The Houston Literary Review

Fall 2007 Photography Pages

 THLR is proud to offer our readers a glimpse of the photographic journal of Richard Tannery who worked in Iraq as a civilian contractor.

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  Richard Tannery’s prior publications are primarily online at Coffee Press Journal, Muse Apprentice Guild, The Kagablog, Underground Window, and he co-founded the Unruly Texans Writing Group and ExperimentalPoetry.com.

Tannery is from Austin, Texas where he graduated from UT Austin with a B.A. in Anthropology and double minor in History and English. He gained employment with a major defense contractor in 2005 to go to Iraq, where he lived and worked for nearly a year before being injured on the job. 

 

I am currently on medical leave and look to return to Iraq in the next year with an international aide and relief agency (I should not mention the name) that I have been volunteering with stateside. I am just now attempting to publish what I wrote while stationed, and look forward to amassing my publications in a book titled: Poison Cloud: A Year in Post-Saddam Iraq. 

 

The Unruly Texans writing group was also co-founded with J.Shane Tyree, Charlie Wright, and DJ John Kinsey in 2000. We built a website called ExperimentalPoetry.com which ran from 2001 to 2004 in an effort to collect and e-publish undiscovered, talented writers, poets, artists, illustrators, and the miscellaneous fringe of the creative world.

  After years of torture under the Iraqi National Olympic Committee President Uday Hussein, the shell of this soccer stadium is left as a monument to the area's dark past.

bunker 3

concrete and sandbags provide shelter for frequent incoming fire

 this sucks

a condemned living and sleeping quarters on base

  Ex-pats

civilian contractors relax after a workday in the makeshift tent/office dubbed: thumperville