Have we lost the guts to participate as witnesses in war? Only Dominic Nahr showed real war images in Arles. However I was still asking why After War has become a genre in photography. After war, the blurb says, nature once again becomes the imperturbable mistress of the place. The work took ten years to complete and ranged over many centuries and many countries. In 2004 he decided to abandon the action fields and to concentrate instead on making images of places where war had happened. Morvan is a Parisian who used to work as a photojournalist. He photographed places where war had taken place back as far as the 12th century through the American Civil War to North African wars and on to the modern central European wars. Jan Morvan’s work Battlefields was, for me, a real After War set of images. These were made in peacetime, long before there was any trace of war.There were many dark brooding images of Somerset which, apparently, McCullin made when he returned from war torn regions. There were several shots of Palmyria, Syria. What I found shocking was that much of the work was created while I lived in London at the end of the 60’s and beginning of the 70’s. There were a number of images of a homeless woman called Jean and many homeless Irish men. Much of his early work was done around Spittlefields in London, before he became a war photographer. I was also happy to find that the “After War” in this exhibition refers to where McCullin sees himself at present. I was rewarded by being one of only a couple people in the Eglise Ste Anne. I started with Don McCullin as I knew that later in the day this exhibition would be thronged. However Arles managed to make some sense of this genre for me. I really do not see the point of going to a place after something momentous has happened there. This is a genre with which I struggle all the time.
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