After seeing Rwanda in Photographs: Death Then, Life Now I decided to research into current and perhaps older photographers who have photographed war zones, or the aftermath of wars.
The first photographer who came to my mind was and Simon Norfolk who is well known for his photographs of Afghanistan.
After seeing his photographs and comparing them to those that I saw of Rwanda, I realised that his photographs still show that a war was happening but they don’t show the hopelessness or despair or convey as much emotion as those in the Rwanda exhibition.
Another photographer who I thought of is Don McCullin who has been photographing wars for many decades.
Don McCullin’s photographs convey a lot of emotion, I think. The way that he captures his subjects and portrays them doesn’t seem overly sympathetic or as though he felt sorry for them. I think that he was just photographing what he saw, without worrying about if the images would be too graphic or emotional to show people.
In a book about his photography, the author has written about war photography, “There are questions to be asked. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we’ve accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?”(Delpire, R, Don McCullin, Thames & Hudson, 2007, 5-6). I think that McCullin’s photographs ask us all of these questions and make us think about what is happening in the world around us, in other countries.
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