Art Of The Day Weekly

#366 - from 27 November 2014 to 3 December 2014


Richard Peter, Dresden After Allied Raids, Germany 1945, © SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / Richard Peter, sen.

The profession of destroying

LONDON – The one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I gave us to see images from archives rarely seen until now. The survey opens up to other deadly conflicts and this exhibition compares them in an original manner. The time lapse between the “founding” event and the photograph taken determines how they can be put face to face. An hour, a month, a year?The American soldiers shot by Don Mc Cullin under shock after an explosion (Shell-shocked US Marines) hang next to the cathedral of Reims taken by Pierre Antony-Thouret on 19 September 1914, right after German bombs set it ablaze. And Vietnam in 2000, exactly 25 years after the fall of Saigon, is shown close to Nicaragua in 2004, also a quarter of a century after the Sandinista revolution. We do not know how to heal History’s war wounds nor what is the limit to man’s destructive obsession. As is commonly said, “The Sky’s the Limit”.
Conflict, Time, Photography at the Tate Modern, from 25 November 2014 to 15 March 2015.

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