(Viewed 13 December 2014)
“Conflict – Time – Photography”
is a major group exhibition, marking the 100th anniversary of the
start of the First World War. Essentially, the exhibition deals with the role
of the camera in documenting the aftermath of war, or at least the aftermath of
conflict action, and the uses to which that documentation can be put. In many
cases the chosen photographers visited sites of conflict after the conflict
ended and used their cameras to make personal statements about the effects of
war, to apportion blame, to express their own feelings on the subject of
conflict or simply to document the destruction, to lives and human structures,
caused by war and conflict.
The exhibition deals with
conflict from the time of the Crimean War (with photographs by Roger Fenton,
who is widely regarded as being the first war photo-journalist) to the present
day (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan). However, its unique curatorial selling point is
that the exhibits are ordered not by date, but by the amount of time that
elapsed between the occurrence of the conflict or skirmish and the recording of each photograph. Toshio Fukada’s images of the mushroom cloud, taken less than
twenty minutes after the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, are
therefore in the first gallery, whilst Chloe Dewe Mathews’ photographs of
execution sites of World War 1 deserters, taken almost 100 years after the
executions (about which more later), occupy the final gallery.
Don McCullin’s famous photograph
of a shell-shocked US marine, taken moments after he had been involved in
battle during the “Tet Offensive” in Vietnam, hints in the first gallery of a
photo-journalistic element to the exhibition. However this memorable image,
still powerful today, proves to be a diversion. For the most part the
exhibition features fields, buildings or the remains of buildings in the
aftermath of war. Sometimes, particularly in the later galleries, there is
little or no evidence from the images that conflict has occurred: it is
necessary to peruse the accompanying text to understand the significance of the
photographs. People are largely absent, even in the immediate aftermath of
conflict (such as in Luc Delahaye’s memorable photograph of an Iraqi street in
Ramadi moments after the explosion of an “improvised explosive device”, where a
dust cloud all but obscures the shell of a crippled armoured car). Richard
Peter’s starkly beautiful reminder of the horrific damage to the city of
Dresden caused by Allied bombing (Image
1) also features no people: only a statue presides over the ruins of a once
great city.
Image 1 (Richard Peter)
Peter’s photograph is a brilliant
example of how a single image can arouse horror and outrage about the brutality
of war. Likewise, Shomei Tomatsu’s simple photograph of a watch recovered from
the ruins of Nagasaki, showing the exact moment of the explosion (11.02 am on 9
August 1945; Image 2), together with
the image of a military helmet with a fragment of bone fused inside and many
photographs of scarred survivors (all featuring in a book published 21 years
after the explosion), are just part of a large section of the exhibition
devoted to how Japanese citizens and photographers coped, or failed to cope
with the horrific aftermath of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Image 2 (Shomei Tomatsu)
These examples demonstrate the
power of the photograph, both as a documentary tool and as a vehicle to stir
emotions; to learn lessons and to appreciate the vulgarity, brutality and
pointlessness of conflict. However, as the exhibition progresses and the
distance in time from the conflict increases, the impact becomes more muted.
Straight documentary and direct propaganda are replaced by conceptual works,
such as Taryn Simon’s attempts to document the living descendants of Hans
Frank, Hitler’s personal legal adviser (not surprisingly, many of these
descendants refused to have anything to do with her project, which therefore
included many blank frames in addition to a handful of photographs of living
descendants or items of clothing sent by those who co-operated but did not wish
to be photographed). Frank was executed following the Nuremberg war trials in
1946. It is estimated that he contributed to the deaths of over five million
people, but I fail to see the point of involving people, who simply had the
misfortune to be born into Frank’s family, in this work. Stephen Shore, well known
for his “ordinary” photographs, travelled to Ukraine in 2012-13 to photograph
the last remaining Ukrainian holocaust survivors, their everyday surroundings
and belongings. Three million Ukrainians were killed by the Nazis during the Second
World War: Shore's photographs, whilst mainly featuring everyday details of the
survivors’ lives, do at least transport us to a different world. However, a
group of photographs alone cannot explain to us the horrors that were endured
by these proud, elderly people.
The final room of the exhibition
contains a series of (mainly) landscape photographs by Chloe Dewe Mathews,
entitled “Shot at Dawn”. In 2013, 99 years after the commencement of the First
World War, Mathews was commissioned to find and photograph the sites where
British, French and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion
on the Western Front. Rarely can such an emotionally-charged subject have
produced such a bland and forgettable series of images! The sites were
photographed at dawn, the time when the soldiers would have been shot. We see uninteresting
fragments of woods, picnic sites and pancake-flat never-ending fields and
ditches (for example, see Image 3).
Whether the deserters’ relatives benefit today from knowing where their loved ones
were shot is open to question. Could the fields and ditches be haunted with the
memories of the dead soldiers? I doubt it. My belief is that Mathews was on to
an artistic “loser” when she took on this project and her photographs represent a rather
limp end to the exhibition. However, there is no excuse for offering a book of
her photographs, complete with many blank pages, for £45 in the exhibition
shop!
Image 3 (Chloe Dewe Mathews)
Overall, this is an interesting
and contemplative exhibition, dealing with the aftermath of conflict. The power
of the photograph to demonstrate the destruction caused by conflict is amply
demonstrated, even though the documentation of battle is largely avoided. The
different ways in which the aftermath of war has been documented and then used
to create photographic art by conceptual photographic artists provide an
interesting, if uneven counterpoint to the exhibition. Perhaps time really does
heal wounds, both physically and metaphorically, because the works in the later
exhibition rooms generally lack the impact of the earlier works. Maybe we
should act in the immediate aftermath of war to stop it happening in future: if
we wait too long memories will fade, the impact of war will become muted and the
mistakes that bring war upon us will happen all over again.
