WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath
Nov. 11, 2012 – Fe/b 3, 2013
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
One of the most sobering and disturbing depictions of war in paint is undoubtedly John Singer Sargent’s Gassed, which shows a line of World War I soldiers hit by mustard gas walking in between piles of wounded colleagues — or worse, corpses. Although Sargent’s painting doesn’t depict a battle, the violence is implied, which makes it even more horrific.
War has changed a great deal since Sargent felt comfortable setting up an umbrella to shield his easel while he observed battles, and a current exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston examines the intersection of war and photography.“Photographers (and various unmanned technologies) have covered almost every phase of armed conflict and its aftermath,” writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, the MFAH’s curator of photography, in the catalog. “Photographs have been useful in planning and conducting wars, and have been essential in gaining public support for war efforts and in the loss of that support.”
The exhibit — which features about 500 objects and images from 280 photographers from 28 nations and over 165 years — comes with an impressive 600-page catalog (which costs $90). Religion comes up frequently in the book, including in a section devoted to “Faith.”
In his catalog essay “German Snapshots from Word War I: Personal Pictures, Political Implications,” Bodo von Dewitz addresses the “popular motif” of showing church ruins (starting page on 157), particularly “images of crucifixes damaged by war but with an intact or relatively undamaged figure of Christ.” The anonymous postcard The so-called Christ of Fleurbaix at the western front (1916), for example, shows a wrecked house (with the roof crossbeams revealed) on a shell-shocked street. But the enormous crucifixion sculpture — with the exception of its impersonation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa — appears to have emerged unscathed.
The implication is that sacred art enjoys divine and miraculous protection, even in times of violence. “Amateur photographers used images of the accidentally undamaged as a way of generating meaning amid the ever-present threat of death during the war,” writes von Dewitz.
In her chapter on faith (pages 366 to 377), Wilkes Tucker notes that troops’ spiritual well-being
W. Eugene Smith‘s Soldier Praying, Battle for the Rocky Crags, Okinawa (April 19, 1945), for example, shows an injured soldier with a bandage covering his eyes and half of his head lying on a stretcher. The bearded man’s uniform is covered in blood stains. But however unfortunate his situation is — or, perhaps, precisely because his situation is desperate — he clasps his hands in prayer.
is as much a part of a military commander’s responsibility as their healthcare, clothing, and food. Among the earliest records in which a leader addressed spiritual life is a reference written in the mid-5th century by Eusebius, bishop of Ancyra, in which he refers to the 4th century practice of Roman Emperor Constantine, who ‘gave Christian soldiers given times off to attend Sunday services and compelled the rest to attend a parade at which a non-denominational, monotheistic prayer was recited.’
“Smith’s notes recount that the wounded soldier, whose injuries prevented him from receiving morphine, had calmed himself through his prayers,” Wilkes Tucker writes.
Other images show bearded Orthodox Jews (identifiable by black hats and coats) praying at the Western Wall alongside a soldier wearing a kippa (skullcap) and a gun over his shoulder, and a soldier being baptized in a sandbag‑lined pool in Kuwait. He wears a cross necklace and a dog tag.
But as Mark Markov‑Grinberg’s The Oath of War (1942) demonstrates, weapons can sometimes become idols, as they do for the photographed soldier kissing his bayonet.
“Russian photographer Mark Markov-Grinberg acknowledged that, for some, as James Hillman stated in his powerful book A Terrible Love of War, ‘It is as if the guns have become gods themselves. The spear that stood at a Roman altar to Mars was not a symbol; it was the god,'” Wilkes Tucker writes.