SMFA Faculty members Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari announce the publication of their new book, "They Came to Baghdad." The husband and wife team previously worked together on a 13 year long collaboration about the visual imagery of Ataturk in Turkish culture and published "The State of Ata" in 2010. Now they turn their attention to Iraq as they provide a visual narrative inspired by Agatha Christie's 1951 novel "They Came to Baghdad."

Mandel and Zakari provide images and news accounts of the 40 countries that have participated in the Multi-National Force deploying troops to Iraq between 2003 and 2011. They parallel this compilation with 40 of Christie's book covers, conjuring an exotic site for diplomatic and romantic intrigue. The final chapter documents the continuing invasion with an index of corporate logos of the contractors hired for the reconstruction of Iraq and the major foreign investors involved.

The work is based entirely on websearch from traditional media sources as well as from alternative sources that have now entered the public sphere, from eBay, Amazon, Flickr and Myspace to translated blog entries from around the world. The book will be part of the traveling exhibit "Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here" organized by Beau Beausoleil and Sarah Bodman. The U.S. premiere of the collection will be at the Cambridge Arts Council in 2013.

Mike Mandel is an American photographer who has published nine projects including co-authoring the seminal photographic work "Evidence" with Larry Sultan. His work was exhibited in the Berlin Biennale (2005) and at PhotoEspaña in Madrid (2009). Chantal Zakari is a Turkish-Levantine artist and recent U.S. citizen. Under the pseudonym Show-n-tell she published "webAffairs" in 2005.

The book is available through lulu.com in hardcover print-on-demand and as an e-book.