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.
The aim of these pictures, when they were taken, was to expose some kind of objective, irrefutable truth – evidence beyond language that could shake the world to its senses, into action. James Nachtwey thought of himself as a messenger and Don McCullin once said: “I take more than I bring. I bring hope, but I give nothing.”
Conflating “truth” and “reality” is photojournalism’s perennial problem. These things all happened – but as truths they can only be partial. This disorientating, packed show – with little context given to any images beyond a few rudimentary texts – doesn’t question the ethical issues or harmful effects on both subject and photographer. Carter killed himself, while the child he photographed was reported to have survived. It also fails to address the problems with pictures becoming synecdoche for places and periods in history. In subsequent years, these photographs have been used for bad as well as good – to justify wars, to bolster imperialist attitudes, to maintain the west’s saviour mentality.
The intent, I can only assume, is to allow the images to do the talking and let the brutality hit you. And it does. It is hard to argue that we have become numb to images when looking at the incinerated body of an Iraqi soldier, shown in a photograph taken at close range during the Gulf War by Kenneth Jarecke; or the family who lie lifeless, their suitcases next to them, in a shot by Lyndsey Addario. Sometimes the bodies of those still clinging to life are even more harrowing: Nachtwey’s image of a skeletal man crawling across the ground at a feeding centre during the famine in South Sudan in 1993 is devastating. Yet, since all of these photographs have been published and seen in public before, you would hope, in this museum setting, to gain something. Just looking at them once again feels tantamount to voyeurism.
No matter how faithfully a photographer attempts to depict reality, there are always choices involved: every image is the result of decisions about framing, how and when to look and when to look away. The notion of truth in relation to photojournalism and the ethical issues of both shooting and exhibiting charged scenes has been picked up by a new generation.
From the spectacle of violence captured by these icons of photojournalism, the exhibition segues into more ambiguous ideas of truth in series by contemporary photographers, seeking more subjective truths, research-based studies and concept-based work on global crises. But it’s a struggle to connect the dots.
There is a small selection from On Rape, Laia Abril’s groundbreaking project on sexual violence, shifting the blame onto institutions and their failures to protect women. Abril photographs objects involved in the crimes, not the survivors. Poet and photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova document a Ukrainian family living in Donbas, on the frontline of the Russian aggression, in the summer of 2019, an intimate view of life during war and its impact on domestic life.
There are saturated black and white shots documenting American poverty by Matt Black that feel generic. A suite of works from Trevor Paglen’s ongoing project The Other Night Sky – to follow and photograph the world’s secret governmental satellites, based on the work of amateur satellite observers – adds another dimension to the idea of truth-seeking. But it’s too much in too little space: the issues these photographers so fervently wanted to bring attention are diluted and the show collapses under the weight of its own ambition.
Staying closer to the exhibition’s attempt to explore truth is a pair of images by Robert Capa and Max Pinckers and Sam Weerdmeester. Taken at the same location, 79 years apart, the later image is Pinckers and Weerdmeester’s response to Capa’s mythologised The Falling Soldier, an evocative 1936 picture passed off as a depiction of a soldier taking a bullet in the Spanish Civil War. But the image was believed to have been staged by Capa. Pinckers and Weerdmeester visited the location, which had been pinpointed by a Spanish academic, and took a new photograph with a high-resolution camera – an attempt at accurate representation without romanticism or uncertainty. However, the empty landscape tells nothing of the bloodshed that it may once have contained. This exhibition may muddy truth and reality, but this pairing does at least give you plenty to ponder.
Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the Macedonian town of Veles, the fake news production centre for the US Presidential election in 2016. The young news hackers of Veles made millions creating falses American news portals – and contributed to Trump’s victory. But Bendiksen’s images also pose as truth: the people in the documentary-style pictures are in fact, digitally-rendered avatars. Incidentally, the god Veles, who lends his name to the town, was the pre-Christian Slavic god of deception.
The Sainsbury Centre is probably the UK’s most radical museum. An enormous effort has been made in the last three years to display its collection as living entities, to ask existential questions through art. The Camera Never Lies, although earnest, doesn’t chime with that vision. It misses the chance to pose vital questions about how images are consumed, how history is reduced by viral images, how the role of photographers and picture editors influences our understanding of the world. This exhibiton feels more like a reassertion of faith in a style of photojournalism that is – as the exhibition itself proves – no longer a viable or appropriate response. Yes, the grisly side of humanity is laid sickeningly bare. But where does that leave the camera?
• The Camera Never Lies: Challenging Images Through the Incite Project is at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, until 20 October
