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  1. Culture
22 November 2010updated 11 Sep 2021 6:35pm

Exhibition review: Bringing the War Home

An unconventional take on war photography at the Impressions gallery in Bradford.

By New Statesman

Bringing the War Home is an exhibition that wants to get away from the conventions of war photography. Seeking to expand our concept of a genre that is traditionally the preserve of photojournalists on the frontline, it attempts not only to reflect the experiences of those not serving in combat – those left behind, civilians in the aftermath of conflict etc – but to question whether it’s even possible to accurately document the experience of warfare.

This last may seem a hoary old path to go down , since it touches on the “truthfulness” of photographic images in general (the question of the authenticity of Robert Capa’s iconic war image The Falling Soldier certainly comes to mind during this exhibition) but this is, in fact, a far more layered and conceptually ambitious exhibition than that opening gambit implies. 

The exhibition brings together 10 contemporary visual artists, and not all work directly in the medium of photography but rather as collators of “documentary” evidence, so we also have postcards, letters and emails. It was partly inspired by American artist Martha Rosler, whose series of photographic collages, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, from the late 60s and early 70s depicted images of soldiers in the Vietnam war inserted into idealised American homes, rather in the manner of Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Make’s Today’s Home’s So Different, So Appealing?

Rosler’s collages presented an agit-prop critique of a war that was, for the first time, fought out in living rooms, so that, in a very graphic sense, it was “brought home” to us via our television screens. In Rosler’s work, heavily-armed soldiers had literally invaded the American home, the consumer dream trampled by the brute tread of American foreign policy.

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This exhibition is preoccupied with neither politics nor protest, but rather representation. Embedded with British troops in Afghanistan, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin chose to completely reject the camera, mindful of the cultural saturation of images of suffering and armed with the notion that a “good” war photograph was a questionable criteria.

Instead, the duo present a large roll of photographic paper which has simply been exposed to light. So in a work entitled The Repatriation II, June 16, 2008 (from the series “The Day Nobody Died”, 2008) all there is to see is a roll of film that goes from opaque black to swimming pool blue to shimmering white. The duo used the Snatch Land Rover they were driving (used to transport troops) as a makeshift dark room – just as photographic vehicles were used in the very early days of war photography – and, in response to dramatic events such as a suicide attack, they opened the vehicle doors at the appropriate location and exposed the paper to the sun.

It’s interesting to note that in Roger Fenton’s own photographs of the Crimea – the precursor of all war photography – images of the dead, the injured or the mutilated were all diligently avoided. But in this age of over-saturation, the avoidance of such images in Broomberg and Chanarin’s work becomes a form of critique rather than sanitisation.

In his “Theatre of War” series, Christopher Sims simulates the carnage of war, but in a way that exposes its artifice. Using fake settlements in Louisiana, constructed by the US military to serve as training grounds for soldiers prior to deployment, Sims takes the viewer “backstage”: a man casually poses for the camera with his guts poking out through the tear in his shirt; a woman in a Niqab, her eyes beautifully made-up, has explosives peeking out from her breast pockets. We’re meant to engage with the incongruity of these images, not to be deceived by them. For the participants the theatre of war, is, for a while at least, literally make-believe.

This is war as experienced outside the warzone: mothers wait for the return of their sons, holding up pictures of their boys in uniforms; “care packages” from loved ones are photographed against a stark black backdrop; a child-like scrawl in a toilet of a US airstrip in Kuwait speaks of homesickness, while one piece of graffiti shows a hungry Pac Man facing the hooded enemy: an Iraqi woman and a “ghost monster”.

But the most arresting work in this quietly compelling exhibition is Asef Ali Mohammed’s “Stories from Kabul”, in which Kabul residents from a range of professions are photographed in their setting of work and asked the question: “How has America influenced your life?” From lavish gratitute, to outright hostility to pragmatic concerns you really couldn’t get a more disparate set of responses. The images might be two-dimensional, but little else is.

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