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Course: Tate > Unit 2
Lesson 3: Documenting Conflict- Conflict, time, and photography
- The Berlin Wall and industrial England: Don McCullin's conflict photography
- Kurt Schwitters' wartime portraits
- Traces of illegal migration in Mexico: Mark Ruwedel
- Shai Kremer in an Israeli military training stage
- Burke and Norfolk: Photographs from the war In Afghanistan
- Hrair Sarkissian: Syria's "Execution Squares"
- Key Points
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Conflict, time, and photography
This video brought to you by Tate.org.uk.
Broadcaster and historian Dan Snow introduces an exhibition that explores the way photographs capture the lasting effects of conflicts, both in the moments after acts of violence are committed and many years later. Because they can bear witness to and capture life very nearly as we see it, photography has a unique relationship to reality among the arts. This can be seen in the evolution of photography from pure reportage to more creative forms of documentation. While the photographs in this exhibition serve to document and give proof to instances of conflict, very rarely do they show it explicitly: in some photos there isn’t a single weapon, just the faces of those who served as witnesses to a trauma. By showing what no longer is there, they document and immortalize the effects of violence on the landscape, human body, and psyche, from shell-shocked soldiers in Vietnam to empty fields in Flanders.
Broadcaster and historian Dan Snow introduces an exhibition that explores the way photographs capture the lasting effects of conflicts, both in the moments after acts of violence are committed and many years later. Because they can bear witness to and capture life very nearly as we see it, photography has a unique relationship to reality among the arts. This can be seen in the evolution of photography from pure reportage to more creative forms of documentation. While the photographs in this exhibition serve to document and give proof to instances of conflict, very rarely do they show it explicitly: in some photos there isn’t a single weapon, just the faces of those who served as witnesses to a trauma. By showing what no longer is there, they document and immortalize the effects of violence on the landscape, human body, and psyche, from shell-shocked soldiers in Vietnam to empty fields in Flanders.
Photographs have the power to document, to capture images and the lingering effects of events on places and people. What else can photographs encapsulate, depict, or relay?
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At0:39, what does shell-shocked actually mean?(2 votes)
When soldiers came under heavy bombardment or fire, especially during World Wars I and II and if they survived, they would often emerge disoriented, confused, unable to speak straight, and often their bodies would do weird, random movements. For example, after World War I, one soldier came home, to find, every night, his legs would lift automatically then drop while he was asleep. This occurred thanks to the mental trauma he faced in the trenches.(1 vote)
What else can photographs encapsulate, depict, or relay?
Happiness, sadness, the truth(1 vote)
0:39Video transcript
I've come to Tate Modern where I'm going to look at the new exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography There are images of battlefields, of conflict zones taken in the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, even years after the act of violence took place This is Don McCullin's Shell Shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue in South Vietnam in 1968 Don McCullin was right up there in the front line. He had access, that's almost unimaginable a generation before or a generation after and it is just an overwhelming physical impression of the effect of violence on the human body This room really gives you a sense of the scale of modern industrial warfare These are all images from Kuwait after the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 It was a short war in the end but one that's left a long and enduring physical legacy The footprint of modern war is deeper and much harsher than wars that have gone before Now we are leaving behind thousands of tons of junk the detritus of war I was really stopped in my tracks by this installation here These are pictures from the Congo a year after the formal supposed end of hostilities The legacy of the violence, the physical scars people that have been tortured and brutalised millions of people displaced living in camps like this There's not a single weapon in any of these pictures It's of people who are traumatised by the unspeakable violence that they've witnessed that's been perpetrated against them or their families These are the unmistakeable concrete structures the German bunkers Hitler liked to believe that his empire would be everlasting and yet these photos were taken 65 years after these structures were built his empire's gone and they're rotting away back into the sea This is what happens to all the dreams of all the conquerors and dictators that ever lived ultimately in the end their empires crumble into dust These are four photographs taken on what was the Western Front during World War One and I'm always struck every time I visit the Western Front that when we humans can hold the memories of these wars and conflicts in the past the earth itself doesn't really care The earth recovers the trees reforest the landscape