The exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography (2014), held at the Tate Modern Museum, addresses our complex relationship to war-torn paths. Issues of dealing with memory and trauma run deep within the show where concepts of time and proximity are at the forefront. Curator Simon Baker takes from Kurt Vonnegut’s musings on how to deal with memory and trauma, as a thematic foundation for the exhibition. Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, is the author’s solution to the impossibility of looking backwards without becoming frozen in the process; a process of which was interested in the destruction of time itself in the book. Baker had taken the decision to make ‘looking back’ at events across a distanced time, the central argument and the organizational basis of this show. The show focuses on subjective remembrance – how does one remember? How do artists and societies come to terms with traumas of the past? What is created amid these collected photographs is a question not only about memory but the truth value of the image and how its affective nature plays with these concepts of memory, time, distance and narrative. Amid the exhibition there is little to distinguish between pieces that desire a documentation of the past and more conceptual works that wish to exercise memory - like Vonnegut -, on a personal and collective level. Photography as a medium is a critically affective choice given its ability to deal with events and objects in an ephemeral and reflective way. The starting point of the exhibition is the value of the time taken to consider the past, looking beyond the instantaneity of photojournalism to consider images of war and conflict made after the fact: It begins with photographs made ‘moments after’ something that has already happened, and move gradually through images made days, weeks, months and years afterwards, creating an elastic stretching of time from the vantage point, to its past and future – relating previous conflicts to present ones. The principal aim of this non-chronological strategy is to mimic time and see the past as Billy Pilgrim saw it; shifting perspectives constantly from contemporary conflicts to those in distant history and all points in between, across time and space. Many of the works included necessarily share the spirit of Vonnegut’s literary return to wartime Dresden in the 1960’s, engaging with, rather than seeking to bridge, the impossible passage of time; into the then that pervades the now and gives it meaning. It is this elasticity of temporality as played with in the Tate that hone in on Agamben’s arguments about contemporaneity. This exhibition is concerned with the distance of one’s relation to an experience within time, whereupon reflecting on events in different time periods – while both being a part and apart from said temporalities, form the ontological experience of the patron as if they were Agamben’s contemporary or Vonnegut’s Pilgrim. It is the curator’s desire to evoke the experience of feeling that one is in this space; in which they remain aware of, connected to, but physically apart from the ‘ongoingness’ of measurable temporalities of historical consequence that we find a connection between Agamben and Vonnegut. In this space, the exhibition reaffirms the position of photography as a medium of historical record, with the image-maker as witness. Discussion of conflict photography however, concentrates on our society’s assumed ambivalence towards, and depoliticisation of the violent image. A consideration of the medium helps to illuminate Nancy’s thinking on violence and the image – and how such themes are coerced in the show. As time progresses, the archive of these images helps to form collective memory, establishing accepted narratives and ‘official’ histories. Where, patrons are posed with a challenge of understanding based on their knowledge of the production and reproduction of photographs in a visual and consumer culture, interrupting the communication and sense of reproducibility associated with the medium. What is key when reviewing the photograph is understanding its role in communication and meaning-making. For Nancy, it is the disruption of the image, characterized in part by its disposition as force that is exercised in, or as, a network of relations. Whereupon dissecting selected works within the exhibition, Nancy’s arguments about violence and the image, and their invisible and visible natures that help to seek/apply truths, engage with sentiments of memory and how those devices affect/effect understandings of history/one’s own relations or reactions to certain imagery. By considering the significance of the photo it is important for a proper analysis of the success and affective nature of the exhibition.

​

​

Curator Simon Baker took inspiration for the exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography from Kurt Vonnegut – a writer who took nearly 25 years to address his experience as a prisoner of the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 and Hiroshima[1]; for Vonnegut, he surfaced the next day “to see what he called ‘possibly the world’s most beautiful city’ completed destroyed”[2]. The event of Hiroshima is another influencer for Baker because of the works that the tragic event had inspired, one spanning over many years. With this in mind, Baker decided to curate ‘looking back’ at events, across different planes of time as the organizational factor for the show. Taking its cue from Vonnegut, the show offers the expanding passages of time between events and the photos that reflect on them[3]. The exhibition has no intentions of being photojournalistic, as often this type of medium elicits propagandistic ‘truth’ narratives and injects the viewer into the “immediacy [of] wartime chaos and strife. Rather, [the exhibition] is about remembrance – about how artists, and by extension societies, come to terms with the atrocities and traumas of the past”[4]. The patron is inducted into a space where they can reflect on the physical traces of war and trauma, where, in a space unstuck in time, one can see these images and their representations blur, heighten and fade with time. In many ways Baker’s exhibition acts as Agamben’s notion of the archeological dig. Agamben reminds us that to access the present, it must take shape in the archeological sense, where what prevents access to the present is a mass that we cannot presently experience: “to be contemporary means in this sense to return to a present where we have never been”[5]. How one can achieve such an ability relies on perceptivity – to achieve contemporary perspective, to be contemporary is to negate the blinding light of the present and see the darkness; “In neurophysiologic terms, darkness is not an absence of stimuli, but the activation of other cells in the retina and thus of another kind of seeing”[6]. This effect is an active one, where active/conscious looking is what is needed to see beyond the bombardment of images in contemporary society. To be contemporary is to render the present world archaic in order to locate its ‘point of origin’[7]. Yet it is not a retreat backwards in time, rather this search is the contemporary person’s – here being the willing patrons as guided by Baker – ability in the present to relate to the past, creating a dynamic connection between them. This sight offers potentiality – Agamben’s contemporary relies on their sight to make these connections and it is this sight that offers the potential of active vision. There is the potential to be, and not be, rooted in our experiences. The individual is in a constant state of being able to see, ergo sight itself is a thing possessed by everyone – it is a condition of existence. Yet, we have not only the ability to experience sight, we can experience darkness too. Therefor we have the potential to ‘not see’, to deprive ourselves;

​

The image, therefore becomes visible against its absence, it differentiates itself from its lack and puts itself forth through darkness into visibility”[8] It is here that one can imagine the liberated spectator – one who not only has the choice to refuse to watch, but sees spectatorship as “the potentiality of darkness of the other image[9].

​

To be unstuck allows for bringing the past back to life and understanding it. The exhibition heightens understandings of persistence and memory, where, despite the lack of bodies (or their disappearance/invisibility), the effects of war is present within landscapes and objects. In the photograph and war for example, conflicts are often represented and circulated as spectacles with propagandistic intent. As such, war imagery and its mediation as a spectacle have increasingly become difficult to separate. To recognize this trend is to acknowledge the capacity of media to shape public perception, and by extension, memory and beliefs[10]. The ‘spectakil’ as defined by Clare Finburgh in her text Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict, is another form of the word ‘spectacle’. Originating symantically in the Latin spectaculum, to mean ‘sight’ or ‘aspect’; “Spectaculum itself derives from spectare, the Latin verb ‘to look’ or ‘to observe’”[11]. Finburgh makes clear that given the etymological origins of the word ‘spectacle’, it is predominantly associated with sight – one connoting the gaze and a sight that is often striking or unusual regarding the nature of the object. The word also infuses implications of entertainment and possesses the ability for affective relation to what is seen/produced[12]. Relying on Susan Sontag’s arguments on the spectacle, Finburgh agrees that the spectacle does not generally leave the viewer indifferent; “to qualify as spectacle, a scene must provoke so intense a reaction that spectacles are described, as […] Spectacle is associated with scenes of pain, torture and misery. In addition, it is often paired with combat and conflict”[13]. The spectacle then, is a highly charged term with a seemingly inherent link to certain types of imagery, namely trauma. Opening up the term, trauma imagery can be produced in a less explicit means. It can be a hauntingly beautiful scene that resonates, or preys on the viewer’s emotions. A spectacle can be an event or thing seen by the eyes or something presented that evokes wonderment – or other emotions such as pity or disdain, more specific to these feelings would be terror or suffrage. To view a spectacle enables a sense of satisfaction or even pleasure[14]. The charge an image holds has the ability to fool memories, distort truths and create new narratives. Memory researcher, Kimberly Wade explains that a big reason why many are fooled is because people trust a photograph; “We still think of them as frozen moments in time”[15]. Within the exhibition, the term spectacle is potent, not purely in forms of explicit violence, but due to the affective nature some of the works possess - and they heighten the potential of the blinding light of the age through this discourse. The exhibition itself has a deliberate lack of photojournalistic material – apart from a few works by veteran Donald McCullin[16]. The curator wanted to move beyond the instantaneity of photojournalism and absolute narratives that are extensions of them, to explore the aftermath or war and trauma mainly through the scope of artistic photography[17]. Subject matter offers landscapes, objects, voids, and the human body mainly presented as a shadow or shell through a multitude of temporalities. Yet, having some photojournalism within the exhibit accompanying artistic representations create an interesting division between journalistic and artistic memory/remembrance; the photojournalistic images invite patrons to remember through explicit violence – our corporeality, the innate physical response to a recognized violence that festers in the body. While the artistic imagery is partial to reflection. In both forms, the viewer cannot escape the knowledge that war harms people. The spectacle of the horrors of war – whether implicit or explicit -, makes for fascination. For example, facing the wall full with Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of scars and traces, the implication of the Kuwaiti landscape is to recognize that these are war graves and the work is spectacular in itself[18]. Some have argued that artistic affect in war photography falls short due to the lack of explicit violence. Susan Sontag contends that viewers want to see explicit evidence of atrocity without artistic involvement or liberties[19]. Yet, arguably, if the individual looks at the traces of atrocity and their subliminal referents, and are uncomfortable by the artistic portrayal (beauty) of the scene, this type of spectacle is equally as potent and causes just as powerful reflections on what is present and absent within the work, and within the memory/history. Both offer intense affective power, where one (photojournalistic images) may be less poetic and more intellectual, while the other (artistic images) does not engage innate physical reactions. Simon Baker in the catalogue for Conflict, Time, Photography goes on to explain how images work to effect memory and understanding;

​

The conflicts referenced all share major complex and contested histories, not only in relation to what occurred at the time, but also in relation to the official narrative and histories that followed – histories that are often hidden or forgotten. Ranging from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to the Armenian Genocide, the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and the Lebanese Civil War, these conflicts, although some occurred almost a hundred years ago, still provoke controversy and therefore renewed engagement and investigation[20].  

​

​

By creating a space that include works from different periods and organizing them based on the time the photo was taken after the event, the exhibition attempts to probe into hidden or forgotten histories/memories that provide a junction between past and present[21]. By grouping photographs based on elapsed time between the event and capture, the sequence of the exhibit “moments after” and finishing as “99 Years Later” provides context of both the time between the event and the image – and the time between the event and now and potential future). Paralleling these two timelines creates a context where viewer’s see the photographer’s reactions to that time (of which has passed) and the viewers now judge their own reactions to that (now passed) time since both the event and the photo. David Mellor contributed his sentiments to the catalogue, arguing a correspondence of the photograph and war; observing the attitudes of the artists showcased, Mellor agrees that war coincides with representation – and such representations are an act of image-making, or, creating narratives[22].

​

Baker decided to create spaces where images/objects that have the same remove, but do not share the same subject matter or conflict, are set next to each other. Baker states that the exhibition’s unique non-chronological design enables people to think about the subject matter over a period of time and question how one remembers[23];

​

As the years go on, photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki become a lot more graphic, a lot angrier, tougher and more determined. In Shomei Tomatsu's 11:02 Nagasaki,you have the famous pictures of keloid scarring, melted bottles, bone fused into a helmet and the watch that stopped at 11:02, when the bomb hit. The effects of the radiation were so long lasting that you could be a documentary photographer and go to Nagasaki in 1970 and still find people struggling to live on a daily basis, with problems relating to the bombings[24].

​

This is a key factor to the exhibition because the patron is faced with the idea of a conflict as well as the idea of it ending. More importantly, the museum-goer is situated with the unique opportunity to give agency to their sight and to exercise motifs similar to Agamben’s contemporary. Yet simultaneously, the exhibition’s structure creates an echoing effect. Certain traumas continue to ring throughout the space. Not all of these works were created instantly after the moment of an event’s occurrence, some of them were the creations of intensive research and long-term practices[25]. The effect is one like suturing; connecting fabrics of varying temporalities. Much like Agamben’s conceptions on the vertebrate, Time, Conflict, Photography allows the patron to see what the contemporary would perceive; a broken vertebra in the present. The backbone of time is fractured and the contemporary is at the point of its fracture within the exhibition’s structure; An understanding that leads to grasping one’s time and recognizing the obscurity of the present light[26]. Coming back to Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five reflected Vonnegut’s inability to write clearly about his experiences. Baker notes how interesting the introduction is, “because it's all about him trying to travel back and remember—but he can't really—and I think that the anger, such as there is in Vonnegut, is a self-excoriating sense of self-consciousness”[27]. On the same note, Baker believes photography works in a different way with the same sort of interest in expression. For him, the medium allows for, and deals with, trauma in an emotional and reflective way. Tied to this intent is the question of how does one remember?[28]. The passage of time for Vonnegut, presented a problem and solution; in Slaughterhouse-Five he writes, “People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”[29]. Baker recognizes that Vonnegut struggled to understand survival after a horrific event – he had evaded the destruction of Dresden as a result of being in an insulated underground meat locker of the slaughterhouse in which he was held prisoner[30]. As a clever means for looking back, Vonnegut’s solution to such an impossibility (without becoming ‘frozen’ in the process) was to destroy time in the book. Vonnegut uses a character device, Billy Pilgrim, who ‘comes unstuck in time’ and is able to experience time ontologically, as a means to navigate time. Pilgrim shifts constantly between the past in Dresden and the present in post-war America as well as a strange future where he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore[31]. What is interesting is through Vonnegut’s mixing of science fiction and a story of his war experiences/trauma, he creates perceptive reflections on war and the ephemeral nature of time through the story device of Tralfamadore;

​

​

All time is time,’ one of the aliens tells Pilgrim. ‘It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber[32].

​

​

Pilgrim himself is able to transcend time barriers in the novel and has the ability to review and experience junctures of his life – going back and forth between past and present through his Trafalmadorian perspective, he is projected into a position of timelessness[33]. It is the nature of Pilgrim’s uncommon situation that patrons of the Tate are invited to experience in similar ways as they are invited to act as Agamben’s contemporary. Agamben’s contemporary is an ‘untimely’ individual. Yet he is a person whose sense of being contemporary as it is experienced ontologically – through the understanding of nature. This is a truth Agamben believed was found in the experience[34]. To understand the structure of Conflict, Time, Photography, further investigation into Simon Baker’s deliberate curatorial choices should continue. It is evident that using the ontological experience of Billy Pilgrim as a starting point as a means for enveloping the museum-goer into different time periods all at once is a clever construction for navigation. Moreover, by supplanting the individual in a non-historical chronological order, the exhibition is less so documentative in nature due to the art objects designated groupings. Arguably these groupings promote an affective behaviour because they are grouped by how close after a traumatic event, they were taken and the lack of chronology or location denotes a disregard for repetition of history lessons and more a focus on the immediacy of feeling the image evokes (as well as the suturing effect of the ‘fractured vertebrae that was spoken about earlier). Agamben’s argument for the contemporary does not negate chronology but considers the contemporary’s relation to time as broken – much as it seems to be the case for Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim. For Agamben, it is the contemporary’s ability to perceive the darkness of one’s own time that causes for such a remarkable gift – a ‘special sight’[35].

​

he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present[36].

​

In Agamben’s excerpt, light is the element of ‘one’s own time’ that is known and available to all, but is paradoxical in that it hides the essence of the present (to be ‘blinded by the lights of the century’)[37]. The perception of the darkness is inseparable from this light. The light that Agamben speaks of can be as much blinding as it can be illuminating – which also signifies an essence of presence. Presence, or to be ‘present’ is difficult to grasp as well given Agamben’s metaphor about distant galaxies;

​

Indeed it comes to signify the essence of the presence itself. When we observe the night sky, what we are really looking at is the light from distant galaxies traveling toward us – light that can never reach us because, in an expanding universe, those galaxies are moving away from us. […] Our time, the present, is in fact not only the most distant: it cannot in any way reach us… In the obscurity of the present light … without ever being able to reach us, is perpetually voyaging toward us[38].

​

Agamben’s passage considers the distance of light and darkness as well as time and how such understandings effect one’s perception of their era. He does not consider the darkness of a period of time as only absence, but such darkness can also be a positive beam – one that travels toward us but never reaches us. The contemporary’s attention to this is important for two reasons: first, Agamben connects the darkness to an ‘immemorial’ or prehistoric origin that constitutes an ‘unliveable’ but crucial element of the present. Ergo, the contemporary’s attentiveness allows for a ‘return to a present where we have never been’[39]. Second, the contemporary figure who interpolat[es] the present into the inert homogeneity of linear time’, is one that introduces the possibility of possessing a special relationship between different times[40]. These photographs, held in their specified groupings, enable the patron to probe into ‘the darkness of the era’ as they are released from chronological narratives – devices that for the sake of this argument, are the blinding lights. I argue that it is Baker’s intent to plot the visitor as the contemporary, to see conflicting and haunting images that contribute new ways of understanding the essence of eras that were hidden beneath spectacles of the time(s). Shoair Maylain argues in the exhibition’s catalogue that archives are crucial for this process because they help to create collective memory where one can use information to reconstruct the past; archives are also linked to notions of time, because they rupture the idea of linear time and provide a vision into the past, bridging the gap between past and present, and allowing artists to activate moments from the past in the present –by acting in an archeological way, the exhibition too provides a vision into the past, by experiencing different temporalities, the patron is able to pinpoint origins; the exhibition shows patrons images of war from different times, in present time, locating origins for existing/resulting effects/current situations[41]. As time progresses, the archive helps form collective memory, establishing accepted narratives and official histories[42]. Yet archive histories can be contested and questioned to where some content may be changed, clarified or recontextualized. The elasticity of the archive, holds a close relation to conflict, it is “anchored and tethered by conflict, while conflict relies on the archive for remembrance”[43]. To be completely ‘up-to-date’ is blindness in Agamben’s eyes; the contemporary must avoid total immersion within the present, distancing themselves for they are the individuals who possess a disjointed relationship with time. The true contemporary is better off grasping their own time more clearly than other individuals due to their very disjunction within it[44].  Contemporariness is a singular relationship with the individual’s own time – one that “adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it”[45]. Conflict, Time, Photography is concerned with the distance of one’s relation to an experience within time. To reflect on the past while at once possessing the feeling of being a part of it, yet apart from the experience captured and presented. Contemporariness then, is natural for insightful speculation on what it is to be/feel in time – a state of ontology. The nature of being in a space; a space in which the individual is aware of, connected to yet physically apart from, a space that “whatever else is occurring within it, is palpably also located in time, but in a different kind of time”[46]. As put by Agamben, the contemporary ‘grapples with the beasts of our time’, those who hold the position of the contemporary must firmly hold their gaze on their own time so as to see through the light into the darkness; it is them “who must firmly lock his gaze onto the eyes of his century-beast, [and] who must weld with his own blood the shattered backbone of time.’ Having locked onto the beasts of contemporary violence, destruction, and trauma[47]. This notion is present among several of the displayed works in the exhibition, spanning between the rooms marked ‘Moments After’, ‘Days Later’, ‘Weeks Later’, ‘7 Months Later’, ‘One Year Later’ etc.

​

In the first room, Moments After, works by Luc DeLac, Don McCullin and a piece by artists Broomberg and Chanarin all share a space. Luc DeLac’s work follows large images of immediate reaction, where one sees the dust hanging in the air literally seconds after an attack. Broomberg and Chanarin’s work was a response to being embedded. Where what they did instead of taking photographs when something happened, they unrolled a sheet of photographic paper and made an abstract mark[48]. Then there is McCullin’s work although himself known as a war photographer, was incorporated in the exhibition due to the image’s testament to the horrors of war. The photograph was taken in Vietnam during one of the most violent battles of the Tet Offensive, part of a series of attacks launched by the Viet Cong in January and February of 1968 during the Battle of Hue in Vietnam[49]. Titled Shell-Shocked US Marine In Vietnam (1968), the Marine’s image was photographed minutes after he was engaged in the fight. As Baker notes in the catalogue, media coverage of the fight was considered a crucial turning point in the US public’s understanding of the war. The situation of this piece in the exhibition heightens understandings of narratives tied to imagery that can alter or neglect factors regarding the event. McCullin has stated that a photo like this would not have been possible without his ability for close proximity to the soldiers during the battle – something that would not be applicable today when journalists and photographers are ‘embedded’[50]. The Marine’s gaze testifies to the traumatic experience of war, a brutal image of the psychological effect of conflict on the individual’s psyche and its long-lasting effects on the person – the body under extraordinary stress, implying Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among other mental problems, rather than showcasing physical or explicit violence. McCullin’s work puts forth the recognition of the horrors of war, brought on through the challenging of propagandistic histories attached to the period (this narrative is thus aligned with themes of Agamben’s light), in order to interrogate the neglected truths found in the darkness of said time. In the room ‘7 Months Later’ lies Sophie Ristelheuber’s work Fait (1991). Seven months after the end of the First Gulf War, Ristelhueber traveled to Kuwait to take photos of the ‘wounds’ left on the desert surface[51]. The French title Fait refers to both ‘fact’ (what the documentary images supposedly contain) and ‘what has been done’[52]. Ristelheuber used a number of angles to capture the damaged landscape, changing perspectives to such a degree where the viewer loses sense of the scale in the work. Ristelheuber has been quoted by Baker as considering her work purely about scars – that which possesses much more than what is shown on the surface. The work is presented fully within the room for maximum affect:

​

​

four walls of gridded images of the Kuwait desert. Shifting between up-close shots of the scorched, scarred sand and aerial photographs of great swathes of desert, Ristelhueber has created a typology of the landscape of modern warfare: craters, tank tracks, discarded objects, abandoned clothes, many of which seem to be merging into the sand. The result is almost claustrophobic[53].

​

​

The work is installed from floor to ceiling and evokes familiar images of jet attacks and close-ups of mutilated tech that confront the viewer with the intimate violence of war. Although no violence is made explicit, there is no gore, for the perceptive viewer, the implications of these ‘scars’ – from vehicle tracks, trenches, and abandoned stations/vehicles -, presented a dramatic view of the invisible truths about war that isn’t recognized; abused soil, forgotten and damaged weaponry hides beneath the surface of knowledge that a traumatic event occurred and has forever imprinted the event in the earth. It is this memory, held by the landscape, and its persistence that prove that despite the disappearance of bodies, the act is still enveloped within these objects and the landscape – “the only elements that we are allowed to see are those that have survived the initial blow to be recorded”[54]. The work proves that although nature may have absorbed the conflict, it has not been forgotten and breeds a lasting resonance on the landscape. Thus, one can correlate knowledge from the past to understandings of the present to recognize the origins of the space and what had created it to be so. Such a work focusing on marks or traces of violence, heightens the human impact, putting to the foreground new perspectives on the implications and testaments of war that is often neglected. The works propose that there is hidden knowledge latent within the darkness of each photograph, one that can give information on the cause of the present space’s status. Baker’s curation enables any actively conscious onlooker with probing interest to wrestle themselves from chronological narratives and embrace the moments shown, as they were captured. Agamben’s contemporary in his alienation from the currency of his time, allows his perspective to see time in ways that time has not been seen; he sees the persistence of the past in the present – and can hope to change the present in ways that also reconfigure affect understandings of the past. In such ways, Baker offers this opportunity to his visitors; he offers his visitors the chance to be distanced from their time so as to perceive it, alongside the past and muse about the possible future, present and past through the exhibition’s arrangement. Compounded with this ability is the acknowledgement that the patron has the freedom to walk back and forth between these rooms, completely unstuck to any time preset.

​

As noted, the contemporary sees the living influence of the past in the present. Not all are aware of the effects war has had on the present time (whether physically, geographically or mentally/emotionally). The Modern Conflict Room, an extension of the exhibition, is another layer to the manipulation of timelines and understanding. Keeping in mind Agamben’s assertion on the contemporary who divides and interpolates time – the very same who is capable of transforming and putting it into relation to other times -, this room is an amalgam of different understandings of history. The space is in the middle of the show, described as ‘womb-like’ and comfortable, the intent of the room was to be treated as if it were a discovery[55]. Guest- curating this room within the exhibition is David Miller from the university of Sussex, both he and Baker intended that the room engages personal identification with memory. The layering on the wall is a miming of the layering of history, the way the objects in the room are placed are a means of representing how any individual organizes their understanding of history in the everyday: ““we stumble upon them, we find them, you’re walking around London and you may see a plaque that says ‘something happened here in the 19th c’ – the archive’s intervention is to remind us about the vernacular, to remind us about this completely different layering of history”[56]. Within the room are objects from the everyday to propaganda, personal effects, letters, magazines and newspapers. The setting of the exhibition is abruptly changed once entering the room, the space is less white-cube museum aesthetic and closer to a domestic space. The setting strikingly contrasts with the exhibition as a wartime cabinet of curiosities, where objects on top of photographs hold and produce understanding of memories[57].

​

Present within the show are issues of visibility and invisibility when dealing with violence and the trauma of war. As it has been argued with reference to Baker’s use of Pilgrim – and the character’s similarities to Agamben’s contemporary -, addressing the complex relationship of a war-torn past engages understandings of one’s own time, among other periods of time, this also includes memory as it is revisited/understood in image. To apply Nancy’s theories on the image to the works shown, accentuate the impact of the image and the exhibition’s affective ability on the curator’s ideal patron (Baker’s image of Billy Pilgrim, Agamben’s contemporary); to understand why the viewer may believe a photograph it is important to review Nancy’s considerations on the relationship of photography to art and reality and the documentary value of the photograph. Firstly, images are often understood as an imitation of real objects or events, people, things. Nancy objects to this common belief, arguing that images do not imitate objects but compete with them. This rivalry implicates a competition or, agnon in place of the believed imitation[58]. This competition is one for presence, Nancy explains, “The image undermines the presence of the object. Instead of simply showing an existing object, the image shows the being and mode of being of the image”[59]. This detail allows for the image to pull the object out of a state of pure attendance into presence, where the person or object is elevated to subject[60]. Nancy’s notion on monstrosity comes from the image’s ability to show (de-monstrate), in order to ‘illuminate and to highlight’[61]. In this capacity, it is where violence makes itself apparent[62]. M. Wigoder’s essay The Triad of Vision and the Violent Photo Image articulates Nancy’s thinking on the photograph. Wigoder details that if Barthe’s realist approach to photography is adopted, the character of Nancy’s blow is manifested in the indexing ability of the photograph, especially where monstration is concerned[63]. Wigoder continues on Nancy’s beliefs on the blow, where for Wigoder, the blow is a moment of its own grounding. It is also a relation between the photograph and its referent due to its inseparable nature; “a medium that cannot escape its preoccupation with death, wounds, and traces. Just as Barthes had typified the violent character of the photograph by reference to the intraceable”[64]. Nancy uses the word to assert that violence is inherently absolute, and for which reason it is guided by the intraceable principle (which is ‘always the mark of truth’)[65]. Recognizing the argument of the absolute registers a concern for the documentary value of the image – if it claims a single truth, then we can understand why the belief in the accuracy of the photo lends to the ‘monstration’ between images.

​

As, all sides “seeks to lay claim to a single truth, especially during the unfolding of events of a conflict, when the image acquires a significant propaganda value”[66]. According to Nancy, the image is seen as both violent in itself (a reference to the bombardment of images and their ‘all-presence; through advertising (advertising of which evokes streams of images) as well as being party to the violence that concerns war and exploitation (such violence as omnipresent, indecent, shocking etc.)[67]. It is understood that the image is much more than an image, documentation or representation, it is ‘the thing itself’ and calls for attention. The call to look is what defines the image. The image’s complexity lies in its double nature; they have the ability to produce an effect as a result of its concurrent contradiction, EX., horror and beauty, truth and lie can coexist[68]. This two-fold of the image, its plurality, asserts the concept of co-appearance. The simultaneity of being-with is different from ‘appearance’ as either to reveal what was hidden or as ‘mere’ appearance, which fails to reveal the truth[69]. Here, presence is different from appearance because presence identifies the fight between the object represented and the image representing it, for presence; “since there is no authentic reality or self before or behind the appearance we make to one another, Nancy suggests that the crisis of the spectacle is not so much a result of the replacement of life by representation, as it is the result that ‘society gives itself its representation in the guise of symbolism’”[70].Ergo, given such guises, a distinction needs to be made within the ‘order’ of appearance – between distortions of reality that claim to exhibit such and those that belong to appearances ‘for beings-in-common’[71]. The ungrounded image, cut away and separated from the ground, is a distinct sum that breaks with the continuity of life. It is unlike an icon, holds no religious aura nor is infused with the power of outside authority, yet it does exert a force. This force comes from the relationship between the distinct and ‘remarkable’ image, surrounded by the invisible ground as a result of its absence; this indicates the object that is/was before the image attempts to represent it. Violence will always appear in an image and will always be realized in the image. The reason, for Nancy, is that an image is the index of something that has been missed; violence is the trauma (which is connected to truth) that by-passes perceptual ability. We cannot truly know violence, only its effects through showing its effects, so we cannot truly know what is at the basis of the image;

​

Violence, to strike a Lacanian chord, is the missed encounter with the real. The illusion, of course, is that we perceive violence as violence. Someone gets shot. We see the blood. Image and violence thus once again play themselves out[72].

​

Nancy’s argument is similar to Cara O’Connor’s statement on violence; no thing can be manifested or really show itself other than through the image. The image shows the thing, and violence through the image is a disruptive force (it cannot be stopped nor expected), it disrupts order and leaves questions and ambiguity[73]. The image is something different from representation where, rather than springing from worldly opinion, the image compels by its own entirety or ‘self-sufficient groundlessness’[74]. In this regard, the image can act as truth because “‘in one stroke’ stroke’ it asserts itself and says something about the world ‘without being accountable’ to the world”[75]. Due to its immediacy, violence can create an image of itself, however the difference between this violence and the violence of the image lies in the image’s violent blow. The violent blow rejects dissimilarity through its ability to be worldless and complete, referring to nothing other than its own violent force. Art however, is a ‘violence without violence’[76] because these types of images refer to difference and have the ability to open onto the world[77]. The artwork brings into question “what is true?”. The work by artists Adamn Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who’s photograph hangs in the first room titled “Moments After,” the piece appropriately attunes to Nancy’s criticisms on the image. Named The Day Nobody Died (2008), the work was created during the artist’s embedment with the British Army in Helmand Province, Afghanistan[78]. Broomberg and Chanarin were interested in investigating the role of photography in active war, and to critique the creation of an image under embedded journalism and heavy monitoring. The piece underlines the tensions “between the creative imaginings of conflict by artists and the sanitized image of war that often results from state-sponsored war art programs and corporate journalism”[79]. Broomberg and Chanarin took to Afghanistan a lightproof box that contained a roll of photographic paper about fifty meters long by seventy-six centimeters wide. With this paper, they made photographic objects that appeared at first, to have little to do with photography or war. Yet, as Randy Innes has made apparent in his essay ‘The Day Nobody Died’, War Photography, and the Violence of the Image,  these images resemble colour-field abstractions, each work was created after an event that took place during their embedding; “In response to each of these events, and also to a series of more mundane moments, such as a visit by the Duke of York and a press conference to announce the 100th death, all events a photographer would ordinarily record, we removed a six-meter section of light sensitive paper from our box, in the back of an armored vehicle which we had converted into a mobile darkroom, and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds”[80]. The process created images that literally mark a specific space and time yet do not create a visual indicator of the event. As such, The Day Nobody Died disrupts expectations of war photography and simultaneously shows the limits of photojournalism[81].

​

Despite the title, the work’s refusal to depict the event confronts the conceit of conflict photography (the expectation that war can be documented in visual means). The work disrupts in two ways, one of which is an exhibition of large-scale abstract photos, made via a chemical process of exposure of film to sunlight. The second is a twenty-three-minute video of the box’s adventure/experience to and from the warzone. Broomberg and Chanarin created a work that was at odds with the conventional desire to visualize the violence of war. Instead, the work presents a visual record of unremarkable events, staying true to its title, it does not depict suffrage or gore. The work is unlike spectacles of violence, rather, the irregular elements in the work causes for ambiguity. The work The Day Nobody Died refuses spectacularization through a disregard for conflict photography tropes[82]. The work encompasses streaks of colours contrasted with deep blacks and browned whites in varying formations. Through its design, the work is challenging if the viewer regards photography as an objective medium that accurately records and reproduces what is present in front of the camera. Broomberg and Chanarin’s large photographs are non-figurative and coined by them, as ‘action photographs’[83]; “without a lens to condense and focus the sunlight emanating from outside the armored vehicle, the light affects the surface as an unfocused wash, a stain impressed upon the paper. They seem to show nothing; they cannot easily be added to evidentiary, archival, or memorial inventories”[84]. Yet, these photographs are still markers. The title of the work refers to the fifth day of their embedding, where during such a deadly phase of war, no one was killed. The work and its name give reference to what is usually viewed with little interest for a war photographer – an absence of any events. For the artists to embed, they had to sign a form that banned them from documenting images that showed evidence of conflict (including dead or wounded bodies, nor evidence of enemy fire, etc.)[85]. However, although The Day Nobody Died is essentially a series of abstract impressions, it is still a photographic image; taken at a time and place, light particles have been directed and infused onto a sensitized surface. These works are markers of events without any coded information about the events beyond their title, just as well, the photographic paper was also present during each event captured[86]. When one considers the titles of each of their works, the photographs seem to be inadequate records, only markings with no clear information about them. However, the series directs focused thought on photography’s own condition as a medium while also investigating the medium as a visual and absolute record[87]. What the work presents is a disjunction between the photo’s exposure as negating photography’s role as legible codifier/presenter of absolute truth of recognizable imagery. However, these photos are still tied to the event of their production; their creation/emergence through light, the photographic stain preserves the events captured as “affective signals only, suspending them and preserving them as incomplete within the photographic process[88]. It is through this means that The Day Nobody Died bridges into Butler’s proposition about war photography; the work interrupts conventional photographic communication. Butler notes that war photography is not only concerned with what it shows, but how it “shows what it shows” – and it is this assertion that causes question and reflection on how war photography visualizes and communicates certain ideas of war, what is shown and what is hidden[89]. Central to The Day Nobody Died is a concern for the violence of war – the violence that inhabits visual and photographic representation of war. The series questions the intersection of violence and the war photograph, one concerned with the ethics of representation in war photography;

​

As Broombeg and Chanarin observe, camera-made images usually ‘erase the marks of their making.’ Photography’s violence then would seem to be embedded in, and monitored by, its very mechanisms. ‘Images’ that are made of the marks of their making ‘and nothing else’ resist the erasure of the ‘how’ of photography and present to us another view of the violence of photographic representation[90].

​

The Day Nobody Died presents photographs where traumas and violence of past events are ichnographically invisible. The photos deny us of any mode of clarification/illustration that organizes understanding and history around traumatic events. But, such a traumatic event can be recognized in the affective streaks of the work itself: “enabling neither refraction nor re-enactment, these photographs seem to have failed: they reverse or invert our expectations and arrive at an abrupt conclusion”[91]. What Innes highlights is that the work by Broomberg and Chanarin investigate photographic communication as well as photography’s relationship to art. The work makes reference to a specific relation of place and event through its engagement with art technique and by using photography as a tool that resists photographic resemblance. Given the work’s refusal to show the violence of war, it not only stems from a moral ground, but it is also a critical perspective that provokes viewers to consider how they may expect war to appear through photography – and how we are conditioned, or have created the appearance of photography to be so[92]. The refusal the work stands by is a resistance to Nancy’s argument on tendencies violence has to make an image of itself[93]. As previously noted, Nancy’s approach to the image focuses on the relationship between violence and force; the image for Nancy is created by forces that impact ‘the being of things’ in the surrounding world (people, events, things)[94]. It introduces conflict and creates plurality.

​

The image, as Nancy has asserted, disputes the presence of the ‘thing’. In the image, the thing not simply ‘being’, it shows the thing is and how it is[95]. The image takes the thing out of presence and brings it to presence – praes-entia, to ‘being-out-in—front-of-itself[96]. It is this way that the thing presents itself, to turn toward the outside is not a need for mimetic repetition of what came before the image. As Innes makes clear, the image enables the thing, “in its ontological being and self-same identity” to create a relationship with its outside[97]. The image, then, can emerge from this opening to the outside and is able to remain in relation to it. The image also opens relations with the thing while simultaneously ungrounding its identity. The two different notions of violence, the first being an event of the image that forces the thing to the outside to present itself. This violent force desires to open a network of relations to make the thing visible. In turn, the ‘image-function’ opens up to an ‘unimaginable’ (a force that is not the thing but open to its presence) and attempts to ground itself and its meaning[98]. We can recall Nancy’s musings on the violent person who wishes to see the mark he makes on the thing, rather than cultivating unity between the thing and the image, the force becomes the image. And, divorced from the thing, violence imprints the image by force; “Photographs of the trauma of war zones risk appearing as forceful impressions of the violence of war in general, where images of violence transmit the effect of blows at the same time that they become blows in themselves, to be repeated time and again in media, in propaganda, and, perhaps with less conscious intent, in multiple digital iterations”[99]. Rather than showing itself, the image wants to show what it is showing - The image is more than that to which it refers, but it is not other than this thing[100].

​

For Nancy, as with regard to The Day Nobody Died, the artwork is an example of the opening of the image toward ‘alterity’. Art’s violence differs from what is characterized as blows because art touches the real (which is groundless), while the blow of itself and in the moment is its own ground[101]; “By refusing semblance and opening instead toward the groundlessness of imagination, The Day Nobody Died draws attention to the mechanisms and procedures through which the real is constructed and subsequently experienced”[102]. By considering the medium used in this example, Nancy’s thinking on the image and violence is illuminated. Innes explains his thinking on the photographic image, one that is the creation of mechanical and “photo-chemical putting-into-relation”[103]. The act of the shutter’s opening and closing, alongside the impression if light, conjoin at a specific time and place to produce what he terms ‘material results’. This causes the photographic being not legible nor illegible, but part of an event that is in relation to a ‘network of forces’”[104]. For Innes, the photographic technique called ‘knot of signification’, where photography is suspended, clawing backwards to what ‘once was’ while also forward to what it is yet to be[105]. The nature of the photo is firstly a need to ‘put into relation’ before it brings observation to something else – or before it presents a series of coded meanings. Thus, the ‘being’ of the photograph/y is ambiguous; photography can preserve recognizable impressions/characteristics of the world but that doesn’t validate the claim that photography is an indexical or absolute medium. It has the ability to obscure the differential essence of photography’s presence[106]. The Day Nobody Died brings attention to the photograph as indication and possessing the ability to ‘uncover’. It works are a trace of piece of the world as well as an exposure to the “world as a visually affective conjuring of photography”[107]. The streaks and breaks in the work is an indication to photography’s multitude of dispositions and the varying and uncertain conditions of a photo’s exposure[108]. Broomberg and Chanarin’s deliberate dismissal of the witness function and visual narrative depiction causes a question of the communicable ability of the photograph. As Innes asserts, The Day Nobody Died causes for a recognition that the force of the image occurs in the grasping of differences where violence insists that they can be held in place[109]. Photography that confronts trauma, war and militarized violence demonstrate, what Innes borrows from Geoffrey Batchen, through an engagement with atrocity that is possible if it is looked at ‘sideways’;  “Looking askance does not mean looking away, or not looking. Rather, it suggests looking otherwise, obliquely, a scancio”[110]. Broomberg and Chanarin’s photo scrutinizes its viewers to reflect on the meanings that they as observers project onto a photo. The artist’s expose limitations of photography and its construction of meaning.

​

In conclusion, Simon Baker’s careful rendering of the exhibition and pieces contained within, provoke viewers to leave roles of passive viewing in favor of active perception. As seen with the dissection of works like The Day Nobody Died, the image possesses powerful affective ability – one that can alter modes of memory if it becomes spectacularized or projected as objective truth. All the images within Conflict, Time, Photography address understandings of war and memory over time; as well as issues of presence and absence. The exhibition acts as manipulator of time chronology, effectively disjointing viewers, causing them to experience different timelines as a product of becoming ‘unstuck’ in their own time. By ‘looking back’, viewers are confronted with these images of trauma and subjective remembrance, where, if they possess the perception, they are able to experience the ‘darkness of our time’ through their involvement within the show. Baker’s curation is crucial for these perceptions as he allows museum-goers to negate spectacles of light, opting from a historical (narrative) timeline structure for the exhibition. Having no distinct chronology enabled a sensual response to time in place(s), playing on/with subjective memories of events – appealing to the nature of time’s ephemerality and use of structured narratives – to be a Billy Pilgrim or, a contemporary, is to engage with the passage of time and the physical distance of one’s experiences within it. To possess the ability to transcend eras and narrative chronologies via the medium of the photograph allows the understanding of its role within ‘meaning-making’; what is and isn’t shown, the violence of the image and how it influences conceptions of history.