A UK Show Surveys Photographs That Defined Major Historical Events. Do These Pictures Hold the Same Weight Now?

It seemed to me, as I walked through the three-part “The Camera Never Lies,” an exhibition of photographs at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, UK, that each generation of viewers ought to come to photographs of the past on their own terms. As photographic technology changes, so does our understanding of history—what might have seemed radical in its intrepidness might now seem tame given the relative ease of taking pictures.

I was looking, as I entered the mezzanine gallery, at a survey of unrelated images that were “Icons of Photography,” or so that first section of the show was titled. These photographs, by the likes of Stephen Carter, Stephen McCurry and Dorothea Lange, were recognizable, the curators argued, because of the ways they have come to signify grand historical events as they circulated in newspapers, in magazines, and online. In almost every case—save for portraits of known individuals, including Winston Churchill, Che Guevara, and Greta Thunberg—these were photographs in which I regarded the pain of others.

It was necessary, given that the affinities in these images extended across decades and geography, to establish how exactly they spoke, in the present, about the intractable, vicious patterns of human suffering. That is, to what degree am I moved when I see a photograph by Eddie Adams of a Vietnamese police chief as he points a gun at a wincing man, or a photograph by Richard Drew of a man falling from the Twin Towers, or another by Lyndsey Addario of a Ukrainian family, now a cluster of dead bodies? What chasm separates me and those who saw these images when the terrors seemed real and insurmountable?

Simon Norfolk: Time Taken 2, LHigh Summer, 2013–14.

The curatorial statement emphasizes the ethical dilemmas the photographers faced as they worked—whether the picturing, for instance, of a starving, near-death man in a camp violated his dignity or helped bring attention to his plight. But they also hint at what seemed to me of far greater consequence than the ethical contract between photographed and photographer. “The balance of judgment,” they write, “is for each individual to decide as you look into the extremes of the human condition.”

Trying to decide for myself, I found some clarity in the next section of the exhibition, “Staging Truth.” Where the previous constellation of images had tended toward the fragmentary, these emphasized a serial, more comprehensive approach. The pictured scenes were hardly dramatic—say, for instance, Controversy, (2017) Max Pinckers and Sam Weerdmeester’s photograph of the location were Robert Capa’s infamous 1936 image of a falling Spanish Republican soldier was taken—focusing instead on the intrinsic potential of photographs to tell the truth unhurried.

In some cases, the stagings were, as the term suggested, objects placed against an austere background, such as Ziyah Gafic’s 2012 catalog of personal effects recovered from mass graves in the aftermath of the Balkans War, haunting in their simplicity. In another case, as in Jonas Bendisksen’s 2021 insertion of 3D-modeled avatars into photographs from a town in North Macedonia, the pictures depicted fictional scenarios. These photographs, requiring an imaginative leap, seem less extractive, or dependent on chance.

And yet, the most poignant images belonged to series that showed nothing staged: Edmund Clark’s 2011–16 documentation of locations in the journeys of unlawful detainees as they disappeared into a network of CIA-run secret prisons, in the “war on terror.” These were complemented by pages from We Don’t Say Goodbye (2022), Lorenzo Meloni’s book on the aftermath of fighting against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, a spread of images that hardly showed actual fighting, but the accompanying, inevitable upheavals of mass displacement and devastated buildings. I also lingered on a series of five images by Simon Norfolk, depicting with somewhat staid glamor tanks destroyed in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. His photographs, taken over the course of a year, show the transformation between the sunniest and snowiest months, as though to point to time itself as a casualty of war.

The photographs by Clark, Meloni, and Norfolk were “often-quiet images,” as Harriet Logan and Tristan Lund, the curators, note. In Meloni’s case, the images “convey the hours, days, and weeks of waiting and uncertainty, interspersed with moments of extreme stress.” They suggest photography as a medium in which a story can be told through the stitching of disparate images. The explication might not be chronological, or even linear, but it does show that events are imbricated with their outcomes.

The exhibition succeeded most when it arranged images into sequences: the panoramic cluster of conflict-centric images that opened the show served mainly to show a tableau of human suffering, but the disjuncture in context between the painful sights made it easier for me to turn away from sights that made me queasy.

As in any exhibition of documentary photography, “truth” is a wearisome word, often immiserated by its relativistic connotations. Yes, we see images of what was witnessed by intrepid and conscientious photojournalists, staged by their narrative-minded colleagues, or—as the final section of the exhibition proposed—filtered through the viewpoint of artificial intelligence. But we know what we know by selective indulgence, by the choice to look closely or away. As has been from its invention, photographs “never lie” because they often ensure that we confront this tension.