Visitors need to be prepared for a walk through the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition "War / Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath." It is dense, filled with emotional complexity, full of images hard to face head-on. In all, there are 400 photographs— yes, 400!— from an array of historical periods and conflicts, prints and printed material from newspapers and magazines representing a broad spectrum of the war experience. There are photos of the heat of battle, of recruitment and training, military life and its routine, the aftermath of conflict, coming home, the remembrance of the experience and the memorialization of the dead. The images are populated by soldiers, by-standers, families left behind, officers carrying out strategy, politicians responsible for decisions to deploy. And, while it is tempting to read these images through stock categories that generalize and simplify, and to believe that because of the medium what we are seeing is definitive and real, I was struck by the gray that lives within so many of these photographs. More often than not it was something beyond the frame that captured my attention: How did this [soldier / victim / spouse / priest / etc] get here? Why is the journalist capturing it? Is it fair? Is it "true"? What is the story that the picture is trying to tell (even, sometimes, in spite of the photographer's intent)? The more time I lingered, looking and thinking, the more it felt like "War/Photography" was aptly named— not with one word playing adjective to the other, but rather the two elements intersecting, their collision leaving complicated markings that remain for the rest of us to try to figure out.
"War/Photography" is at the Brooklyn Museum until 2nd February.
For more info, and to see some of the images from the exhibition, visit the Museum's exhibit webpage at: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/war_photography/
