UNVEIL

Unveil was captured during Atara Delgadillo’s time serving as a humanitarian aid worker in the Middle East. The series explores the brutal "stripping away" of the human myth, a meditation on the uncovering of an inherent evil. It challenges the pretense of modern societies that claim to have outgrown savagery, revealing instead how war has unmasked a level of violence and horror that we cannot go back from, exposing the true "nature" of man and the cruelty of those in power.

The work also explores the ecology of warfare. These photographs, captured against the desolation of the desert, connect the vulnerability of the human body to a planet being destroyed by the environmental toll of war. Delgadillo argues that war does not just kill people; it ravages the land itself. If humanitarianism continues to focus only on immediate relief while ignoring the earth emergency and the ecological ruin caused by warfare, the results will be catastrophic.

Through her lens, she documents the realization that there are no winners in war; it poisons our society. It kills our empathy and leaves the world in a void. She has been left 'naked,' stripped and left with the truth that war takes everything away from us.

Unveil is a haunting testament to the truth that humanity and nature are one, even in our shared capacity for violence and total erasure.