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Art: Poignant Images, With Posterity the Ultimate Winner

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  • Art: Poignant Images, With Posterity the Ultimate Winner

    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
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