Exhibition Visit: "Conflict - Time - Photography" (Tate Modern, London)

(Viewed 13 December 2014)

“Conflict – Time – Photography” is a major group exhibition, marking the 100^th 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.