Rohan Jayasekera and Julian Stallabrass in conversation

about The Sublime Image of Destruction shown at the De La

Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, as part of the Brighton Photo
Biennial, 2008: Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War
of Images

RJ: Let’s talk about that title: The Sublime Image of Destruction.
Classically speaking, the sublime is a quality of awesome grandeur,
usually sought by artists in nature or God, not normally in war. Why
look there?

JS: The sublime is also threatening, though: the stormy sea that we
find a sublime spectacle when seen from a safe distance may also in
other circumstances drown us. Kant distinguishes two types of
sublime—the mathematical and the dynamic. The mathematical is
about ungraspable magnitude, and the dynamic about ungraspable
force. Both may threaten us physically but also and more
fundamentally they threaten us mentally, challenging our rational
descriptions of the world, and our powers over it.

There is a military sublime which is a subset of both of Kant’s

categories. You can see the mathematical sublime for example in
Simon Norfolk’s wide landscapes of destruction; and the dynamic
sublime in the force used to cut through a thick concrete wall (we
see that in the works of all the artists in the exhibition).

The sublime does not have to be an elevated experience. It can be

felt on a fairground ride or in a war movie. There is something about
the scale and resolution of most museum photography that trades
on the sublime, just by throwing at the viewer more information
than they can readily process (I’ve called this effect, which is not
confined to photography but is quite common in contemporary art,
the ‘data sublime’). So the photographs in this show bring these
various aspects of the sublime into a disturbing but also appealing
combination.

RJ: The media has always sought to be both disturbing and

appealing. And that overdose of interpretable information you
describe is the precise quality that distinguishes conflict journalism
today from how it was ten years ago. Inevitably the viewer now
selects from a storm of media practitioners - perhaps a foreign TV
station, certain bloggers, a paper, maybe an Iman’s sermons on
DVD - a chosen few whose vision they favour with their trust. Can
your artists’ vision be trusted?

JS: Certainly not! Trusting artists (or the media), the very idea… The
Biennial is showing a lot of work that it does not necessarily
recommend, or not unreservedly. We will be showing official US
Army photography, for example, and some of the photographs
taken at Abu Ghraib. The De La Warr exhibition looks like a
conventional museum show of objects that are firmly placed in the
‘art’ category, but it should be seen in the context of the Biennial as
a whole which deals with a wide range of war imagery, and which
gives viewers the chance to look across that range and formulate
critical views of its different components. Broomberg and Chanarin,
Simon Norfolk and Paul Seawright all make work that has a
conscious relation to photojournalism, and seeks to be more
considered and less driven by the spectacular and transitory event
than pictures made for the newspapers. But, in doing so, they have
evolved a range of positions that should, of course, also be
questioned.

RJ: True. I’d urge everyone intrigued by the De la Warr exhibition to

take a look at the rest of the Biennial too. Journalists are always
debating the whys and wherefores of war imagery, but I’ve never
seen that debate addressed in such an original and diverse way.
But, further to trust: Generally there’s a kind of veterans’ deference
given to opinions from those ‘just back from the front’ that trumps
dissent from those safe at home. You say their positions should be
questioned, but how do the artists facilitate that challenge?

JS: The artists in the Bexhill exhibition do so by taking a wider

approach to the issue of war than one that focuses on the
experience of the troops (which is what embedded journalism is
intended to focus upon). Seawright’s pictures place us before
expansive but terribly dangerous vistas, and implicitly ask viewers
to imagine the experiences of those who have to live in such places,
surrounded by ruins, mines and unexploded shells. Norfolk is more
direct in his spectacular scenes of ruins, and in photographs of
blood-covered walls and burnt-out archives. Through their pictures,
Broomberg and Chanarin ask what conflict, actual and latent, does
to the landscape of a contested territory, and depict the many
means used to take ownership of it, physically and symbolically.

The question you ask is an essential one, for the social compact that
the troops cannot be criticized (which was fractured in Vietnam, not
least by many of the troops themselves who returned relating
horrific stories of what they had been urged to do) has been firmly
re-established. The swiftest political suicide would await any MP who
had the temerity to suggest that ‘our boys’ ever acted with anything
less than the utmost honour and professionalism, no matter the
evidence to the contrary. The Biennial does not want to dismiss the
views of the troops, and in Julian Germain’s exhibition in Aspex,
Portsmouth, photographs taken by them will be shown and
discussed. Their perspectives, though, must be complemented, set
in context and ultimately enriched through the consideration of
other views.
JK: That’s our responsibility as citizens. To engage with other views,
for and against, before signing off on that particular compact. It’s
clear from the artists’ backstories that they are totally engaged in
this way already. But I know that some viewers will still wonder how
that commitment to engage sits with the apparent distance –
physical and emotional – the works put between themselves and
their subjects. Can they still retain meaning if the message is
rendered abstract by disconnection, obscured by distance?

JS: That’s a fascinating question, and I think that to begin to answer

it you have to look at the habits and constraints of museum
photography. Those massive, spectacular prints that adorn museum
walls are made with large-format view cameras, the kind you use
with a tripod and (perhaps) a cloth thrown over your head. They are
wonderful at capturing detail in broad scenes but generally not
much good for rendering movement close-up, the very essence of
photojournalism. If people do appear, they tend to be immobile and/
or distant. Here technical constraints and an ideological suspicion of
too overt an engagement come together to produce that ‘abstract
disconnection’.

I think that such works can carry meanings—and as I suggested

earlier, those meanings can be quite various. Maybe there is a
danger that in drawing on the sublime, and on distancing, they
produce a view in which the artist stands above and outside the
conflict and reports on it, almost as though it was a natural
phenomenon. That the weight of detail, the degree to which the
recording power of the large cameras is relied upon, tend to create
a picture of which the tendency is to say: this is how it is. What
those pictures show is, of course, terrible enough; but in and of
themselves, it may be argued, it is hard to derive from them overt
political standpoints; and in this way, inhabiting a zone of ambiguity,
they do not cut against the fundamental rules of the art world.

RJ: In some of the works, it is hard to discern an overt political

standpoint, true; maybe we should take the chance to exercise our
critical faculties looking for it! But that distance from political
opinion might be good for some. Bexhill has many residents whose
lives were defined by that sublime British historical monolith, World
War II. Politics aside, I’m sure that distance - of time - does not
make abstract or disconnect them from their own personal
experiences of wartime tragedy, courage, cruelty and inspiration.

JS: I think it is there, and it is the artists’ intention that it should be.
With Broomberg and Chanarin, for example, there’s a sophisticated
understanding of how nations define themselves through images,
and through an interplay between the transformation and
representation of the landscape. It is just that the coolness of the
museum photography mode may be thought to come into tension
with an overt display of political passion.

I am sure many Bexhill residents have memories of the World War II,
and that many have personal experiences of Britain’s numerous
subsequent military adventures. All of these are tainted by
imperialism: the fight against Nazism was against a system that
applied imperial methods to Europe, after Germany’s colonies had
been stripped from it following the Great War. Some of its most
despised features—concentration camps, the aerial bombing of
civilians—were invented by the British for use abroad. Following the
end of the war, Britain continued with National Service to man its
many interventions in defence of its Empire. We continue to do so,
in alliance with the new global superpower. So those memories are
directly linked with what is happening today, and they, too, should
not escape critical questioning.

Julian Stallabrass is the curator of the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial; Rohan
Jayasekera is an editor of Index on Censorship.