About Beautiful Pictures of Ruins and a Landscape that Holds Documentary Truth^*

Simon Norfolk

simon@simonnorfolk.com

Landscape Photographer

As part of Pavilion 2023, Simon Norfolk—a British landscape photographer whose work explores the various interpretations of the term battlefield—presented a lecture on the reasons behind his particular photographic aesthetic and his critical view of conflict photojournalism. In his quest to separate himself from the clichés and visual motifs that often accompany war photography, Norfolk has captured war zones, refugee crises, and military technology, showing the superimposition of time in the landscape. The beauty of his images is, in his view, a strategy to dialogue with the landscape tradition and invite the audience to expose themselves and reflect on the horrific consequences of war.

Rather than telling you I have been to this or that place, I would like to talk about why I take photographs the way I do. I would like to clarify from the start that I am not anti-photojournalist. I believe that photojournalism is the raw material from which our image of the earth is created. So, I have a lot of respect for photojournalists, but there is an important reason why I don’t take such photos.

I can best explain this by looking at a series of pictures from the invasion of Iraq. Most of the photographs were taken by two of my favourite photographers while I was in college—they were my photographic heroes. James Nachtwey and Louie Palu, along with a few other great photojournalists, all working for Newsweek Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. You would think that they would be able to shoot anything that they wanted to. That they could gain access to anything working for American magazines. But what disappointed me was that, when they returned from Iraq, they had taken exactly the same photographs. It is almost as though there was a kind of format that had to be followed in order for the pictures to be considered acceptable, particularly to an American audience.

I found that tremendously exciting. They could have done Special Forces, gone with the Navy, been on a submarine, or visited a cyber warfare centre. Instead, all of them chose to photograph helicopter evacuation because it has that instant pathos, it has that instant action, and it creates great pictures. It is not a particularly interesting story about what is happening in the war, but rather, a marginal, trivial side story. Yet, for photojournalistic reasons, it makes those great pictures that win prizes, and that is what matters.

So, all these photographers ended up shooting the same thing, maybe just a coincidence, but they all shot the same cliches: the same ‘running at the helicopter through the dust’ picture, the ‘helicopter at night waiting for the call to go and evacuate the wounded’ picture, the ‘wounded hands.’ And everybody did the sort of ‘wounded hero’ picture. And I found it incredibly dispiriting that instead of these photographers branching out and covering the whole of the battlefield in new and interesting photographic formats, or all the new ways in which war is being fought, photographers are being channelled down into the same groove of the same repeated cliches about what war is about. The photography comes down like sewage draining down into a gutter and ends up travelling in the same direction rather than spreading out and illustrating what war is about. And this is what I find deeply disappointing about war photography. I respect the photographers who go out there and shoot this stuff. I just wish they would be smarter about what they photograph.

One of the motifs I hate the most is children with guns. Children with plastic guns running around in the war zone, which are allegedly absolute nonsense, bogus photographs. You could walk out of the room that you are in right now, and within 300 yards, you will find a child playing on the street with a plastic gun. It does not tell me that your city is disappearing into a spiral of violence. What it does tell me is that these photographers have no imagination.

Take, on the other hand, "Marlboro Marine" taken by Luis Sinco, which became a kind of propaganda picture. But one thing we know now is that the U.S. Marines got completely chewed up in Fallujah; they got absolutely slaughtered. And their response was to carry out a massacre. The city was flattened, and thousands of people in it were killed. And so, this thing of being translated straight from photojournalism into tabloid newspaper, into the category of proper propaganda, is an easy slide when you’re shooting those iconic cliches.

Wings of Mercy (fig. 1) is another example. In fact, what really makes me angry about the James Nachtwey picture is that it doesn’t tell me who wounded that kid. Was it the Taliban, or was it an American soldier? Because I think that is important. But it’s not even mentioned in the damn caption. We just assume that this little child has been saved on the battlefield. Or Getty Images picture “2nd Marine 8th Battalion gives a candy to an Afghani boy”. It’s meant to be a picture of American soldiers winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan children by handing out candies (fig. 2). But look at the child. Look at how many guns are pointing at this child. One, two, three, four guns pointing at his face. And look at how fearful he is. Meanwhile, the American soldier’s face is sweaty behind sunglasses at arm’s length distance. It’s got to be the worst picture I have ever seen of an attempt to win the hearts of the Afghan people. And yet, this is an official handout picture. It annoys me that the pictures I think are important, the pictures that do tell the story about what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, are being shot but not shown because the pages of magazines are full of those awful cliches about helicopter rescues and wounded little children and soldiers giving out sweets.

Figure 1_ Wings of Mercy. Source: James Nachtwey for Time
Figure 2_ 2nd Marine 8th Battalion gives a candy to an Afghani boy. Source: Bay Ismoyo/AFP vía Getty Images.
Figure 3_ Link to Dead soldier in Fallujah. Source: Stefan Zaklin.

Stefan Zaklin’s image of a dead soldier in Fallujah is incredible (fig. 3). I actively looked for this stuff and did not know about this picture. And that makes me angry because this picture should be on the front cover of every American newspaper. It tells you what is going wrong with your war in Iraq. So why are these pictures not being consumed? Because the American public does not want to see it. You never see pictures of American soldiers being humiliated; they are never published by the editors. And that creates a false narrative. That is why I am not a photojournalist. That is why I take the pictures I take—because I am trying to get around this dilemma. If I were to shoot this photograph, they would not use it either. So, I must find another way to get there. To try to talk about the war, I would have to find a new way of taking photographs, a new way of drawing an audience into looking at those pictures.

Figure 4_ The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Source: Roger Fenton.

My response is to go backwards because I am English, so I live deep in history. The English are obsessed, trapped in a honey-coloured history from hundreds of years ago when we were important, back to the days when we mattered. We do not anymore, though. But, for me, looking backwards is a starting point. Roger Fenton’s picture from the battle of the war in Crimea, the battle of Balaclava in 1855, is a fascinating photograph about warfare because it does not contain any of those horrible clichés that are in the first pictures I mentioned (fig. 4). All there is in this picture is a shower storm of cannonballs. The photographer invites the audience to imagine what it would be like to be sent on a cavalry charge up this path through this hailstorm of cannonballs. You have to fill in the gap. What do you think it would be like when these things were flying around you? How brave would you have to be to ride a horse into that?

So, these photographs are more eloquent for me—they are more honest. They invite your participation in creating the meaning of the picture. If I showed you this picture and asked, ‘What do you think happened here?’ then I am asking you to contribute, and that is a much more interesting process. For me, as a photographer, it is not about taking pictures of warfare that magazines will buy, but I must give you a reason to want to look at those things. I need to create a pathway. Why on earth would you want to come and see my pictures when you could go and do some other lovely things on a Sunday afternoon? You can read a book, sit in the park, play football, or do whatever you want to do. Go and get drunk in a hammock. I don’t know what you do during the weekend.

For me, the way that I create that pathway is to make sure that my pictures are beautiful. They are pictures of horror, for sure. I go to places where horror and warfare are taking place. I am not a post-conflict photographer. I have to go while the conflict is still ongoing. But I work very hard to make it look like it is over. I work hard to make it look very still. And I work very hard to make it look beautiful. Because what I am doing there is saying: ‘Come, come, come and look at this. Look at this.’ And then, when you get close, I go—pam, pam, pam—with the content. That is what I do.

And I draw my inspiration from the past. My influences are 16th and 17th-century European landscape paintings, beautiful pictures of ruins, and golden light smashing across these pictures from one side. Sunrise or sunset, some evening of the day, beautiful landscapes, northern Italy somewhere, ruins, great ruins of great empires. For me, the ruins of empires are the most important thing to photograph because I come from a country that is a ruined empire, and we are still living in its ruins. Walk down the streets of London, and you will see these grand palatial buildings, beautiful palaces, and beautiful English country houses that were built with the wealth that we stole from India, with the profits of the slave trade. We are all still living in these ruins by savages, making fires in the ruins of some great, beautiful palaces tumbled down. So, in these paintings, you see the ruins of the greatest empires that ever existed. After time and history had passed, even the greatness of Rome faded into nothing but ruins, disappearing into long grass and undergrowth. Now, this golden light is just illuminating the last of these ruins. So, I tried very hard to quote exactly from these paintings when I took my pictures.

Let’s look at the landscape photograph from Afghanistan, the golden-coloured one (fig. 5). The reason why I print my photographs on a large scale is because that is how big these paintings are when you go and see them in the National Gallery. The reason I got out of bed early in the morning to capture that golden light across that landscape is because that is the light you can find in these paintings. The reason there are three shepherd boys—and I paid them $5 each to sit in the foreground—in my picture is because there are shepherd boys in these paintings by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin and Caspar David Friedrich, and those famous, key landscape painters of the romantic period. I think that I am a romantic landscape artist, and not because I fall in love with girls all the time. My work is romantic because I am interested in those philosophical ideas created by 18th- and 19th-century English poets, painters, musicians, and travellers. Ideas about how to look at the landscape and make the landscape reflect its history, to bring the history of empires out of the landscape.

Figure 5_ Afghanistan: Cronotopia. Source: Simon Norfolk.

That is why I photograph the way I do. Shepherd boys, golden light, ruined landscape, ruins of a great civilisation; the same motifs again and again. And I quoted them endlessly in my work because, for me, these paintings are a vocabulary. And I can pull those words out and reuse them in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, or any of the places where I have photographed conflict. The picture of Afghanistan is part of a series I worked on in 2001, which was the project that transformed my career from being a struggling, impoverished photojournalist into a famous—la-di-da—artist who sells his prints and gives seminar speeches. I was given jobs by National Geographic Magazine, and prizes at big shows. Afghanistan also transformed my way of working because I used this big wooden five-by-four camera to shoot this kind of story. So, I shot Afghanistan how I wanted to, photographing the ruins that were left behind as if some great empire had swept through this place, leaving behind its rubble. I tried to create these pictures that looked like those paintings with these beautiful golden landscapes, with rubble, ruins and smoke. And even though the war was still happening, I tried to make it look like the war was over and a thing of the past.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not consider myself a post-conflict photographer. In my experience, I found that if you wait until the war is over before you try to shoot these pictures, all this stuff disappears really quickly. Everything gets cleaned up. Everything is valuable. If you want to capture broken military equipment, you have to be there while the fighting is happening. You cannot turn up two months later; it will all have gone to the scrap yard. It is all good stuff, right? Nice metal for recycling purposes. So, all the evidence disappeared as fast as I could photograph it. One time, I made a plan to photograph a rocket that I saw in a bunch of trees in the light of dawn. But when I went the next morning, it was already gone. Someone had stolen it. Someone was cleaning up. I think my photographs are more archaeological than anything else. I think my job as a landscape photographer is to walk through the landscape, pull objects out of it, and say: ‘Look at what I found’—like a fragment, like something from a previous time, even though it is ongoing. That is what I do. That is an archaeologist’s job. And much more than an archaeologist: the job of a photographer.

I guess the thing that interests me with pictures nowadays is time-travelling through pictures. When I look at the top of my camera, I see this dial for shutter speed. It says: 1/60th of a second, 1/30th, 1/15th, 1/8th... And this little button annoys the hell out of me because I want to turn that and keep turning it. I want to show you a picture that takes a year or maybe a hundred years or perhaps a picture that goes all the way back to when the British Empire was ruined at running half the world. That is how long I want to expose. We still live in this kind of afterglow of glory. To me, the most complex thing I am interested in is the English and our very unhealthy relationship with the empire—how we have never truly learned to live in a post-imperial world. The Afghan neighbourhood you see in the picture is called Africa (fig. 5). It was a middle-class district near the university that was completely destroyed in the fighting with the Russians in the 1990s. You can see now why I put those shepherd boys in the foreground, and that golden light is all about that history of ruins.

Figure 6_ Bosnia Bleed. Source: Simon Norfolk.

The snow scene is a photograph I took in Bosnia in 2005 (fig. 6), where I went back looking for signs of mass graves. Most mass graves in Bosnia are secondary mass graves. Many murders and atrocities were committed during the war. People were locked in a barn, killed, and then buried there. Before the war was over, people knew that there would be war crimes tribunals, so Bosnia is unique in that it has secondary mass graves. They went to the first mass graves at night, dug them all up with machinery, threw the dead bodies into trucks and drove them somewhere really secret to bury them again. They threw all the bodies down a mineshaft and then threw a load of grenades down the mineshaft to collapse it. Or they buried all the bodies in a lake where no one would ever be able to find them again. They were trying to hide the evidence before going up against war crimes tribunals.

The snow scene picture shows a path to a secondary mass grave site. There were approximately 600 bodies in this mass grave on the mountainside in a very remote location. They are very difficult to identify because if you use a machine to dig up bodies and bury them again, obviously, there won’t be neat bodies placed in rows but rather a big mass of bones, along with tissue and uniforms and clothes and everything. After they had hidden all the bodies in this mass grave, they then covered the entire site with landmines and put the red marks you see on the trees. The demining teams came and demined the path. The road is clear, as is the actual site of the mass grave. But the red paint on the trees says: ‘Do not go into the forest. We have mined it.’ The whole forest and the entire hillside are covered in mines. They did that to make sure that nobody went up there looking around. The red paint on those trees is revealed very nicely when snow falls, but you can hardly see it the rest of the year. Only in this winter landscape is there a lovely contrast between the red and the snow. The other side of these trees is lined with landmines! Do not go there!

For me, the landscape has an inherent documentary quality. I would like to illustrate this with a place that profoundly impacted me. I went to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland—the largest of the German Nazi extermination centres during the Second World War, where over a million Jews were killed. It is an incredibly contested space. A very busy place, it receives nearly a million visitors a year. I stood watching the tourists, all very different from one another—no communication between them. So, for me, as an English leftist, it is a place where fascism committed its worst crimes. Next to me was a 15-year-old girl from Israel. And even though we were looking at the same thing, she was there because this place is where her grandma was held during the war. This is why she has no aunts, uncles, or cousins; most of the family was destroyed. Standing next to her is a young Polish soldier, newly enlisted in the Polish army. He is looking at the same objects as I am, but his thoughts are different. To him, this is the place where the high command of the Polish army—Poland’s great leadership—was destroyed, leading to the country’s disappearance under communist rule for the next 50 years. We are all looking at the same objects, yet each of us extracts a completely different story from what we see.

The lesson that I took from that experience was that humans are inherently selective, even dishonest, in how we construct history. We create narratives that suit us, but none of them are reliable. Every story is incomplete and biased, shaped by perspective and context. Yet, standing in Auschwitz, I felt that the landscape itself held a kind of documentary truth. There are those trees, there are those ruins. If you reach into that pond—a pond of cold water by the gas chambers—the mud is white because it is bone ash from the gas chambers, still there to this day. The landscape holds a truth, while humans are too busy with their politics and opinions: I believe this. You believe that. I disagree with you. I think this. You don’t think that. I hate you. I am going to kill you. The landscape, it seemed, held onto some truth. That gave me a kind of faith in the landscape—as if it holds an unspoken truth beneath the surface. That archaeological metaphor again: landscape carries these secrets longer than human fashions, memories, and politics. And that is one of the reasons why I love landscape, because it is like a simple, objective text that holds its secrets waiting to expose them at some point later in time, maybe not to you or me because we are too political, too opinionated, too prejudiced, and too set in our ways. But one day, the truth will come out.

The interesting thing about that picture from Bosnia is that when those soldiers lay all those landmines in the forest to hide that mass grave, they thought that no one would ever go looking there. But what has happened in the ten years since the war ended and when I took that photograph? Some rednecks from the village died. The local thug has gone off to live in Switzerland, or he died, and some local people are thinking, well, maybe I will just make a little secret phone call to the investigators and tell them to go and have a lookup on the hill. And little by little, over time, the secret conspiracy to hide these atrocities is collapsing and falling apart like a sandcastle. And these gangsters and these thugs that committed them know that, sooner or later, the truth will find them, that they are going to get a knock on the door one day. They might die before it happens, but probably not, and so, one day, they will be up in court for those things they did ten years ago.

In my work, the archaeological idea, the truth within the landscape, and beauty are intrinsically connected. It is easy to make ugly pictures of war. I could cover the place in blood and guts, and I could terrify you and make you throw up. I have seen those things. I didn’t photograph them, but I could have, and I do not think that would make you engage with the picture. I do not think you would dive into the picture. I think you would just ricochet off it, just as I do with photojournalism. When I look at a newspaper, I spend less than a second looking at the pictures on the pages. I watch people on the bus looking at Instagram and how they scroll through very quickly. That is their engagement with the world.

So, my job is to make you stop: ‘Wait. Have a look at this. It is really interesting.’ And for me, beauty is a way—my way—of bringing you to a halt. I don’t know how else to do it, but I must get hold of you. If I could make you pause for a moment, then maybe I could have a conversation with you. I think that is part of treating the audience as adults: inviting them to contribute and to enter into dialogue. I cannot just hang my truth on the wall and expect you to come to my gallery and see it, even though it is horrible and painful. One has to build a pathway to bring people into one’s life, one’s pictures and one’s ideas. In particular, I think that if your work is going to be about war and horror, you need to create an access point.

Thank you very much for your time.

---

* The transcript of this conference was prepared by Alexander Gümbel, serving as Guest Editor for this issue, and affiliated with the School of Architecture and Design, Department of Design, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.