In November 2001 British artist Simon
Norfolk began a journey through
battle-scarred Afghanistan,
following the fall of Kabul, with an indiscreet and cumbersome
cherrywood plate camera. These remarkable images, as
Jason Burke commented in The Observer Magazine, " …reveal
a post-apocalyptic landscape devoid of people, but shot through
with a surreal and barren beauty."
European art has long had a fondness for ruin and desolation
that has no parallel in other cultures. Since the Renaissance,
artists such as Claude Lorraine and Caspar David Friedrich
have painted destroyed classical palaces and gothic churches,
bathed in a fading golden twilight. These motifs symbolised
that the greatest creations of civilisation – the Empires
of Rome
and Greece or the Catholic Church - even these have
no permanence. Eventually, they too would crumble; vanquished
by savages and vanishing
into the undergrowth.
Afghanistan is unique, utterly unlike any other war-ravaged
landscape.
In places destroyed in the recent US and British
aerial bombardment,
the buildings are twisted metal and charred
roof timbers (the presence
of unexploded bombs deters all but
the most destitute scavengers) giving
the place a raw, chewed-up
appearance.
Mikhail Bakhtin called this kind of landscape a ‘chronotope’:
a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously,
a place that displays the ‘layeredness’ of time.
The chronotopia of Afghanistan is like a mirror, shattered
and thrown into the mud of the past; the shards are glittering
fragments, echoing previous civilisations and lost greatness.
Here there is a modern concrete teahouse resembling Stonehenge;
an FM radio mast like an English maypole; the Pyramids at Giza;
the astronomical observatory at Jaipur;
the Treasury at Petra;
even the votive rock paintings in the caves at Lascaux.
Art historical references may be intriguing, but the destruction
of Afghanistan
is first and foremost a human tragedy in which
millions have lost their lives.
The people killed in these
attacks leave almost no record – only the forensic traces
survive to tell of the carnage. Seeing Afghanistan as a chronotope
can reconnect the evidence in the landscape to the story of
this human disaster. It points to the archaeological remains
that are the only indicators of the appalling suffering that
is modern war, a suffering so atrociously suppressed
in mainstream
media coverage.
This year, Norfolk won the Silver Award from the Association
of Photographers and the European Publishing Award for his
book of Afghan work published by Dewi Lewis Publishing and
available from September 2002.
Norfolk's work is held in public collections including The
British Council,
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The Weismann
Arts Museum, Minneapolis and The Portland Art Museum, as well
as in a number of private collections.
His work has appeared
many times in titles including The Sunday Times Magazine, The
Observer, New York Times, South China Morning Post
and La Republica's
Magazine. |
