If you’re looking for portraits of Iraq by journalists outside the Pentagon’s embedding program, Unembedded is a project by four photographers and two filmmakers that includes a traveling exhibition, a book, and this web site.

Unsurprisingly, the overall sense is of chaos, despair, and destruction, as in Seattle filmmaker James Longley’s devastating “Iraq in Fragments,” which screened at the end of last month at the Cinerama, when Annie Wagner reviewed it and did an extensive interview with Longley. The Unembedded images differ from the typical American media coverage in that they are unabashedly focused on Iraqi life, not American military personnel. They also feel overwhelmingly physical, as if they reflect the photographers’ sense of fear for their own lives, roaming as they are unconnected to any armed party, like many Iraqi civilians. I only wish there was a show like this—or really any meaningful coverage—coming out of Afghanistan, too.

Unembedded was recently seen at the Northern Arizona University’s School of Communication, is up now in Photographic Gallery in New York, and then it goes to the CONTACT photo festival in Toronto. (Interesting mix of venues.)

To compare these images with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from Iraq over the last three years, click here and then choose “2004” or “2005” on the timeline at the top, or go directly to this year’s winning portfolio, by Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News here. Here’s an example of one of Heisler’s images: