It’s good to start with a joke, but there are really not a lot of laughs in this show. Drawn from Toronto’s Black Star Collection – an archive set up by three Holocaust survivors – it presents more than 300 examples of postwar photojournalism. Arranged chronologically, it takes as its starting point the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, and partly prompted by Nazi atrocities. From there, it ranges globally across Africa, Asia, South America, the Civil Rights Movement in the States and political upheaval in Europe.
At its heart is a story about the role of the image in a pre-digital age. For 50 years, it says, this was how the West saw the rest, and it was a vision wholly biased toward a First World understanding of history, geography, winners and losers. Africans are victims or savages. Japanese and Vietnamese soldiers are sadists. South Americans are corrupt. Perhaps after Belsen, readers of Life needed to know that everywhere else had been, was, and probably always would be just as staggeringly horrific, or perhaps those images had simply recalibrated what people thought was acceptable to publish and consume.
These photos, many of them superb, and made under extremely dangerous conditions by brave people, create a kind of collage of misery and infamy. And since they’re all black and white, it can be hard to tell in exactly which shithole something nasty is happening to some poor sod. So there is a weird consistency to them, which reinforces the façade of objectivity, and also makes you understand how readers became inured to the misery of a lot of the world. Then you arrive in the Southern United States in the early ’60s, and you realise that the Civil Rights Movement did more than just battle discrimination. The images made by Bob Fitch, Charles Moore and others can’t be ignored so easily, and not just because they’re nearer to home. Alabama probably felt as remote as Algeria to lots of New Yorkers. But when you see civilian protestors with their clothes ripped off by dogs, or beaten with wooden clubs while elected officials look on approvingly, you’re not put in mind of the Congo or Indochina, but of Warsaw, of Nuremburg, of Chelmno and Treblinka. And that’s a whole lot harder to swallow over your cornflakes and the latest on the space race.
There are too many photos in this show, too few captions and too many curatorial feints, given the material. If you want a nice quiet amble round an exhibition for an hour, you basically couldn’t do worse. But should you go and see it? Yes. Yes you should.
Chris Waywell