War in Iraq: The Coordinates of a Conflict;

an Exhibition of Photographs by VII. A

Second Opinion
Stanley, Sarah, Afterimage

The War in Iraq: Coordinates of Conflict, Photographs by VII, March 12 thru May
30, 2004.

Marianne Fulton writes of photographer Carl Mangly famed photo, a Korean

woman carrying her baby and worldly goods flees the fighting around Seoul in the
winter attack on the Korean capital in 1951. "Besides showing a refugee, this is
about motherhood, about the human race." Despite Roland Barthes' critique of the
universalizing tendencies of The Family of Man exhibition based on shared
experience, he admits elsewhere that "there could be no photography" without the
universal. Photography's ability to generalize human experience, changing the
peculiar into the all embracing, can certainly create dramatic war images. Opposed
to the humanistic inclusiveness though, the universal is attained through modern
warfare's machine-like accuracy in wrecking the human-inhabited landscape.
Humanity is dealt with equally in the combat zone--one body lies prone as does
any other; gunfire and explosives from either side destroys homes and cities with
exactly the same technology. Detailed captions are often necessary to fill in specific
identities of persons and places. This will to transform individual stories of
suffering into powerful, overarching themes of death and destruction also becomes
war photography's greatest philosophical incongruity.

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The War in Iraq: Coordinates of Conflict, an exhibition currently on view at the
International Center for Photography, present a series of war images that showcase
the hostilities that Americans already know too well through unrelenting news
coverage. These photographers have formed agency VII, which includes one of the
most well known living war documentary photographers. James Nachtwey, the
subject of a recent feature length documentary on war photography (War
Photographer by Christian Frei, 2001). The agency hopes to develop alternative
means of distributing their photos via the Internet, thus broadening the scope and
content of their photos. If these photographers aspire to create a more nuanced
image of the war in Iraq, this exhibition tells an equally compelling story about the
status of war photography in relation to the news media. This show's catalogue of
200 images, with the generic title War, stands alongside Robert Capa's book of war
images taken over half a century ago, and when compared, there are striking
similarities in tone and content. War photography was first commissioned by news
magazines, including LIFE and LOOK, that featured oversized images of war
deemed of great historical importance, and these early modes of representing war
have continuity.

The photos Capa shot, and the ones seen now at the ICP, fit into three distinct
categories: war politics, active combat and civilian life during wartime. Generals
conducting war strategy sessions or arriving at their military posts, presidents
performing the affairs of state and military training camps are most common, on
par with uniformed soldiers in active combat, followed closely by explosions of
various kinds that often create sublime landscapes of orange or blue haze. These
reoccurring themes, illustrated in photos such as "A Wounded Northern Alliance
Commander Lies Dying After Being Shot by Taliban Forces outside Kabul" (Ron
Haviv) and "Charlie Company Pass a Secondary Explosion en Route to Baghdad"
(Christopher Morris), narrows the war photographer's subject range to the point of
redundancy. These are the scenes that we expect of war, and the story would feel
incomplete without them.
The photos that depict civilians grappling with the horrors of war require a
different vocabulary, although even these often involve the wartime activities of
fleeing, exemplified in a stark black and white image of a line of walking figures,
"Refugees Flee the Ongoing Fighting" (Antonin Kratochvil), and mourning the
dead. The notable exceptions in this exhibition present some of the more
ephemeral situations found within the war-torn landscape. …

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Publication information: Article title: War in Iraq: The Coordinates of a Conflict; an Exhibition of Photographs by VII. A Second Opinion.
Contributors: Stanley, Sarah - Author. Journal title: Afterimage. Volume: 31. Issue: 6 Publication date: May-June 2004. Page number: 19. ©
Visual Studies Workshop. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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