{"id":6423,"date":"2007-09-01T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-01T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/september-october-2007-about-the-cover\/"},"modified":"2023-09-29T08:10:27","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T13:10:27","slug":"september-october-2007-about-the-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/about-the-cover\/september-october-2007-about-the-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"September &#8211; October 2007 About The Cover"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps the greatest platitude in the modern world is the desire for peace. It trips off the tongues of warlord presidents and repressive dictators, of conscienceless revolutionaries and campaigning religious leaders out to convert the world or cleanse it. Where is our Flaubert, with his <em>Dictionary of Received Opinions<\/em>, to reveal the deadly emptiness of this nostrum? Perhaps it is Simon Norfolk. For two decades, in ruined places from Rwanda to Afghanistan, Norfolk has amassed a stunning catalogue of death and destruction. It reveals that modern society is dedicated above all not to peace but to war\u2014to planning it, fighting it, and developing its weapons. \u201cSimon shows us the ruins of our tomorrow,\u201d says Bonni Benrubi, whose New York gallery is presenting a selection of ten works by the artist (September 20\u2013November 24). Also in the fall, the photographer\u2019s work from Beirut is on view at Gallery Luisotti, in Santa Monica, California (September\u200815\u2013 November 3). Iraq has been without doubt the most photographed war in history\u2014a war, moreover, that did not need to happen. Many of the images simply repeat clich\u00e9s of the battlefield. In contrast, Norfolk\u2019s photographs, shot with a 4 x 5-inch view camera, arrest viewers with their detailed implacability and Claude Lorrain-like painterly light. They force us to contemplate the sheer magnitude of the firepower unleashed: in the shattered modernity of Rashid Street in central Baghdad, or in a yard of stately palm trees littered with rocket shells. But Norfolk\u2019s projects also look beyond the battlefield to the technology that makes these battles possible, and, beyond that, to the fantasies of threat and control that animate our war-making. Above the arc lights and burnt hills of Nogales, Arizona (our cover photograph), stand the radio surveillance towers of a growing system of border control. Norfolk has photographed surveillance and computer systems around the world, and as beautiful as such photographs are, \u201cwhat you see is not all that you get,\u201d says Benrubi. The towers of Nogales are a poetic synecdoche, standing for the larger role of technology in defensive thinking and global politics. \u201cAll of this work, I might even call it \u2018Toward a Military Sublime,\u2019\u201d Norfolk said in a recent interview. \u201cBecause these objects are beyond: they\u2019re inscrutable, uncontrollable, beyond democracy.\u201d And of course, all built and operated in democracy\u2019s name. This is the paradox of the world\u2019s only remaining superpower, that it imprisons in the name of freedom and kills in the name of peace. No wonder then, that in the face of such hubris, Norfolk entertains fantasies of apocalypse. He titles the show at Benrubi \u201cI Met A Traveller From An Antique Land&#8230;,\u201d quoting Percy Bysshe Shelly\u2019s famous poem \u201cOzymandias.\u201d The poem contemplates the ruins of a once great and warlike civilization. It includes the memorable line that could be Norfolk\u2019s motto: \u201cLook on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps the greatest platitude in the modern world is the desire for peace. It trips off the tongues of warlord presidents and repressive dictators, of conscienceless revolutionaries and campaigning religious leaders out to convert the world or cleanse it. Where is our Flaubert, with his Dictionary of Received Opinions, to reveal the deadly emptiness of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"6253,6387,6629,6454,6760,7311,6412,6391,6439,1708,16856,6413","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[5712,5713,5124,5711],"issues":[144],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6423"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20706,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6423\/revisions\/20706"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6423"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=6423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}