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.
