the cost of war

civilian casualties are typically categorised (example) by year or location, in order to help study, dissect or analyse things. the loss of lives, however, is continuous, unabated, unwarranted, and entirely inconsiderate of age, location or circumstance.

if bullets and bombs do not differenciate between who they killed on december 31 and on january 1, why must all our representations do so? those people had names, often died with companions, and were always too young to have been killed — bullets did not care about this, but why don’t we?

link to the visualisation

functioning as slowstudio
data source: iraq body count (Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, et al)
working with: rohit sharma
and help from: jennifer haugan