In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes wrote: "I wanted to explore [photography] not as a question but as a wound". Photographs arriving from Ukraine are just like wounds that reopen old ones from the Second World War.
Yesterday a Russian airstrike hit the children's and maternity hospital in Mariupol. Windows blew out and heavily pregnant women were carried out on stretchers, others walked out of the hospital with blood on their faces and clothes. Two hospitals in Zhytomyr also had their windows blown out in a Russian airstrike, one of them was a children's hospital.
According to the rules of war, civilians should not be targeted and medical workers, medical vehicles and hospitals dedicated to humanitarian work cannot be attacked, but it appears the rules are not being respected by the Russian army. In any war children pay a huge toll and the videos or photographs or children walking in the cold with their mothers, arriving in other countries on packed trains or being forced to flee when severely ill, just make you realise that we didn't learn anything from two previous world wars. These images also make us think about pictures from the Second World War like the ones taken by Lee Miller.
In September 1945, 5 months after Lee Miller documented the U.S. Army's liberation of Dachau, the former Vogue model turned war photographer was still travelling around Europe. Emotionally distressed by the war and deeply shocked by what she had witnessed in the concentration camps (to accompany her images of the emaciated survivors and heaped-up dead of Buchenwald and Dachau, she cabled to Vogue the words: "I implore you to believe this is true"), she kept on recording the trauma she saw around her and the destruction caused by the war.
Arriving in Austria she visited the Children's Hospital in Vienna where she took some of her last photographs as a war correspondent for Vogue. At Vienna's University Children’s Hospital, she took pictures of children dying because the necessary medicines were not available.
Cabling Audrey Withers, her editor at Vogue, Miller wrote: "For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark blue when I first saw him. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss's Danube. I'd thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies; there are many faces for the dying. This wasn't a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched…There was nothing to do but watch him die. Baring his sharp toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life, as if it might be worth something."
While in Vienna, Miller also took a picture of a young girl in a white dressing gown and a bow in her hair. White bed railings framed her, while she looked directly into the camera, a doll in a tattered dress lying next to her, almost a lifeless representation of the many children who died.
Miller's photographs confronted the magazine's readers demanding them to consider the physical and psychical costs of war. Miller sympathized with the children in the hospitals and saw their portraits as a warning against future wars.
If you got the chance of seeing Miller's images in exhibitions or you have books about her work, you will be able to make comparisons with images we are seeing from Ukraine.
There is, for example, a picture by Miller showing the Nonconformist Chapel in London bombed in 1940. One picture shows one of its doors with bricks and debris pouring from it. Miller also captured a long shot of the same scene showing the remains of the building. Her caption for thsi picture called to mind her surrealist past with Man Ray: "1 Nonconformist Chapel + 1 bomb = Greek Temple". The bomb that destroyed the chapel had indeed transformed it into another building characterised by another architectural style, almost reinventing the role of the structure.
There is a picture taken by photographer Evgeniy Maloletkaan from the Associated Press that shows a Ukrainian serviceman taking a photograph of a damaged church after shelling in Mariupol and that makes you think about Lee Miller's photograph. While in that case the debris poured out of the door, in this case the church is surrounded by destruction, all the buildings around it are heavily damaged by shelling and all their windows have blown out. What must have been a golden dome is also reduced to a skeleton, while the cross on top of it is still standing. Just like Lee Miller's photograph, this picture shows transformation through destruction, creating a parallelism between images taking in the 1940s and images taken now.
Rispondi