In Battle this week there was the annual commemoration of England’s great and bloody encounter of 1066. It is peculiarly festive as hundreds re-enact the slaughter and subsequent regime change.
However I have come to see Unveiled at the Independent Photographers Gallery in Battle. I am looking at a soft view of a Kabul cityscape under snow. There are some bicycles and four people. I looked very hard to count these few people. Where are the rest of a capital city’s population? Dead? Watching telly? Housebound?
The clue is the framing of this image which has been taken through the grille of an Afghan woman’s burka.
The picture was taken by Harriet Logan in 1997. She was commissioned by the Sunday Times to take photographs of women in Afghanistan at a time when it was illegal to photograph living things. And yet in spite of this rule, women were willing to be photographed secretly.
Photographs were the evidence that they existed, that half the population of Kabul was confined to its houses.
The photographs are the resistance to the multitudinous Taliban rules that ranged from a ban on women laughing loudly and a complete ban on women’s activity outside the home unless accompanied by a close male relative such as a father, brother or husband, to a ban on the keeping of pigeons and playing with the birds and kite-flying.
Harriet Logan went twice to Afghanistan, in 1997 and 2001. The pictures tell the story of two moments in Afghan time – the time of the veil (1997) and the time of the unveiling (after the US/UK invasion of 2001).
Text and context are very important to this exhibition. The images are subtle and beautiful and are a visual voice for the women of Afghanistan.
But on her first visit Harriet Logan was accompanied by a male writer who had no access to women. So the oral stories were recorded by the photographer, and become the caption of the photographs. This creates a compelling relationship between a face for the faceless and a voice for the voiceless.
In terms of the two sets of pictures creating a historical narrative, there is the huge gap between the present story and the pre-’97 past. This gap is plugged by text.
Harriet Logan said in an interview with Holly Kyte: “The Taliban have become a symbol of terror and the fact is I don’t think life has ever been good for women in Afghanistan. I don’t think the Taliban are particularly worse than anyone else has been. We see the burka as a symbol of the Taliban, and it just isn’t – it’s a traditional Afghan thing.”
The curator of the whole biennial, Julian Stallibrass, places the show in the present with his pertinent introduction: “At a time when the future of Afghanistan under UN and US occupation remains deeply uncertain, and when in Iraq women are being forced on pain of death out of education and back behind the veil, Logan’s images and her subjects’ words carry a stark plea to the present.”
Being in Battle reminds one that violence resonates down the years to a time when there are just ancient ruins standing in the autumn sunshine.
A few miles from Battle, there is a exhibition called The Sublime Image of Destruction where the low golden light illuminates a ruined gateway in a Baghdad landscape.
This spectacular photograph so invokes the Romantic language of Claude and Poussin that it is hard to disentangle what one knows of the reality of the battles and destruction of Baghdad from our cultural romance with the Golden Age and the Antique.
In a subtle way, the photographer, Simon Norfolk, is penetrating deep into the meaning of ruins. The picture made me understand that those ruins in European landscapes that look beautiful to the aesthetic eye are the legacy of centuries of wars.
Finding the beauty in ruins is a way of channelling sorrow, a slow communal catharsis.
The Sublime Image of Destruction also gives us pictures of military practice areas in Israel taken by Broomberg and Chanarin that could almost be abstract paintings by Ben Nicholson.
In enormous contrast to Harriet Logan’s exhibition there is, in the gallery, no contextualisation of Broomberg and Chanarin’s images. Nothing to let the viewer know that the concrete walls that they are looking at with star-shaped holes in them are the result of the Israeli Defence Force’s practice of tunnelling through houses rather than using the streets to travel along.
Nor that the star shapes are the strangely-natural result of an explosive blast.
Without these facts, the experience as a viewer is that one is being asked to disregard the violence that produced the landscapes and to accept them as neutral, timeless, placeless images.
Likewise their stunning photographs of hilltop fortified Israeli settlements overlooking the tiny dots of Palestinian shepherds in a landscape. The viewer with no knowledge of the political relationship between the hills and the valleys is denied an understanding of the images and of the world.
In all other ways this exhibition is deeply stimulating and memorable but the presumably deliberate withholding of where, when, why and what by some of the photographers makes one wonder whether they are slipping over the edge into a place where aesthetic concerns smother the responsibility of witness to war.