Conflict , Time, Photography

Excellent exhibition at Tate Modern looking at photographs of conflict and its effects.

I thought this might be a slightly worthy history of war photography but it was much cleverer and more thought provoking. The works were arranged in order of how soon they were taken after the conflict so they began with pictures of the Hiroshima bomb exploding and ended with pictures of First World War battlefields taken last year.

In doing this it made you think about the effects of war and conflict and the different stages in our reactions. I ended up sketching a time line in my notes showing reactions starting at shock and disbelief, moving on to horror, then interest in the horror (for example the battlefield tours of France in the 1920s), long term effects, a desire to forget and ignore, understanding and even a desire to preserve the destruction. Each conflict seems to move through these stages at a different pace and different people can react to the same event at a different pace. It was an interesting show to see the day after the Charlie Hebdo events, a time full of shock at what had happened but I found myself already thinking about what the longer term effects would be.

Moving away from philosophy there were some amazing pictures. Many of the Hiroshima ones from the great cloud to the shadows on the walls reminded me of Pompeii with the big explosion and the images of people left in hollows in the rubble. I was fascinated to see the pictures of the damage done in the Paris Commune and to learn they were some of the first photographs to be used as police evidence. Most moving was a picture by Marc Vaux where he returned to the place he had been wounded and taken a self-portrait of him sitting at the exact spot a few years later. Photography as therapy?

I also loved the installation at the end “A Guide for the Protection of the Public in Peace Time” a wonderful collection of objects and pictures from conflicts set in a living room type setting based on the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict.

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