Libyan Sugar

'Around midnight we piled into a tiny car and drove for seven hours, from Cairo to the eastern border of Libya. Our driver, a wide-eyed, nicely dressed Egyptian city man with slick black greasy hair, persuaded military officer after officer standing beside tanks that he had foreigners and therefore special privilege to pierce the curfew barriers and drive west, as if in a high-speed chase on empty highways. Somewhere sometime we passed the pyramids, not too long after a pit stop at a McDonalds where a shopkeeper was selling green 'StarFuck' ashtrays shaped like coffee cups. The jet-lagged dreams of three, packed in a backseat, took us elsewhere as the sun rose over the Mediterranean just beyond the sand dunes. The barren desert, looking left to nowhere, looking right to the sea. The towns were simple shacks, and men in long robes without faces standing still. Would Libya be different? Would it be a different world? Something told us so. Something would be there for us.'

- Michael Christopher Brown

Centered around the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Libyan Sugar is a road trip through a war zone, detailed through photographs, journal entries, and written communication with family and colleagues. A record of Michael Christopher Brown's life both inside and outside Libya during that year, the work is about a young man going to war for the first time and his experience of that age-old desire to get as close as possible to a conflict in order to discover something about war and something about himself-perhaps a certain definition of life and death.