The Camera Never Lies: Some powerful moments – but is the title really true?
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What is the most horrific photograph you have ever seen? When I first encountered Kenneth Jarecke’s portrait of what remained of an Iraqi soldier after being incinerated alive, I felt ashamed that I couldn’t look away. His eyeless face is set into a rictus grin, carbonised skin the texture of deep-sea coral. Taken in 1991, it was so shocking, that Associated Press pulled it.
I was surprised, then, that this picture failed to disturb, when I saw it again at the beginning of The Camera Never Lies. It wasn’t just the dull light of the Sainsbury Centre’s gallery. The exhibition draws on photographs that have come to define how we remember the past century, and its conflicts. So, here’s Eddie Adams’s second before a Viet Cong officer is shot in the head (1968), or the troubled gaze of Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl (1984). But the dense opening wall – its juxtapositions never clear – saps pictures of their power, looking more like the Pinterest board of a troubled mind.
You search instead for the ways a photographer responds to the fog of war. Perhaps it’s with patience, as Don McCullin suggests in the broken stare of a shell-shocked US marine (1968). For others, it’s about giving us a glimpse of unmediated terror, like Nick Ut’s photograph of a Vietnamese girl, fleeing a napalm attack (1972), or the way the human eye strains in Damon Winter’s Medivac (2010), as a helicopter kicks up a storm of dust above a wounded soldier, the detritus flying towards us. In such pictures, the wait for the decisive moment collapses. You point, and shoot – as epitomised by Robert Capa’s brag, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
But just as often, the show suggests that photographs are not the objects of truth we think they are. Capa’s own Falling Soldier (1936) – the Spanish militiaman flung back by a bullet’s force – was likely staged. Such uneasiness drifts through several other works here, like the kiss in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square (1945) – with several people in the decades since it was taken claiming to be the very same sailor and nurse swept off her feet.
This feels worth saying. Watching Alex Garland’s Civil War recently, in which Kirsten Dunst’s brooding lensman roams an America tearing itself apart, was a reminder of how much we like to believe in photojournalism as a forensic counterweight to atrocity.
Still, while there are several great moments in this show – especially Matt Black’s close-up of a weathered hand grasping a fence in Allensworth, California (2014), part of a series documenting poverty in America, Richard Mosse’s use of military infrared film to render the Congolese rainforest in surreal purples (2012), and Edmund Clark’s cool documentation of CIA “black sites” (2012) – the curatorial conceit remains out of reach. At times, the exhibition seems to assert little more than the hazy relationship between a photograph and reality. What, for instance, might it say about the age of social media? The images that flow out of the Israel-Hamas conflict are peppered with viral deepfakes, often involving children in deep distress (as if the in-real-life carnage were not enough). What happens when everyone has become a photographer and photo-editor?
Perhaps this show is less about the deceptiveness of the camera, and more about the logic of our own mind’s eye. Without knowing what to look for in the closing set of pictures, photographed by Trevor Paglen, you might just see night skies. But when the titles reveal the pinpricks of light for what they really are – secret satellites roaming the heavens – you see them everywhere. The camera never lies, indeed.
From May 18-Oct 20; sainsburycentre.ac.uk
