WIIGF? The Aftermath Project

From theaftermathproject.org home page

What is war good for? Unfortunately, it has given us a lot of significant photography. I say unfortunate, because most war photographers would say they'd like to be out of a job. Sara Terry, whose work as founder and artistic director of The Aftermath Project has been going on since 2005, might express the same wish.

Terry is an established photographer. Her multi-year project Bosnia's Long Road to Peace brought home to her the need to continue attending to locations of conflict long after headline news has turned its focus elsewhere. She guided the evolution of the project until 2012, when managing director Gretchen Landau joined the team. Together, the two oversee the grant program (deadline for 2014 funding is this November 11 link), the publications, and educational outreach for the non-profit.

It is useful to visit the project web site and review the work that has been done under Aftermath's aegis. It is critical to recognize that this is not combat photography. One must keep in mind Brady and O'Sullivan on Civil War battlefields, or Fenton on the Crimean Peninsula, in that there is no war currently happening in these photographs. (Those mid-19th century photographs would exemplify the most immediate kind of "aftermath" images.) The projects supported reflect not only geo-political and ethno-cultural range, they also move way back in time. In some cases, armed aggression ended decades before the contemporary photographer arrived. The effects of conflict may endure beyond the lives of firsthand witnesses. The suggestion is implicit; there may, in fact, be very little life on this planet that does not qualify for attention as life impacted by war

I am one of two people who have written about The Aftermath Project in conjunction with their annual publications of award winners and finalists titled War is Only Half the Story:

• Volume 4 (2011; GS review published on photo-eye blog 9/10/2012)
• Volume 3 (2010; Joscelyn Jurich review published on photo-eye site 4/11/2011)
• Volume 2 (2009; GS review published on photo-eye site 11/24/2009)

Volume 1 was published in December 2008 and featured Jim Goldberg's 2007 series "The New Europeans"; volume 5 was released last December. All volumes are listed as available through the project's web site; a link to the bookstore can be found in the banner on the home page.

Those awards are given each year to "working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of conflict." As I see it, the more such work gets noticed, the more the negative effects of armed conflict are imprinted on our species, the less likely we may be to think that war only affects those nearest to it, or that war actually solves anything. The more warlike we behave, the less human we become.


Link to 5-minute video about Sara Terry's work in Bosnia

theaftermathproject.org

WIIGF? Portraits of soldiers.

Ulysses S. Grant helped Mathew Brady usher in an era of candid portraiture, records of soldiers portrayed in moments of composure, of quiet between salvos. Though this is clearly a perilous calm; Grant's poise is tenuous, and his surroundings are as temporary as his glance is fleeting.

There's an extensive discourse on this image, courtesy of Jeff Galipeaux, originally published in 2002 on Salon.com. An excerpt:

In June of 1864, along with nearly 2,000 images of soldiers, fortifications, battlefields and cannons, Brady took the first important casual photograph, the first permanently recorded awkward image of an important man: The image of Ulysses S. Grant. Brady captured the image at the forward command center in City Point, Va. It is a landmark of psychological portraiture, paparazzidom and the creation of a public image -- all at once.

The hat is slightly askew. The brow is scrunched. There is that frown. There is the awkward placing of Grant's feet, the angle of his hip; the left hand clenched in a fist, the fingers of the right brushing against a tree. It's all wrong for the portrait of an illustrious leader in 1864, but disarmingly natural by today's standards.

I have always found this portrait tremendously compelling. The shape of the tent, the line descending to the right like the graph of a falling stock market (the fate of the South, mapped out in the Northern command post?), the bright foreground water, the elegant folding chair, the muck, the tree trunk, the sky, all of these planes of interest and textural details surrounding the nominal subject of the photograph.

Current photographers whose work is of soldiers, without the context:

Suzanne Opton





































Suzanne's work in the "Soldier" series has been featured on a series of public art billboards around the country, including in Minnesota:


















Ellen Susan

Ellen's photographs are originally done as wet collodion negatives, which gives her a straight-line connection to Brady and Grant (and accounts for the reversed type that appears on these soldiers' name tags). She also makes inkjet prints, which allows her work to reach a larger audience.













































































Suzanne Opton's "Soldier" web site
Suzanne Opton's personal web site, including her expansions on the "Soldier's Face" theme that use images of citizens who have been bystanders to war
Ellen Susan's "Soldier Portraits" web site

Wendel A. White

Wendel A.White, from the series "Small Towns, Black Lives"

I'd been aware of Wendel A. White for several years before he sat down across the review table from me in New Orleans in December. Some time ago I followed a link to a 2002 New York Times review of his admirable, restrained, and moving web project (solidified into a book by Noyes Museum of Art in 2003), Small Towns, Black Lives, which was the opening chapter in a series of projects investigating concepts of community in African America. Wendel has received a Guggenheim artist fellowship, among many other awards, and he's a professor of art at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, so I was aware of him in the academic world through the Society for Photographic Education; another friend in that context, William E. Williams, had mentioned Wendel to me, and their works are complementary (Willie has done a lot with Civil War battlefields and locations along the Underground Railway). I like what Wendel has brought to a survey of historical and contemporary African American culture in New Jersey; his work has provided important insights for me.

The Times writer described Wendel's images as "restrained rather than theatrical," and they do approach quietly, respectfully, as though aware of their cultural gravitas but relying on a viewer's extended attention and questions to fully animate them. During PhotoNOLA Wendel showed me work from "Schools for the Colored," the third and newest portfolio in the series. Here's an example:

Wendel A. White, from the series "Schools for the Colored"

Sometimes, the buildings themselves are no longer standing:

Wendel A. White, from the series "Schools for the Colored"

Sometimes they've been swallowed up in larger structures:

Wendel A. White, from the series "Schools for the Colored"

The photographs employ a very simple device (masking, using lighter density for the surrounding environment) to memorialize structures that symbolized segregation but also provided shelter, education, and community for children in the "Up-South," the Northern "free" states along the Mason-Dixon line. Wendel ties the visual trope to a memory by W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that when he was growing up he felt "different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil." In Wendel's photographs, the veil dims the world outside the buildings, which take on vividness such as they must have had to those who utilized them in the 19th and 20th centuries--they were oases, distinct from a world that was at best seeing African American lives through a veil, dimly.


Wendel A. White's website