Centered around the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Libyan Sugar is a road trip through a war zone, detailed through photographs, journal entries, and written communication with family and colleagues. A record of MCB’s life both inside and outside Libya during that year, the work is about a young man going to war for the first time and his experience of that age-old desire to get as close as possible to a conflict in order to discover something about war and something about himself—perhaps a certain definition of life and death.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

“Three things set this unrelenting book apart from other war reportage. The first is Brown’s gift for making flat-out great pictures — he seems to have the photographic equivalent of perfect pitch. The second is that the photos were made on the camera of a mobile phone, which lends the work both immediacy and a literal link to the mobile phones that propelled the uprising. The third: Brown’s notes and letters home, interspersed throughout the book, reveal his joy at getting good pictures, but also his horror, fear and constant doubt. He doesn’t let himself off easy, and that difficulty informs our viewing, too.”

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