Steven Mumford is a New York artist who has made several trips to Iraq during the war and recorded his observations in a series of remarkable pen, inkwash and watercolor drawings. The images range from intimate portraits of soldiers to battlefield scenes to pictures of the local citizens who were much less reluctant to pose for an artist’s pen than they might have been for a reporter’s camera.

This posting of his Baghdad Journal is part of the Artnet online magazine. The drawings are beautiful, scary, immediate and revealing in a way photographs couldn’t be. The work has now been collected in a book published by Drawn and Quarterly.