The meaning of a pietà
On Friday, Tom and I went to Fotografiska for the afternoon. He hadn’t been since February 2020; I’d never been. Maybe you haven’t either, but you might know it as the museum that actually moved into the space a certain grifter had been eyeing as the home for the Anna Delvey Foundation.
It’s not a very big museum, which is among its merits for people who, like me, can spend maybe 90 minutes at a museum before their brain clocks out and their upper back starts yelling. (Another merit: in the lobby you can buy a drink, maybe a nice iced lavender oat latte or a glass of wine, and then take it with you through the galleries. Holy crap, folks: I am reborn.)
Most of the shows are set to close in the middle of next month, and our lives are on the verge of getting very busy again, so we wanted to make sure to see them. Our main aim was the James Nachtwey show.
Nachtwey is one of the foremost photojournalists on the planet, working since the 1980s to document the effects of war, famine, genocide, and other atrocities — mostly those enacted by humans, on other humans — around the planet. The images in the exhibition range from the 80s to the present; in a case near the exit is a set of work prints from Ukraine. (The New Yorker ran a stunning portfolio of his Ukraine images in May.)
I wish I could show you his entire artists’ statement, printed onto a wall in the exhibition, but the phrase that sticks with me is that seeing images from Vietnam in his younger years made him think about how “a war photo could be an anti-war photo.”
I did capture one paragraph:
Many of the people I have photographed were exploited, assaulted, victimized. The powers-that-be tried to silence them, render them invisible. When a photographer tries to focus attention on their story, people often see it as a way to reach out to the rest of the world, even in moments of profound personal loss and sadness — as if to say that this cruelty, this suffering, this injustice happened here, in this place, to us.
This is a tough matter that the documentary film world is always debating, with no easy answers — the matter of the ethics of being a person with a level of privilege and security who spends their life pointing their camera at other people so that still more people can look at them in their very worst moment, maybe the worst moment of their life. (See also Kirsten Johnson’s extraordinary film Cameraperson, which I have seen five or six times, wrote about extensively, and will watch periodically the rest of my life.)
I thought about this as I walked around witnessing some of the most extraordinary images I’d ever seen. In one, we see a vaguely man-shaped shadow on a background, then find out it’s the imprint of a man who was burned to death in his own house. Or victims of famine being wheeled away from the camera. Vietnamese men and women who were exposed to Agent Orange, with their children born later who live with deformities both mental and physical because of it. Or there’s a single hand outstretched in a group of women in burkas, observing a holy day. A set of images from 9/11 were so riveting I couldn’t walk away.
One of them from Darfur, of a mother caring for her son in 2003, brought me up short. I’ll link it here rather than embedding it. (It’s not graphic but I want to be sensitive.)
If you clicked through, you see that it looks a lot like a pietà, Mary caring for the body of her son, murdered by the empire. I kept staring, because my first thought was Oh, how beautiful. Then I was instantly repulsed by my thought; this is not beautiful, this is heinous, no person should ever have to live having watched their child die in this way, to have gone through what these Sudanese have lived and died through.
I thought of how excruciating it must be for someone like Nachtwey — who clearly displays a finely-tuned consciousness and a deeply humanitarian impulse — to make such a beautiful picture — it really is beautiful — out of something so monstrous.
Then I recalled that what a traditional pietà shows me is not beautiful either; it, too, is monstrous, a cruelty beyond words.
Then the two ideas, of the old archetype and the new image, started feeding into one another, heightening them.
Further on in the exhibition was a set of photographs of emigrants arriving at Lesbos, crossing water as if they’re crossing the Red Sea from slavery to safety; I started to realize this was not entirely unintentional on Nachtwey’s part, or if it is, it’s deeply informed by a set of eyes steeped in the artistic tradition. I’ll show you one of these:
From 2016. The caption reads: “Upon reaching shore, migrants gave thanks, using discarded life jackets as prayer rugs.”
I don’t have a conclusion to draw. I just can’t stop thinking about it.
(I wrote a bunch of things lately, but in particular: about society being a mess in three new movies, the meaning of the rampant trend of chapters in movies, and about the incredible, brain-breaking HBO show The Rehearsal.)
Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.