FEATURE BEYOND PHOTOGRAPHY
Steve Mumford, Platoon Sgt Ricky Cliat Knocked Out from Grenade Concussion, Baquba, June 2004 (2004), ink and watercolour on paper, 29 x 37 cm. All Steve Mumford works courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York
a napalming in Vietnam (1972), where it is her nakedness, her absolute is prepared to look trauma in the eye, the content of a handmade
vulnerability, that cuts to the quick. Or Eddie Adams’s photograph of image must always be tempered by the artist’s style, which is the non-
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner (1968), photographic work of art’s own immanent reaction shot. The shock, the
which stays with us precisely because what we see is not death as such, grief, the disbelief, the outrage that are written on McCullin’s Cypriot
but instead the terrified, contorted features of a man anticipating his woman’s face, aren’t they each to be found in that matchless response
imminent end. Even Robert Capa’s iconic Falling Soldier (1936) is not to war, Guernica (1937)?
an image of someone dead, but captures, rather, a man on the cusp of While it may be invidious to hold any work of art up next to
dying. His legs may be buckled and his arms flung backwards. But in Picasso’s masterpiece, Steve Mumford’s Iraq pictures – a new batch of
that instant he is still upright and belongs to us, the living. which was up at Postmasters last autumn – look singularly inapt when
If, like the sun, death cannot be viewed straight on, then perhaps compared to Guernica, or indeed with any number of other artists’
the most we can attempt is to look at its reflection. Reaction shots responses to conflict. His deadpan style precludes the possibility of
that show the shock and disbelief of stunned bystanders or of grieving properly engaging with the suffering that everyone knows this recent
relatives when confronted with sudden, violent killing, afford us such campaign has inflicted. Instead all it delivers is the complacent viewpoint
an indirect glance. Don McCullin’s Grief-stricken woman and son after of an invader. As the war continues, so will we continue turning to other
discovery of murdered husband... (1964) is one such picture. To look at it media in the belief that they will show us what photography cannot.
is to find ourselves implicated not just in the particular story it describes, And although our quest to comprehend the ultimate consequence
but in the wider, universal response to trauma too. of man’s hostility towards man will never be fulfilled, a different artist
Paintings and drawings of war also come at death at one may yet come along and remind us that the fundamental reality of war
remove: however unwavering the artist, however directly he or she remains a trauma too agonising to behold.
ARTREVIEW six.linsix.lin
p062-066 War AR Jul07.indd 66 1/6/07 01:39:30
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