September 12th, 2001 Herald newspaper, Montreal, from the "Love and War" series

About the Photographer

Simoneau, Guillaume

Canadian, b. 1978

Guillaume Simoneau's project Love and War (2011) tracks his on-again, off-again relationship with a woman named Caroline Annandale. Simoneau first met Annandale at the Maine Photographic Workshop in 2000. Both in their early twenties, they began an intense, youthful relationship and traveled the world together just prior to September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks on the United States, Annandale enlisted in the US army and was sent to Iraq. The two grew apart, Annandale eventually marrying someone else, but they reunited several years later upon her return from war to begin a tumultuous second chapter in their relationship. Using a variety of images, including pictures he took when they first met, photographs Annandale emailed home from Iraq, text messages, and handwritten notes, Simoneau charts the couple’s love affair and its attendant ups and downs, but not in chronological order. Sequenced to mimic the disjointed nature of memory, communication, and identity, the project reveals how our ideas about ourselves and of our loved ones are always a blend of past and present. As the photographs accumulate, they expose Annandale’s loss of innocence and her transformation into a toughened war veteran. Ultimately, Simoneau reveals the lasting impact—the invisible, indelible, and irreversible effects that both love and war have on people’s lives.