In times of war, photographs serve as both documents and materials of persuasion. In fact, it is precisely because they are viewed in the first place as documents that they are so potent – when framed in the rhetoric of a given cause – as materials of persuasion. Later, they condition our memory of war; they preserve it in iconic images that outlive not just the combatants they show but also the photographers who captured them. Timothy O’Sullivan’s shot of the dead at Gettysburg, Robert Capa’s image of a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling from a bullet, Nick Ut’s photo of children fleeing a napalm attack in South Vietnam, Eddie Adams’s record of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner: these images have stayed with us. So what of today’s wars? Will they leave similar photographic icons?
Some shots of the recent conflict in Iraq
may survive. John Moore’s photo of US soldiers lolling around in the
presidential palace may be remembered for its eerie calm, for the odd
tension between its (triumphal) imagery and (muted) tone. But in the
representation of war, video has to some extent displaced photography as the
medium of choice. Arguably, the most enduring visual record of the Gulf War
is the video footage of charred convoys on the road to Basra towards the end
of the conflict. And the recordings of the 9/11 attacks, endlessly looped at
the time, continue to hold a grim fascination.
War today rarely involves pitched battles. New technologies have vastly
increased the distance between a soldier and his target. Satellite
surveillance systems, real-time digital communications, smart missiles:
these and other advanced weapons and logistical tools allow those who
possess them to pummel the enemy from afar. They make it easier for
politicians to sell war to the public but harder for photographers to
capture it on film. Night-time bombing and stealth technology make it harder
still. Modern warfare is dispersed and often instantaneous. No wonder
photographers focus on moments of symbolic violence (the occupation of a
palace, for instance). These are designed to stand in for and recapitulate
the moments of very real violence that precede them.
There are, in other words, huge practical obstacles in the way of the artist or photo-journalist who wants to present the modern conduct of war. There are also difficulties of a moral or political order. Of those, the most important has long been a concern to Susan Sontag, who pointed out in On Photography that images of carnage may over time lose their power to move. Repetition may blunt their horror. They may in the end turn war into a spectacle, a familiar parade of grisly scenes that are consumed and forgotten in the batting of an eye. So how, in today’s world, can the reality of war be brought home to those who have no experience of it?
The photographer Simon Norfolk is one of a handful of contemporary artists who consistently address the effects of war. Hauling his wood-and-brass field camera from country to country, he takes sumptuous photos of ruined ministries, abandoned prisons, the husks of tanks and jets. He avoids the practical difficulties in representing modern warfare by examining the aftermath, not the waging, of war. And he gets round the problem of desensitisation by focusing not on the immediate human trauma of armed conflict but on the material destruction. In this he is unlike Sebastião Salgado and James Nachtwey. Salgado follows Rwandan refugees to the camps in Tanzania and Zaire, he goes to southern Sudan, where war has brought famine in its wake, he meets Kurdish villagers caught between the PKK and the Turkish Army. And all of this he records in grainy black and white. Nachtwey too travels to war-torn areas (Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya), visiting intensive care units, death camps and orphanages and catching the maimed and emaciated in gut-wrenching shots. His answer to the problem outlined by Sontag is the same as Salgado’s: it is a ratcheting up of the horror, a more sustained and unflinching look at the human cost of war.
We need photographers like Salgado and
Nachtwey, whose work is a crucial corrective to the mainstream news media,
with their decorous airbrushing of graphic violence, their infatuation with
modern weaponry and their relative indifference to long-running wars in
faraway places. Many of the conflicts that Salgado and Nachtwey have
reported on (those in Chechnya and the Sudan, for example) receive little
coverage in the media. And photojournalists like Salgado tend to compensate
for the short attention span of the news services, which report on
spectacular attacks but have (at best) only an intermittent interest in
postwar reconstruction. Most casualties of modern war are due not to
sophisticated weaponry but to disease, small arms fire and land mines. And
the body count continues to rise long after hostilities have officially
ceased. A real understanding of conflict can only be gained by observers who
take the long view. It is that lasting trail of suffering that is conveyed
in Salgado and Nachtwey’s photographic accounts.
Norfolk’s approach is different. The wounded and displaced barely feature in
his work, which presents violence chiefly as it imprints itself on the
landscape. If Salgado is descended from Goya, Norfolk is closer in spirit to
Turner and Friedrich.
He shares their taste for the golden tints and long shadows of dawn and dusk. And, like them, he is drawn to ruins. In his widely reproduced shot of a ruined teahouse in Kabul, he recalls Stonehenge as it was pictured by Turner and Constable. He contrives to give the iron-and-cement armature the look of an ancient relic. Here as elsewhere, he composes his image like a landscape painter, with a carefully organised foreground set off against a vast sky and distant hills, a figure posing to the side and providing a sense of scale. Roland Barthes wrote that a good photo often has a detail, or punctum, which upsets the overall impression and tickles the viewer’s curiosity. The punctum here is the mass of balloons. With their varied, synthetic colours, they strike a dissonant note in the quasi-monochromatic scene. But they also expand symbolically on the surrounding devastation, the balloon (like the soap bubble in Renaissance painting) acting as a sign of transience and mortality.
So it is in most of Norfolk’s work. Violence and death enter by the backdoor, quietly. In another shot from Chronotopia, his book on Afghanistan, camels graze near the remains of a tank that was parked by the Taliban under a row of trees. The colour harmonies give the shot a peaceful air, the tank looks as if it is resting. Elsewhere, smoke billowing from a brickyard serves as an echo of smouldering wartime targets and the sun setting over a ruined bus terminal looks like the flash of a distant explosion. The violence of war haunts Norfolk’s work but remains out of sight, manifesting itself mainly in displaced, symbolic forms.
When Norfolk’s more recent shots of war-torn Iraq were published in a colour supplement, a reader wrote in to say that it was ‘entirely inappropriate’ to present the suffering of the Iraqi people as ‘modern art’. The assumption behind the reader’s complaint was that art-making today is an autonomous activity that can only speak to external concerns from a position of radical detachment. This is an assumption that many artists would go along with, but Norfolk is plainly not one of them. On the contrary, he shows a passionate belief in the relevance of photography as a means of bearing witness to trauma. The romantic and humanist strains in his work both militate against postmodernist detachment.
The real problem with his photos is that they dissipate violence. They ostensibly address specific acts of war but end up commenting on more dispersed phenomena: the violence done by modernity to established lifestyles and communities, or by man to the environment. The camels and tanks say it all. His work plays on oppositions – between the modern and the tradition-bound, the manmade and the natural – that were dear to the Romantics, and those oppositions tend to obscure the historical contingencies that underlie the specific tragedies of a specific conflict. There is a curious lapse, in his books, between the grand, meditative view and bare-bones caption. His romanticism is homogenising; it casts a golden pall over every place he visits and every conflict he commemorates. And through the grandeur and stasis of his scenes he gives them a greater temporal reach. He plays down the instantaneity of the photographic exposure and so loses the brutal immediacy that makes photography (in the hands of a Salgado or a Nachtwey) such an apt medium for the representation of war.
You could say that his pictures fold two
impulses together: the urge to remember and the desire for peace. But
inasmuch as the traces of war are often blanketed by the ambient calm, his
images run the risk of implying that nature reasserts itself in the end,
that the camels are bound to outlive the tanks, that war is an epiphenomenon
in the grander cycles of the natural world. There are times when his work
seems bent on forgetting precisely what it set out to remember.
Part of the problem is that his humanism is out of step with the wars of a
post-humanist world. His slowing down of time, for instance, is antithetical
to modern warfare, which, as Paul Virilio keeps telling us, relies
increasingly on technologies that accelerate communications and the
deployment of weapons. Other artists, mostly working in new media, have
taken a more dispassionate view, often reflecting on the difficulties in
representing war, on its treatment in the news media and the recycling of
its imagery in popular entertainment. Their work has little of Norfolk’s
commemorative pathos, but it has often brought war closer to home.
In her film Ariana, Marine Hugonnier
surveys postwar Afghanistan from hilltop vantage points, the voice-over
commenting on the parallels between the voyeurism of the artist or tourist
and the strategic gaze of the military planner. Langlands & Bell have made
an interactive reconstruction of Osama Bin Laden’s one-time base in
Afghanistan, inviting you to navigate the compound, with its strangely
idyllic surroundings, as you would navigate the virtual spaces of a computer
game in pursuit of an imaginary enemy. In his giant lightbox, Dead Troops
Talk, Jeff Wall composes a scene in which Soviet soldiers, recently ambushed
by Afghan
mujahideen, rise from the dead to talk, lark around and contemplate their
wounds. The knowledge that the image is staged only adds to the grimness,
short-circuiting the jaded, cursory attention we bring to media reporting
and enjoining us to follow the artist’s gruesome imagining in every last
detail.
Renouncing the humanist perspective of the appalled observer, these artists are in a position to consider not just the devastation of war but the complicity of the media as they simultaneously condemn, glory in and misrepresent it – and of artists as they contribute to the often violent fantasy lives of outwardly peace-loving communities.
Norfolk positions himself somewhere between photographers like Salgado and artists like Wall and Hugonnier, but his work has neither the open rage of the photo-journalists nor the reflexive understanding of the artists. His images are generous in their will to remember but they overreach themselves, deploring conflict in general and modernity with it. In the process, they lose sight of their original purpose. You cannot remember a tragedy without remembering what makes it different to all other tragedies.
Marcus Verhagen is a freelance writer.