Coffin Ban, Tami Silicio, 2004
By April 2004, some 700 U.S. troops had been killed on the battlefield in Iraq. The U.S. government had banned news organizations from photographing such scenes in 1991, arguing that they violated families’ privacy and the dignity of the dead. As a government contractor working for a cargo company in Kuwait, Tami Silicio was moved by the increasing human freight she was loading and felt compelled to share what she was seeing.