Images of war raise range of questions

‘Before the Event/After the Fact’ at Yale Art Gallery

NEW HAVEN » Nick Ut’s war photo of 9-yearold Kim Phuc, aka “The Napalm Girl,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972; but as was revealed 30 years later in White House audio tapes, President Nixon wondered to H.R. Haldeman “if that was fixed.”

It wasn’t, of course, but “Tricky Dick” Nixon was ahead of his time in questioning the nature of images that can move policy in times of conflict.

The concern about photo ethics is strong in the digital age, but Yale University Art Gallery’s new exhibit explores other images, too, going beyond photojournalism and far beyond the simple-minded “fake news” allegations thrown about by our commander-in-tweet.

“Many of the works in the show are about photography and power,” says Judy Ditner, the exhibit’s curator.

The title of the exhibit, “Before the Event/After the Fact: Contemporary Perspectives on War,” refers to the training that goes into war and the images that come out of such conflict, as well as ways we process information after a conflict, says Ditner.

“It’s really meant to explore the relationship between images and military strategy, more so than photojournalistic coverage of a conflict,” Ditner says. “And I hope it prompts a lot of questions about what the relationship between images and war can be, as well as to challenge our expectations about what a war photograph is.”

Five different visual areas are sampled — by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, An-My Lê, Peter van Agtmael; a video installation by the filmmaker Harun Farocki; and a video and digital reconstruction created by design studio SITU Research. There are combat zones, training sites, movie combat scenes and SITU’s graphic and scientific reconstruction of the death of 47 civilians during protests in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2014.

• Lê (born in Vietnam and later a refugee who earned a master’s degree from Yale) blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and between the genres of war and landscape photography. The exhibit features photos from her early series “Small Wars.”

“I think they’re striking because they appear to be images of combat. In fact they are a group of Vietnam War re-enactors on (an) excursion in the Virginia countryside,” says Ditner, who notes Le’s use of a largeformat camera to highlight the incongruity between landscape realism and the constructed nature of the image.

Le’s “Battle of Corinth,” meanwhile, shows a momentous Civil War battle scene taking place in a Hollywood film but framed with movie lighting, special effects and sound people in the foreground.

Why is this material in an art gallery? Le is an artist, replies Ditner, and the skepticism in the works “ties into the bigger conversation that’s always haunted photography: Is photography art? And at this point I think that maybe we can agree that some photography is art, some isn’t art (but) this is really a bigger question of how images act on us.”

And for those questioning how much “documentary” images are reality (not to mention the manufactured conflict of reality TV), Le’s images lead us to question all images we see — but particularly military ones that are fraught with the implication of lives at stake.

• German filmmaker Farocki’s looping video shows how virtual-reality technologies are used both to train American soldiers and to treat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. At right on the split screen, young soldiers in 20092010 are manipulating game-like con-

YUAG PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s prop-laden Tze’elim Military Base, Negev Desert, from series “Chicago.”

JOE AMARANTE / HEARST CONNECTICUT MEDIA Curator Judy Ditner speaks at a preview in front of the Peter van Agtmael print “Local Sheikhs Arrive at the Handover of a Baghdad Neighborhood from the Americans to the Iraqi Army.”