The invention of photography radically changes the representation of war: the story above all becomes image, synthesis, evidence, emotion, with a planetary diffusion previously unimaginable. The Great War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, Vietnam produce legendary reportages such as those of Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Jones Griffiths. Recent wars, in ex-Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the contemporary and still ongoing wars in Congo, Libya, Palestine, Sudan, are witnessed more and more by citizen-reporters. War changes and photography looks at it with different eyes. This strong and exciting exhibition documents the ways in which photography has told the great conflicts of the past and how it tells those of today. In a rich, well-documented, actively engaging journey.
The exhibition – the first of its kind in Italy – has some particular characteristics, which make it an event capable of attracting the attention of a vast audience of enthusiasts not only of photography, but also of history and customs.
The scansion is the traditional chronological one, which deals with the various wars that have taken place during the XNUMXth century and at the beginning of the XNUMXst: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, the Bosnian Serb War, the long Middle East conflict, the wars in different parts of Africa, from Rwanda to the Congo, the attack on the Twin Towers and the consequent War on Terror and the most recent outbreaks in Ukraine and more in the Middle East. But within these events, particular points of view have been identified, which have characterized the relationship between war and photographic documentation and narration.
As regards the First World War, for example, the accent falls on the incredible technological innovations that this conflict experienced for the first time, and so here are the aerial photos, which transform the territory into an almost abstract composition, the photos of the tanks weapons, new combat tools, and the cameras themselves, which are, for the first time in history, in the hands of the soldiers themselves, who send home or receive from home the most precious memories. All images that come from the exceptional and still little-studied heritage of the Museum of the Third Army of Padua.
In this regard, the selection of over 20 photographs taken by Princess Anna Maria Borghese, a Roman noblewoman with a passion for photography and member of the Red Cross at the front, has particular importance, an extraordinary example of how photography has been able to tell the daily life of soldiers with true instantaneity of the first Kodak cameras.
Likewise, the Spanish Civil War is also narrated in first person by the militiamen of both factions, and by the numerous newspapers which photographically covered the event as never before. And it is precisely from one of these services that one of the most famous photos of the exhibition, and of the entire one, appears
history of photography, the Fallen Militiaman by Robert Capa, an authentic icon of the twentieth century, which is presented together with another famous image, the one taken by Gerda Taro – Capa's companion – of a militia woman who is training to shoot. This is another fundamental feature of the exhibition: the closeness between the photos of amateurs, of the first-person protagonists of the events, and those of the great photojournalists, demonstrating how photography has truly been to all intents and purposes the preferred means of expression and narration of events over the course of the century. Here then is that the Second World War is narrated by the amazing and precious images of the giants of twentieth-century photography: Robert Capa, August Sander, Ernst Haas, Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bill Bandt, Eugeny Chaldey. Of all these authors, the images that tell not so much the battles (only Smith's selection is entirely dedicated to soldiers in battle), but the consequences that the war has brought to the populations have been privileged: here is Sander's objective, ruthless documentation of the Colony before and after the bombings, the moving images of the return home of the Austrian soldiers in a ruined Vienna by Ernst Haas, the sensational, sometimes dramatic, sometimes even humorous images of Cartier-Bresson on the refugee camps, with the famous icon of the Nazi collaborator pointed out by one of her victims. But alongside these, here are also the stories of the Italian Resistance, some reconstructed afterwards and others instead made right in the field by a partisan whose name has remained, probably mangled, only in the memory of Robert Capa (to whom he had entrusted the images ) and thus went down in history.
The destruction of the war is exemplified by the shots taken in Dresden and Hiroshima after the bombings, and by a wall of mushroom clouds, photographic evidence of the experiments continued throughout the XNUMXs. Then, the war in Algeria with the portraits of Algerian women by Marc Garanger and what has been called "the last photographic war", that of Vietnam. Here Don McCullin, Eve Arnold and Philip Jones Griffiths propose three different points of view, which however always question the need for this war, also highlighting its symbolic nature. The story of the war, from this moment on, was mainly entrusted to television; photography, still present on the battlefields, becomes more of a tool for reflection, even for discussion: for this reason the exhibition abandons reportage and instead finds images of great power and incisiveness in some images created by some of the most important artists of our time. Gabriele Basilico's tortured Beirut, Luc Delahaye's historical reconstructions, like a large history painting, Richard Mosse's hallucinated colors that tell the story of the hallucinated war in the Congo, the multimedia experience of Gilles Perress, the Israeli watchtowers in the composition by Taysir Batnjj they almost become works of conceptual art, and finally two possible conclusions of the exhibition: on the one hand, the dramatic display of the days of uprising in Ukraine by Boris Mikhailov, who thus returns to a "historical" theme after many years of more specifically social experimentation, on the other the project – entirely produced and financed for this occasion – by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, one of the pairs of artists today most on the crest of the wave, who for years have been reflecting precisely on the war and the way of representing it, which highlight how even in the drama of war there can be moments in which chance can cause a happy ending to happen.
These images are then accompanied by the newspapers of the time, documentaries, the possibility of visiting particular websites that offer food for thought on the events and above all on the relationship between war, photography, information and documentation.
A truly multimedia exhibition, with images at the centre, and men and women.
