Conflict, Time, Photography at the Tate Modern

I went to see the exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography at the Tate Modern a few weeks ago and have been meaning to write something on it. What I particularly found interesting about the show were the curatorial choices. The way the exhibition was organized was according to how long after the catastrophic event the photograph was made. None of the works could be considered photojournalism but instead are artistic responses in the photographic medium to make sense of these events. The first room consisted of photographs made only moments have the (usually) war related event in question. The rooms that followed were a few days after, a few months after, a few years after up to 100 years after the event whereby artists continued to respond to the traumas that occurred one century before.

What I also found engaging about Conflict, Time, Photography was that it attended to events from all over the world without a focus on any one or two era or areas of conflict. In this way, there was a certain kind of democracy in the selection of photographs where no one image seemed more dire than the other. Rather, the included works came together to insist on two opposing yet connected sentiments: that the experience of catastrophe is at once unique to an individual and at the same time reflects a collective trauma.

One of the works that struck me in particular was Wolf’s Lair / Adolf Hitler’s War Headquarters by Polish artist Jerzy Lewczynski taken in the 1960s. 

Image taken from http://images.tate.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/grid-normal-16-cols/public/images/conflicttimewebbanner_0.jpg?itok=BeZ9lXzV