At the entry, there’s a wall smattered with some of the most shocking photographs ever taken. In these images, which belong to The Incite Project collection, mankind’s capacity for evil is magnified and feels immutable, an unfathomable sea of carnage and chaos. Ticking every trigger warning box, these famous photographs – mostly taken by white, foreign photojournalists – depict global conflicts and crisis: Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Vulture and the Little Girl, the definitive image of the famine that devastated South Sudan in the 1990s; Malcolm Browne’s photograph of a Buddhist monk shortly after he set himself alight, in protest against the South Vietnamese government in Saigon.
The latter is another Pulitzer-prize-winner, published in papers, on postcards and on Rage Against the Machine’s debut studio album in 1992. There is also Richard Drew’s The Falling Man, the image of someone plummeting from the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks, a shot that came to represent the fall of America. Here too is the photograph of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on the Turkish shore. There is an inescapable sensation of an unequal world, of wordless, senseless brutality.
