Flat Land explores the visual culture of men and women at war by looking at publicly available images of Flat Daddies (two-dimensional life-size cut-outs of soldiers that are carried through daily activities by families and friends back home), and Flat Stanleys (small two-dimensional cut-outs of a cartoon boy, sent by American school children on adventures around the world, sometimes even to war-zones). The photographs are projected on opposite sides of a single projection screen. Fictional voice-over narrations tell of Flat Stanley’s journeys around the world, from the White House to Iraq and Afghanistan, and of one mother’s experience with her flat daddy.
While a government is empowered to send men and women overseas, families and friends create their own compensatory circuit of deployment. Both the Stanleys and the Daddies enact this circuit but in different ways. The government sends the soldier, and then families create a photographic proxy, a “Flat Daddy,” to mark his absence. Photographs of the proxy with the family are sent to the soldier, both confirming and denying his absence. On the other hand, Flat Stanley, as a proxy family member, is sent overseas and photographed with the soldier to share his daily life at war. Then he is returned home, completing his “tour of duty.”
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