“Her subjects, including blue-eyed Americans costumed as Iraqi insurgents, meet her camera with a stunned gaze as if caught in the act of impersonating the enemy. Through these large stills, we can stare back and contemplate the cultural layers stacked before us.”

“And these portraits, like cast photos from opening night, play portraiture against itself. They’re in costume, but are they in character? … This color-blind casting? Does it train or untrain the eye and the mind? Will it go on or will it be a curiosity of this particular war?”

“Beckett's representations of her protagonists resonate with Western painterly conventions and iconography. With echoes of Rafael, Vermeer, and Delacroix mediating the construction of contemporary Iraqi subjects, Beckett creates a strange complicity among viewers, sitters, and the ‘oriental’ individuals they embody."

“Beckett’s photographs convey a dizzying sense of falling through fictions. Where does game-playing begin? Where does it end? You can't say for sure. But amid so much fakery, being employed as a vaccination against an imminent overdose of reality, those eyes staring out at us have an extraordinarily heightened claim on us.”

“Which is more incongruous: the obviously artificial (a mosque interior with plywood walls) or the unnervingly realistic (the Medina Wasl Village butcher shop, as it’s called, has real meat in it; and Beckett lights it to ravishing effect)?

“She displays a masterful hand with color and light. In one portrait, a female Marine as an Iraqi nurse looks like a serene Madonna figure in an embroidered blue tunic, a lightweight white head scarf, and a freshly made-up face— a harmony of composition, soft color, and light. “

“In these portraits, the address between sitter and photographer is so direct and uninflected that we, as viewers, cannot assume an ironic, cynical, or judgmental mental stance without feeling a twinge of guilt due to our own uninformed, mostly cliched assumptions about the identity of the men and women in the photographs— uniformed and civilian alike.”

“The earnest poses here blur the line between the subjects’ fictive roles and their real selves. The result is a brew of self and projected other, an unnerving amalgamation that may offer up more truth than we know about who these people are and how they see the world.”

“The picture shares similarities with an Italian altarpiece from the Renaissance: the chiaroscuro lighting, the sculptural way the dress fits, the devoted posture in which the man kneels in front of a wooden chest. This Jibril Ihsan Hamal is busy constructing an IED, one of these well-known Improvised Explosive Devices.”

“To me, the fact that my photographs take place before war is very important. They are a kind of prequel, made during an anticipation time that is felt by the soldiers and by me.”

“In ‘Simulating Iraq’ at the Bernard Tool Gallery, her photos are rich in detail and color… her style, she says, is partly intuitive and partly a result of the old-fashioned medium format camera she uses.”

“When we stand and look at them, they're looking at us… which I really like because I want to provoke you to look at the people and think about what it would be to be in their shoes.”