CONFLICT, TIME, PHOTOGRAPHY: TATE MODERN’S POWERFUL PORTRAYAL OF THE LASTING EFFECTS OF WAR
Culture 24, UK
Dec 10 2014
By Ben Miller | 10 December 2014
Tate’s survey of photographic responses to war shows the lasting
consequences of conflict
Tate’s huge display of photographers portraying war stems
from an inventive premise: rather than simply presenting these
works chronologically, curator Simon Baker takes his cue from
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical 1969 novel about
World War II, a book which was partly influenced by the author’s own
experience of the firebombing of Dresden but largely filtered through
the reflections of a fictional soldier, Billy Pilgrim.
Vonnegut’s narrative is non-sequential, flashing back to specific
memories of the war, and the exhibition follows suit by basing its
path around time elapsed. So Toshio Fukada – a teenager with a camera
always poised, staying at a nearby army barracks when the atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima – provides one of the first works,
seeing the apocalyptic mushroom cloud just moments after it clouded
the sky over Japan in 1945.
Pierre Antony-Thouret, Reims After the War (1927). From Reims after
the war. The mutilated cathedral. The devastated city(c) Private
collection, London Hrair Sarkissian, an artist known for his Execution
Squares series showing the spots where public executions took place
in Damascus, Aleppo and Lattakia, reflects from the widest expanse
of time.
In 2011, almost a century after his grandparents fled what he grimly
terms the “systematic extermination” of Armenians in Eastern Anatolia,
Sarkissian visited the history sections of libraries in Istanbul,
finding stories of the Ottoman Empire and the forced resettlements
affecting his and many other families before Turkey was fully formed.
Rows of shadowy shelves prove as eerie as the smoke of a crippling
explosive.
This is an exhibition about memory, the power of time and our shifting
perceptions of the trauma of conflict. Much of the time no-one is
present in these pictures, a strange sensation given that those who
are, such as the pair of priests in pristine black robes sombrely
surveying the rubble of Notre Dame a few months after the end of the
First World War, enhance the sense of place and time.
The cathedral and its city, Reims, were repeatedly bombarded from the
nearby front line, illustrated by the architect Pierre Antony-Thouret,
who assembled a “luxurious portfolio” of photos he and other artists
had taken, publishing them in 1927 and putting the profits towards
the resurrection of the ravaged cathedral.
Holy sites, with their silent echoes of former communions, are some
of the saddest here. Simon Norfolk describes the “different layering”
of destruction in Afghanistan.
He points to a place where, unlike Dresden or Hiroshima, architectural
annihilation has been strewing the landscape for nearly 30 years.
Simon Norfolk, Bullet-scarred apartment building (2003). Building
and shops in the Karte Char district of Kabul(c) Simon Norfolk King
Amanullah’s Victory Arch, built to celebrate the 1919 Independence
from the British in Kabul Province, could not look less triumphant,
still intact but its top cracked and shelled.
Norfolk’s work, too, has layers, produced in an anachronistic large
format which creates a beautiful immediacy.
The ghostly feel of a government building close to the former
presidential palace at Darulaman, destroyed by fighting during the
1990s, only becomes truly apparent upon deeper contemplation.
Bunkers, conversely, seem alien, and there’s a wider debate over
whether they should be left as they are or removed from the coastlines
of northern France, where Jane and Louise Wilson picture them in
black and white, huge and incongruous upended blocks.
Jerzy Lewczynski, the Polish photographer who was consistently
compelled by history and celebrated for his distinctive creativity,
takes tiny photos of Hitler’s Wolf Lair, set up in occupied Poland
and pictured 15 years after the Second World War.
Observed as archetypal post-war ruins, the hideaway where an
assassination attempt occurred a year before the end of the war take
on an archaeological fascination, as do the Europe-wide bunkers seen
by Paul Virilio, the urban philosopher who produced a book on them.
Don McCullin, Shell Shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hue (1968). Printed
2013(c) Don McCullin Seven months after the end of the Gulf War,
in 1991, Sophie Ristelhueber went overhead. Her aerial photography
has an even colder chill in the age of drones: cinnamon skeletons
of dismembered vehicles are stuck in sand, potholes pock fields,
lines and chasms intersect the charred landscape.
During the 16-year Lebanese Civil War which ended in 1991, 245 car
bombs were detonated. Walid Raad catalogues the engines which survived
each attack in an installation which chiefly stands out thanks to
the absence of any women in the pictures.
Don McCullin’s portrait of a shell-shocked US Marine, rendered
momentarily unhuman in Vietnam in 1968, is instantly recognisable
from the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition two years ago, and still
feels like a brush with death and a work of photojournalism so rare
it is almost incomparable.
Another incredibly influential photographer, Shomei Tomatsu, has his
best-known work, Melted Bottle, displayed as part of the aftermath
of the atomic assault on Nagasaki.
Chloe Dewe Mathews, Vebranden-Molen, West-Vlaanderen (2013). The
photo commemorates four soldiers executed on December 15 1914(c)
Chloe Dewe Mathews Taken during the 1960s, Tomatsu makes us flinch
at faces ripped and pulled, the skin of victims warped and twisted –
conflict portrayed at its most gruesome.
Chloe Dewe Mathews, a British artist, responds more poetically,
leaving more space – Matthews went to the locations where British,
French and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion
on the Western Front, finding huge ravines and withered trees across
snow carpets.
War, these barren scenes shout, has clear consequences for decades
and centuries to come.
Conflict, Time, Photography is at Tate Modern, London until March 15
2015. Open 10am-6pm (10pm Friday and Saturday, closed December 24-26).
Book online. Follow Tate on Twitter @tate.
http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/photography-and-film/art509627-conflict-time-photography-tate-modern-powerful-portrayal-of-the-lasting-effects-of-war