief, but one of the dirtiest in environmental terms for modern, 'clean' warfare with 'minimum collateral damage' means not just broken lives — the relatively few dead and the many traumatically stressed — but environmental disaster on a hitherto unimaginable scale… After the attempts to sanitize this war it seems appropriate, if bitterly ironic, that the great photobook to emerge from the conflict was a book of landscape photographs' (Badger).

There was also an English edition, for which the title was changed to Aftermath, much to Ristelhueber's dismay. The title Fait has multiple meanings for which there is no English equivalent. In French, it means 'fact' – what the documentary images supposedly contain, 'made' – suggesting this could be a work of art or fiction, and 'done' – locating the facts/work in the past or history.

First edition; (176 x 110 mm, 7 x 4¼ in); 48 colour and 23 black-and-white photographs, text excerpts from 'On War' by Carl von Clausewitz, design by Atalante, all edges black; self-endpapers, black-and-white photo-illustrated thick paper-covered boards, a fine copy; [152]pp.

[Fait] The Photobook: A History II, p168; Errata Editions Books on Books no. 3; What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843-1999, p320.