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| For Most of It I Have No Words by Simon Norfolk was published by Dewi Lewis, 1999. |
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| Aushwitz, the Brick Chimneys of Burned Wooden Barrack Blocks |
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| Systematic Murder |
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| Genocide is a crime of such enormity that it seems to beggar description. Ed Murrow, reporting from Buchenwald, said, 'For most of it I have no words'. Taking its cue from Murrow, Norfolk's book of atrocities largely replaces words with photographs but, equally, they are bound to be inadequate to the crimes. As well as the inevitable gap that exists between representation and reality, this book is full of other types of elision. The book is about genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, among other places, but it admits that some events, such as fire-bombing Dresden, were war crimes rather than intended to exterminate a whole people. It claims to be about 'landscape' but never examines this genre, choosing instead to present some of the places where genocide has taken place. |
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| Norfolk photographs corpses and other direct evidence of systematic murder and yet he moves, increasingly, towards empty spaces. He moves from the explicit depiction of smashed skeletons in Rwanda (1994) to the desert of Namibia where Germans nearly exterminated the Herero nation (1904). These photographs show, in Michael Ignatieff's introductory words, that 'even infamy is subject to entropic decay'. 'Everything slowly vanishes'. It looks at first sight like a counsel of despair in which even the memory of extermination is set to fade away. Does the book inadvertently support Baudrillard's thesis that past events, even terrible massacres of world significance, are unintelligible because 'we are no longer part of the same mental universe'? Does Norfolk invite viewers to travel from photographic evidence of mass murder to a pictorial equivalent of the 'end of history' in the desert night? Baudrillard's idea may certainly haunt sectors of contemporary history, and photography may be used to comment on its own poverty as evidence. |
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| But Norfolk's book is easily separated from both these somewhat meagre positions. His book is an argument for the relation of photography and history: neither is simply given; both require imaginative work. History is what people choose to represent; what is represented becomes the history to be remembered. Crucially, Norfolk is working in a period when there is a push - hard won and insecure - for international courts to sit in judgement on crimes against humanity. On a more local scale, though still important, Norfolk's decision to reflect on genocide and its location in photographs is a timely counter to ideas about the limits of the medium. For instance, Barthes argued that shocking photographs 'limit the sight by force,' stop language and defeat imagination. This idea has been influential in the widespread denigration of the moral force of photography. Similarly, Sontag argued that photography cannot yield moral intelligence. It produces only 'mental pollution' which addles the minds of 'image-junkies' (the inevitable product of industrial societies) and leads to a kind of moral torpor. Between them, Barthes and Sontag have helped to fuel an incipient distrust of photography and moral purpose. |
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| More recently, John Keane has rejected the 'extravagant thesis' that the media turn horror into light entertainment because they suppose audiences to be 'stupid misanthropes'. Keane argues that this flies in the face of considerable evidence that audiences experience moral revulsion at, avoid or discuss the violent images which they see. Empathy with the violated happens, but why and for how long remains unpredictable. But it happens, and to that extent we can speak of a hidden, potentially civilizing dialectic within the growing trend towards ever-increasing media coverage of virtually all forms of violence. Norfolk's book is part of the civilizing dialectic. Of course the book is aesthetically pleasing - this is one of the inevitable puzzles of horror. Though beautifully designed and printed, it is not simply a lovely book. It has great moral force. As Benjamin wrote, 'To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was". It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger'. The danger now is a 'ruling class' of ignorance, an enemy nurturing ignorance. 'Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins'. Norfolk's magnificent book is a brilliant flash in a dark landscape - a light offering not warmth so much as a warning. |
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| John Taylor |
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