Photojournalist James Natchwey still reports from the combat zones for us to see.
Thinking seeing implies closely looking at all images and this is precisely what war photographer James Natchwey has set his task for, as reported by David Remnick along a portfolio published in The New Yorker issue of May 9th: "His refusal to avert his gaze from the true costs of conflicts belongs to a larger mission: to keep the world from doing so."
Surrounded as we are by images, spending more time looking at them than perhaps ever before, are we still seeing those images? Or are we only caught in a regime of visibilities that we consume passively as they swallow us alive? The philosopher Marie-José Mondzain has given some guiding answers and knowledge to behave
When a magazine, known for its fine print, in-depth reporting and lengthy literary reviews, submits to our gaze eleven double-spreads dedicated to b&w photographs, it does not only make an important editorial decision to arrest its readers, its invites them to look carefully until seeing appears, its gives them the space and time that provide the distance required for the subject to constitute itself in relation to the images on display. Thus these images, despite the harshness of the content they depict - the current war on Ukraine -, are not violent per se. For the violence of images is mistaken.
Immediately, as I first perused through the portfolio, I traveled back in time 30 years ago when I was a student in photography and James Natchwey's exhibition Deeds of war opened at the ICP Midtown Galleries. Then, from the naïvety and rightfulness of an eighteen years old, the presence of these images in a museum setting angered me. I could not accept the fact that atrocities were elevated to the status of iconic objects of contemplation. The content was too vivid, too present, it reflected what was currently going on, the wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala - like engaged photojournalism ought to do - but in too bright colours, expensive frames and improper setting. Or so I thought. I felt it provided an apology for those crimes, it lacked the proper, or any, discursive context. It was also a time when contemporary art photography started gaining its lettres de noblesse, with fine art prints massively gaining in size and price. It was awkward, I was coming at it from a different background and I felt oppressed.
It is only today, a lifetime later, after having thoroughly thought about images, their ontology, their inner workings and outer mechanics, that I understand what bothered me. It was the lack of distance, both temporal to its own subject and physical to me as a subject. Mondzain explains this very well in her book L'image peut-elle tuer? when she differentiates between images of violence or the violent force of images and the violence that resides in the systematic violation of the distance in the strategies of the spectacular.
The setting of the exhibition created a spectacle that was "in my face". Once in the galleries I felt captive of the show to be seen, whereas the pages of a magazine provide a dispositive that I can control: I can - and did - interrupt leafing and pick it up again. This space and time is especially necessary when the content of the images is happening simultaneously in the regime of the living. Showing war photography in galleries is surely somehow also necessary but it requires the mode of the retrospection, when the passing of time enables the distance constitutive of the onlooker's capacity to think, so that no violence is done to it.
Marie-José Mondzain, L'image peut-elle tuer?, Paris: Bayard Editions, 2015
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