“Cliches reign, Beckett observed. Ask an old-fashioned B-movie director in Hollywood to sketch Iraqi or Afghan good guys and bad guys, and you get the stereotypes that Beckett photographed.”

“At the project’s heart is Beckett’s own biography, which gives the work its moral footing. Her Peace Corps years in Benin forced her, as she puts it, to reckon with ‘the disproportionately large influence we have as Americans.’”

“…there is both an intimacy to the picture-making when it comes to the portraits, and at the same time a larger social critique that permeates the work. I would say that I am first and foremost a portraitist, so the pictures always came from a place of wanting to know something about the people I was photographing, and also wanting to honor them in the way that they are depicted.”

“Beckett’s project is both visually compelling and politically urgent- a quiet yet devastating indictment of the way a nation constructs its ‘others’ in the name of security and control.”

“If a portrait can be interpreted in multiple ways, my point of view needs to be explicit. The documents therefore became tools: by sharing them, I underline my opinion.”

“This was a quiet moment between mock battles. I asked the soldier to pose as his character. He is holding a mock weapon, an explosive made from a shaving cream can.”

“ ‘With this project, I look at the way Americans such as myself interact with other cultures,’ Beckett says. ‘The photographs draw attention to the problematic depiction of “cultural others” in these trainings, challenging the implicit assumption of American cultural superiority.’ '‘

“On relentlessly large negatives (10 by 13 cm), she captured the Americans, their blue eyes peering into the lens from beneath a plaid headscarf or through the slit of a burqa. She’s not interested in the ludicrousness of an oriental setting erected by American construction companies in the Mojave Desert: she’s interested in the Americans who have to play the good guys and the bad guys in these exercises. It’s about identity.”

“For Beckett, war is less a battlefield than a mechanism of identity construction. These two series form a stark and candid diptych on the expanding militarization of society in the aftermath of 9/11.”

“Ultimately, I argue that Beckett’s deconstruction of an Orientalist vision of the Middle East is bound up with a critical rearticulation of American identity in the twenty-first century.”

“As an artist I believe it is my role to invite a viewer to contemplation, and the works themselves allow space for us to ask questions of ourselves. With this project I look at the way Americans such as myself interact with other cultures, and how we collectively understand our place in the world.”

“…that’s what the training in Anthropology and the training in Peace Corps did for me. It just allowed me to sort of be able to turn things inside out and look at them from a perspective different than the perspective that I would have had otherwise, and that’s just helped me so much as an artist.”

“I really like the capacity of pictures to tell stories and raise questions about people, about the way we live, about the conditions in which we live our lives. And so I think for me, portraiture is about all those things. It's about an opportunity to ask about a person or a society or even myself.”

“It could be that the work allows a viewer access to think about the Muslim community in a way that they had not been able to previously. But it’s also possible that the work can give viewers insight into their own thoughts to the assumptions and prejudices that they carry inside.”

“Shot in natural light, the images share a sense of stillness and quiet, imparted by Beckett’s serene use of color.”

“It would be easy to see Claire Beckett’s quietly reverential photos of Americans who have converted to Islam as a public service campaign devised to combat the badmouthing Muslims take in the United States. But they’re more textured than ads, and sometimes more provocative.”

“These are not ‘natural’ or ‘fly on the wall’ pictures.  Each one was meticulously composed and arranged by me with the help of the sitter.” 

“In her brightly lit, saturated images, Beckett focuses on perception and identity, exploring not only the subjects' physical image as ‘converts’ but also the viewers' understanding of religious culture in the U.S. “

“ ‘Above Medina Jabal Town, National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California’ (2008) is a military building in which storage containers have been painted to look like a town in the Middle East. With its muted desert hues and artificial subject, the photograph looks like a digital animation or a scene from a video game.”

“In The Converts, Beckett explores the impulse to pursue a path that inevitably sets one apart from the mainstream, despite our society’s claims of pluralism.”