I recently visited an exhibition at the Tate Modern called
Conflict, Time, Photography. Luckily for me, my best friend from university is
a member of the TATE and this particular exhibition is free for members and one
guest so I got to go for free, but otherwise it costs £14.50 for adults and
£12.50 for the concession price. This might seem a bit steep but I really
enjoyed this exhibition and personally think it would be worth paying. So, a
bit about it…
In short, this exhibition looks at photography of sites of
conflict from the last 150 years. What makes it unique is the way it is ordered.
Rather than working chronologically through the conflicts, the photos are
ordered according to how long after the event they were taken. The first room
therefore is called ‘Moments Later’ and shows the famous mushroom cloud,
buildings as they are collapsing and one of the images used to promote the
exhibition, the image of a shell-shocked US Marine in Vietnam taken by Don
McCullin. You then progress onto ‘Days Later’, ‘Weeks Later’, ‘Months Later’
and then ‘Years Later’ which spans from one year to one hundred years after a
conflict. I thought this was an interesting way of ordering it and allowed you
to see that while some cities (Berlin, for example) have been able to rebuild
and recover from conflict, others have remained badly affected and some,
deserted entirely.
One of my favourite aspects of the exhibition was that it
did not concentrate completely on any one conflict. There were images from
World War I and II, two conflicts I feel that I know quite a lot about, but
there were others from the Armenian conflict of 1915-1918, Namibia from
1966-1990, Angola from 1975-2002, Nicaragua from 1978-1979 to name but a few,
that I knew less about and had never seen many images of. I realise this says
more about my own ignorance than anything else, but even so, I appreciated that
there were a wide range of conflicts represented and lots of information to
read giving you context on the way around. I think many of the images in this
exhibition needed a bit of explanation, particularly those that were in the
later rooms and taken nearly 100 years after a conflict, but that the curators
had done this really well. If you are the sort of person who walks through an
exhibition and doesn’t read the context, there will definitely be a few images
here you might not fully appreciate. One in particular that springs to mind is ‘Shot
at Dawn’ by Chloe Dewe Mathews four photos which appear to show landscapes with
no real landmarks, but are in reality photos of the exact spots where British,
French and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice during World War I. The
images, for me, were some of the most haunting in the entire exhibition.
The exhibition begins with some quotes from Kurt Vonnegut Jr
who was present during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. He was
locked in the underground meat locker of a slaughterhouse as a prisoner of war
and twenty-four years later finally published his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
The quote as you enter is one from after the book was published:
“People aren’t
supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished
my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a
failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.”
This exhibition then forces you to do exactly that, to look
back. I would recommend going to look back for yourselves and look at just some
of the damage caused by some of the conflicts of the last 150 years and reflect
on the many different ways in which conflict impacts on people’s lives.
Beth x
