Images of soldiers in Iraq were everywhere at this time. I kept thinking about how individuals become a unit and how, in becoming a unit, individuals appear to forfeit certain aspects that would otherwise compose parts of their peculiar identity. The collector decides on the system to order and display individual parts in a collection. In the ordination of the drawers of collected moths and butterflies, the collector both recognises similarity and highlights slight differences. Both, from studying the visible physical variations and, from the data describing the time, location, environmental conditions and means of collection, it is tempting to create statistics, state facts and draw conclusions about individuals in a collection, even to predict tendencies. We know more about certain species from the past, partly because a collector often studied a bird in order to know when was the best time to shoot it, before he could take it to the taxidermist and add it to his collection, common or rare. Perhaps as time goes on it just becomes clear how little we really know?

These soldiers came to me as green and grey plastic, I gave them visible differences and left it up to the public to order and re-order them, according to their own desires – draw your own conclusions.

Photographer : Susannah Oliver © 2003