Since the invention of the medium, photographers have used the tools at hand, from stereoscopes to cell phones, in an effort to convey the reality of war and conflict, both on and off the battlefield. The pictures are never pretty, but they are necessary, and War/Photography, the expansive show now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, shows why.
Curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker and her team at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the show is organized at the Brooklyn Museum by Tricia Laughlin Bloom, associate curator of exhibitions. Organized thematically – Civilians, Children, Refugees, etc., — the show includes more than 280 photographers from 28 countries. There are some famous images on view, including Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the soldiers mounting the American flag at Iwo Jima and Roger Fenton’s much-analyzed Valley of the Shadow of Death, which has absorbed photography historians with the question of whether Fenton staged the image and moved the cannonballs littering the valley floor during the Crimean War. But the majority of photographs are by lesser-known photojournalists and even military photographers.
Many originally appeared in newspapers or magazines, but some, like Kenneth Jarecke’s Incinerated Iraqi, taken in 1991 during the first Gulf War, were deemed too graphic for the public to see, at least in the U.S. Will Michels, a photographer and one of the co-curators of the show, called the image of the burnt corpse of an Iraqi soldier trapped in an incinerated truck, one of the most important photographs in the show. It’s horrifying and shocking, and that’s the reality of an ongoing conflict that moved in and out of the headlines.
Less graphic and equally devastating are images that try to convey the long-term effects of war on soldiers. The thousand-yard stare of U.S. Marine Carlos Orjuela, serving in Afghanistan, in a photograph taken by Louie Palu, captures the flat, unfocused gaze of the battle-weary soldier. Then there are the photographs that represent so-called collateral damage. Rape, long used as a tool of war, is a subject difficult to represent in photographs. Jonathan Torgovnik’s series Intended Consequences focused on some of the many women who were raped during the Rwandan genocide. The women and their children were then shunned by their families and communities.
The product of ten years of research by Tucker, Will Michels and Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant of photography at the MFA, Houston, the show is as important as it is disturbing.
Din Q. Le: Confronting Collective Memory
In his multidisciplinary practice, Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê addresses memory, displacement, and trauma – but also offers glimpses of hope – in works that frame individual and collective experiences of what the Vietnamese call “the American War.”
An-My Lê
Beginning March 14, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is presenting On Contested Terrain, the artist’s first major survey show, with nearly 125 images.
Jon Henry
Jon Henry is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture for his series Stranger Fruit, portraits of Black mothers holding their sons in poses that suggest the pietà.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
Roxana Marcoci
MoMA's senior photography curator talks about her cross-disciplinary approach to curatorial work, Wolfgang Tillmans, An-My Lê, and more.
Domestic Disorder: Re-Viewing the Photographs of Robert Cumming
The film director Alfred Hitchcock used to complai...
Visualizing the Invisible: Edmund Clark and Trevor Paglen
From its inception, the war on terror has been a l...
Image and Object: Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Catherine Wagner
Three notable shows in Northern California this summer provide examples of how sculpture, and the idea of sculpture, are explored in photo-based work: Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Catherine Wagner each make photo-based art and objects that are deeply informed by sculptural concerns.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845 | High Museum of Art, Atlanta
An exhibition such as A Long Arc: Photography and ...
Photography and the American Civil War, Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq, Theatre of War
Photography and the American Civil War (Metropolit...
Jo Ractliffe
On the road to Cuito Cuanavale III, 2009. @Jo Ract...
The Shifting Borders of Photojournalism and Fine Art Photography
Disturbed by the lack of a visual record of Americ...