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The New York Times
November 15, 2013 Friday
Poignant Images, With Posterity the Ultimate Winner
By KEN JOHNSON
In a photograph shot by Spencer Platt in Lebanon in 2006, the
spectacle of five attractive, fashionably dressed young people in a
glossy red convertible occupies the foreground. By surrealistic
contrast, the immediate background is filled with the smoking wreckage
of bombed buildings, where a few pedestrians pass by. While the title
obliquely explains, ''Beirut Residents Continue to Flock to Southern
Neighborhoods,'' the impression you get is of obnoxious rich kids out
for a sensation-seeking drive.
But the truth of Mr. Platt's picture, which won the 2006 World Press
Photo of the Year award, was not what it seemed. In response to
widespread criticism, the car's driver and passengers protested to
news reporters that they were not disaster tourists but residents of
the neighborhood returning to recover their belongings.
Mr. Platt's photograph is one of the less gut-wrenching stops on the
harrowing journey that is ''War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict
and Its Aftermath,'' a vast, deeply flawed but intensely absorbing
exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. It's not the most sensational image
in the exhibition, but it's especially striking because of how many
different issues it brings to the fore. What's the relationship
between machine-made pictures and reality? What do photographers look
for? What do we see, what do we learn when we look at photographs of
people in extreme situations? Are we like what the people in the car
seemed to be: safe, relatively financially secure and out for some
visual entertainment? Or are we members of a world community concerned
for the fate of our global neighborhood?
The way the show is installed doesn't favor the more high-minded
perspective. Pictures by more than 280 photographers from 28 countries
dating from the past 166 years are crammed in groups in a mazelike
series of narrow corridors. It doesn't take many visitors to make you
feel hurried and harried. With a profusion of labels and wall texts
stenciled in white walls painted in dusky shades of red, brown and
blue filling just about every space not occupied by a photograph, it
feels as if you're being yelled at from every direction. This is
unfortunate because there is hardly a single picture here that doesn't
cry out to be seen and thought about on its own for some time.
A color photograph by Alexandra Avakian from 1992 shows a woman
sitting in a bed, her open hospital gown exposing a bandaged breast.
She's looking away to her right while a young boy stands at bedside
gazing at her. The title explains: ''Leonora Gregorian was tortured
and raped in front of her 4-year-old son by Azerbaijani troops before
Armenian soldiers rescued her, Nagorno-Karabakh.'' That's a picture
whose abysmal psychic charge should have a whole room to itself.
I imagine that many viewers who stop to think about it will wonder
where is Nagorno-Karabakh and what was going on there? That's another
big problem with the show: With so many different images of so many
different events mixed together, a clear sense of history remains
elusive. There are lots of famous photographs whose context may be
familiar, like John Filo's picture of a distraught woman kneeling over
the body of a college student killed by National Guard gunfire during
the Kent State antiwar demonstration in 1970. One section is devoted
to how Joe Rosenthal's picture of American soldiers raising the Stars
and Stripes on Iwo Jima came about. A sequence of four prints by
Robert Clark shows the World Trade Center's twin towers smoking and
burning. But lots of less familiar images pertain to wars in faraway
lands that many viewers -- myself included -- will know little or
nothing about.
This historical confusion is a result of an approach taken by the
show's organizers: Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator, and Natalie Zelt,
curatorial assistant, in the photography department of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston; and Will Michels, a photographer and teacher who
also works at that museum. Instead of a chronological organization,
the curators decided on a thematic approach in which images from
different times and places would be grouped together according to
topics like ''Recruitment and Embarkation,'' ''Reconnaissance,
Resistance and Sabotage,'' ''Leisure Time,'' ''Medicine,'' ''Victory
and Defeat'' and ''Homecoming.''
In her introductory essay in the show's 606-page, $90 catalog, Ms.
Tucker weighs the pros and cons. She admits that the thematic approach
''posed the danger of diminishing each picture's individual
complexities and histories.'' She also acknowledges that the approach
suggests that all wars are generally similar, even though every war is
different in its particulars. She argues, however, that ''certain
patterns nevertheless begin to emerge in the recurrence of certain
types of pictures when looking at thousands of photographs, and these
photographs relate to a rough order of war.'' So the show was
organized ''according to the most common and meaningful of the
recurring types.''
That approach provides a neat conceptual context for every photograph
and a comprehensible overall narrative, making the show readily
digestible for a popular viewership. But ''recurring type'' is close
to the definition of ''cliché.'' Slotting every image into that kind
of category has a sentimentalizing, mind-numbing effect, as if the
show were designed in accordance with a Hollywood war movie template.
This is war photography as seen through the eyes of a mass-market
magazine's photo editor. The nonchronological layout also obscures how
technologies of war and photography evolved together in time and the
degree to which photography itself has served as a tool of war,
ideological as well as technical.
A better exhibition could be done simply by hanging all the same
photographs in chronological order, grouping them only according to
the armed conflicts represented -- from the Mexican-American War of
1846-48 to the Arab Spring revolution that began in 2010 -- with a
brief text describing the war at hand. That's the show I wish I could
see.
''War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath''
continues through Feb. 2 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway,
at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/arts/design/war-photography-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html
From: A. Papazian
November 15, 2013 Friday
Poignant Images, With Posterity the Ultimate Winner
By KEN JOHNSON
In a photograph shot by Spencer Platt in Lebanon in 2006, the
spectacle of five attractive, fashionably dressed young people in a
glossy red convertible occupies the foreground. By surrealistic
contrast, the immediate background is filled with the smoking wreckage
of bombed buildings, where a few pedestrians pass by. While the title
obliquely explains, ''Beirut Residents Continue to Flock to Southern
Neighborhoods,'' the impression you get is of obnoxious rich kids out
for a sensation-seeking drive.
But the truth of Mr. Platt's picture, which won the 2006 World Press
Photo of the Year award, was not what it seemed. In response to
widespread criticism, the car's driver and passengers protested to
news reporters that they were not disaster tourists but residents of
the neighborhood returning to recover their belongings.
Mr. Platt's photograph is one of the less gut-wrenching stops on the
harrowing journey that is ''War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict
and Its Aftermath,'' a vast, deeply flawed but intensely absorbing
exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. It's not the most sensational image
in the exhibition, but it's especially striking because of how many
different issues it brings to the fore. What's the relationship
between machine-made pictures and reality? What do photographers look
for? What do we see, what do we learn when we look at photographs of
people in extreme situations? Are we like what the people in the car
seemed to be: safe, relatively financially secure and out for some
visual entertainment? Or are we members of a world community concerned
for the fate of our global neighborhood?
The way the show is installed doesn't favor the more high-minded
perspective. Pictures by more than 280 photographers from 28 countries
dating from the past 166 years are crammed in groups in a mazelike
series of narrow corridors. It doesn't take many visitors to make you
feel hurried and harried. With a profusion of labels and wall texts
stenciled in white walls painted in dusky shades of red, brown and
blue filling just about every space not occupied by a photograph, it
feels as if you're being yelled at from every direction. This is
unfortunate because there is hardly a single picture here that doesn't
cry out to be seen and thought about on its own for some time.
A color photograph by Alexandra Avakian from 1992 shows a woman
sitting in a bed, her open hospital gown exposing a bandaged breast.
She's looking away to her right while a young boy stands at bedside
gazing at her. The title explains: ''Leonora Gregorian was tortured
and raped in front of her 4-year-old son by Azerbaijani troops before
Armenian soldiers rescued her, Nagorno-Karabakh.'' That's a picture
whose abysmal psychic charge should have a whole room to itself.
I imagine that many viewers who stop to think about it will wonder
where is Nagorno-Karabakh and what was going on there? That's another
big problem with the show: With so many different images of so many
different events mixed together, a clear sense of history remains
elusive. There are lots of famous photographs whose context may be
familiar, like John Filo's picture of a distraught woman kneeling over
the body of a college student killed by National Guard gunfire during
the Kent State antiwar demonstration in 1970. One section is devoted
to how Joe Rosenthal's picture of American soldiers raising the Stars
and Stripes on Iwo Jima came about. A sequence of four prints by
Robert Clark shows the World Trade Center's twin towers smoking and
burning. But lots of less familiar images pertain to wars in faraway
lands that many viewers -- myself included -- will know little or
nothing about.
This historical confusion is a result of an approach taken by the
show's organizers: Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator, and Natalie Zelt,
curatorial assistant, in the photography department of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston; and Will Michels, a photographer and teacher who
also works at that museum. Instead of a chronological organization,
the curators decided on a thematic approach in which images from
different times and places would be grouped together according to
topics like ''Recruitment and Embarkation,'' ''Reconnaissance,
Resistance and Sabotage,'' ''Leisure Time,'' ''Medicine,'' ''Victory
and Defeat'' and ''Homecoming.''
In her introductory essay in the show's 606-page, $90 catalog, Ms.
Tucker weighs the pros and cons. She admits that the thematic approach
''posed the danger of diminishing each picture's individual
complexities and histories.'' She also acknowledges that the approach
suggests that all wars are generally similar, even though every war is
different in its particulars. She argues, however, that ''certain
patterns nevertheless begin to emerge in the recurrence of certain
types of pictures when looking at thousands of photographs, and these
photographs relate to a rough order of war.'' So the show was
organized ''according to the most common and meaningful of the
recurring types.''
That approach provides a neat conceptual context for every photograph
and a comprehensible overall narrative, making the show readily
digestible for a popular viewership. But ''recurring type'' is close
to the definition of ''cliché.'' Slotting every image into that kind
of category has a sentimentalizing, mind-numbing effect, as if the
show were designed in accordance with a Hollywood war movie template.
This is war photography as seen through the eyes of a mass-market
magazine's photo editor. The nonchronological layout also obscures how
technologies of war and photography evolved together in time and the
degree to which photography itself has served as a tool of war,
ideological as well as technical.
A better exhibition could be done simply by hanging all the same
photographs in chronological order, grouping them only according to
the armed conflicts represented -- from the Mexican-American War of
1846-48 to the Arab Spring revolution that began in 2010 -- with a
brief text describing the war at hand. That's the show I wish I could
see.
''War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath''
continues through Feb. 2 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway,
at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/arts/design/war-photography-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html
From: A. Papazian