Exhibit Review – War Photography

On August 8, Beck and I went to the Corcoran Gallery in DC to view a photography exhibit.  War Photography – Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath was originally organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and is in the District until September 29 before moving to the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

How powerful was this exhibit?  We could not get through it without taking a break.  Like the combat soldier, we needed some R&R to sit, have a cold beverage and a snack and talk about what we had experienced before we could make it to the end.  Can’t remember a museum exhibit that required a ‘time out’ before.

The images are displayed in groupings that take one through all the phases and aspects of warfare from recruitment and training, deployment, battle, to R&R, homecoming, death and funerals. Sections on civilians and refugees are also included.  Over 300 pictures date from the earliest days of photography and show scenes from the Mexican and Crimean Wars.  The most recent are from the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

Especially in this digital age, where images are so easily made and transmitted, one has to appreciate the challenges photographers faced in the mid-19^th century.  Huge cameras, heavy, glass plate negatives and the need for long exposures required an equally huge tripod and lots of time.  Only stiffly-supported people and the aftermath of battles were photographed.  With the advent of smaller cameras and faster, strip film, brave shooters could document the action in the actual battles. 

Document.  There’s a key word.  While many of these pictures have exquisite composition and other elements of fine photography, the importance of the images is in what they show...the moments in time and place.  I find the most powerful are in two categories.  One is the instants certain events occur, like Robert Capa’s ‘The Death of a Loyalist Militiaman’ from the Spanish Civil War or Joe Rosenthal’s iconic shot of 'Marines Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’.  The other is the sadness and horror of war’s impact on people, especially those caught up in it.  The human body is too magnificent a creation to maim. 

Firing on Communist targets on the west central front, 
near the village of Nunema, Korea,during the Korean War, 1951. 
Image by Wayne C. Weidner

This is a striking image and I mean no disrespect to PFC Weidner [yes, some of the photographers were active military who documented the action when they were not actually fighting in it].  While the shot captures the instant the two cannons fired, it was not a hard picture to take.  Since it was night time, he needed to keep the camera still, open the shutter and wait for the guns to fire.  The muzzle flash and the snow were enough to illuminate the whole scene.  Close the shutter and you have a winner.

The Viet Nam shots always have a different effect on me because my generation fought that war.  I could have been in it.  The luck of the draft lottery kept me out and some might say ‘shame on me’ for being thankful I didn’t get to serve my country.  That’s a discussion for another time.  I just know the rest of my life would have been very different from what it became.  Apart from that, I touched upon some of that in a Veterans Day book review in 2011. 

The body of an American paratrooper killed in action in the jungle 
near the Cambodian border is lifted to an evacuation helicopter. 
Photo by Henri Huet (1966).

Mr. Huet was one of 135 photographers killed while 
documenting the war in Southeast Asia.

My personal feelings about Viet Nam made me realize another thing as 160 years of conflicts were laid out before us.  Apart from the horror of some of the images, another reason the exhibit is provocative is that one’s impression can depend on political and moral views. Clearly, a pacifist would be repulsed by all of it. I suspect many of us occupy a middle ground where some wars feel right [e.g. WW II; “The Last Just War”] and we accept the need to fight back when attacked. 

Here’s where we loop back to the documentary aspect of photography and politics...and the right to know.  One of the most gruesome images was of a bus in Israel moments after a suicide bomber attack.  The emergency personnel had barely arrived on the scene and many of the dead are visible.  The description noted that the government would not permit the publication of this image.  I can understand how such an image could sicken many and drive others to commit their own mayhem on innocents from the other side. 

When that photo reminded me that governments try to manipulate public opinion, especially during war time, by showing positive images and suppressing negative ones, I was reminded of a more recent example from our current conflicts.  I was surprised that one controversial image was not in the exhibit.  Until a successful Freedom of Information Act challenge changed the policy, the Bush administration would not allow photographs to be taken of American war dead.  Even images of the clean, orderly, flag-draped caskets on their way home was deemed politically threatening to the guys who did not want the public to think about the costs and consequences of war.

Surprisingly absent from the War Photography exhibit was an image like

this, which caused controversy in the early days of the Iraq War.

(Image copied from Google Images)

Images from war are powerful.  That’s why people try to capture them...and why other people try to prevent you from seeing them.  If you are in the area, I encourage you to see this exhibit.  It’s difficult but provocative and seeing it is your right as a citizen of a free country.  This freedom was won by the men and women featured in the images.