Prayers for the Americans (I), 1999-2004

Prayer for the Americans (1) is inspired by a little-known short story by Mark Twain, ‘The War Prayer’, written in 1904 as a defence of pacifism in response to the Spanish-American War of 1898. The story describes the day before the American soldiers go off to fight, when the inhabitants of a small town gather in the local church to bid farewell to their men. The preacher asks God to protect them and grant them victory. Suddenly a stranger moves up to stand beside him at the altar and pronounces the words the minister has not dared to say, although they were in everyone’s mind: ‘O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells […].’
Allan Sekula presents thirty-nine images of residents from Hannibal, Missouri, the town where Mark Twain lived and worked. He uses apparently peaceful bucolic scenery, working families and kitsch flourishes to present the real America. Sekula believes that it is this calm that breeds the most warlike ideology of the world’s most powerful country and wonders, ‘Can a sequence or a superimposition of photographs constitute a prayer? Or a psalm?’