ENTRY DESCRIPTION
The soldier, exhausted by heat, humidity, and weeks of fighting, takes respite under a portrait of Saddam Hussein during the invasion of 2003. Most artwork depicting the dictator was rapidly vandalized or destroyed and this painting shows the beginnings of that process.

AUTHOR
At the age of 13 an eccentric neighbor gave Tim Floyd, born in 1955, a broken Leica IIIc. With that camera, Life and National Geographic magazines, Floyd taught himself the craft of photography. His youthful vision was honed by the iconic images of the late 1960s.

Although he chose another humanistic endeavor as a career, Floyd remained an avid photographer. Despite the demands of surgical training, and later practice, Floyd’s photography garnered recognition by photographers such as Eliot Porter and Art Wolfe. In 2001 he won Best of Show in the Northwest Exhibition of Environmental Photography. Later that year Floyd, age 47, was moved by the events of 9/11 to join a U.S. Army Reserve Forward Surgical Team.

Floyd deployed to Iraq during the 2003 invasion, where he saw a unique opportunity to photograph a large-scale conventional war from the intimate environment of a combat surgical tent. The mission also took Floyd and his camera into Iraqi farm homes, city apartments, palaces and the terrorist camp of the Peoples Mujahedin of Iran. The result was several publications and a book, Aid and Comfort to the Enemy.

Now retired from medicine, Floyd has embarked with full force on his other youthful career choice, photojournalism. He is a freelance photographer for the Idaho Statesman. He won First Place in the Idaho Press Club Best of 2019 Awards. A recent photo essay appeared in the Washington Post. He plans to emulate the great photojournalists who worked into their 90’s.

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