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The Camera as Witness to 'Bloody Sunday'
January 11, 2002
By HOLLAND COTTER
PHOTOGRAPHY walks many fine lines. Democratic and prolific
by nature, it undermines old genius-at-work,
precious-object ideas of art. At the same time, it keeps
laying claim to art's special powers and perks. One of its
traditional selling points is objectivity. Yet it's a
medium of calculation: of measured light and chosen angles,
of zooming in and editing out. These opposites define its
tensions.
Such tensions can be felt even in an exhibition as
anti-elitist and programmatically didactic as "Hidden
Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972" at the International Center of
Photography. The show doesn't pretend for an instant to be
art. Most of its dozens of pictures are digital scans of
umpteenth generation press prints, images made to be
transferred to newsprint and valued for information, not
formal finesse.
The pictures all have one subject: they are documents of a
specific event at a certain place on a certain day. But in
the context of the show they are also something less
passive and more passionate than that. They are prosecution
witnesses called to testify exactly how that event happened
and who was responsible. They are pieces of legal, moral
and emotional evidence on which ultimate verdicts of
innocence and guilt rest.
"Bloody Sunday" refers to Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972, when an
outburst of political violence erupted in the predominantly
Roman Catholic city of Londonderry in British-ruled
Northern Ireland. Derry, as Catholics call it, had been a
center of political unrest throughout the decades of the
so-called Irish Troubles. In the mid-1960's government
troops patrolled the streets; a Catholic neighborhood that
called itself Free Derry and was guarded by the Irish
Republican Army declared its independence from British
jurisdiction.
Around this time the Northern Ireland Civil Rights
Association was formed, modeled on the nonviolent black
civil rights movement in the United States. It organized
mass demonstrations to demand equal rights in voting and
housing. And in January 1972 it called for a march in
Londonderry to protest government internment camps where
people suspected of insurgent activities were being held
without trial.
Thousands of people turned out, from international
journalists to local citizens, including women and
children, dressed in their Sunday best. A videotape made by
one of the participants, William McKinney, suggests the
event had a festive, upbeat feeling. To minimize the
possibility of violence, the local branch of the I.R.A. had
been asked to stay away.
The march was monitored, then disrupted by British
paratroopers. As the demonstrators approached a barricade,
armed soldiers sprayed them with purple dye and tear gas.
Suddenly there was gunfire. The crowd scattered, but within
minutes 13 men and boys, ages 17 to 59, had been shot dead;
another man later died of his wounds. No soldiers were
killed or injured.
The shots were heard around the world. The killings were
front page news in Europe and the United States the next
day. In Ireland the repercussions were explosive.
Suppressed anger became overt. Violence increased. Families
of the victims accused the British government of massacring
unarmed citizens and demanded that the crime be
acknowledged and punished.
Prime Minister Edward Heath responded by establishing a
tribunal of inquiry that not only exonerated the soldiers
but also suggested that their actions were provoked by
demonstrators carrying guns and nail bombs. After the
report was filed, families of the dead men campaigned to
have the case officially reopened. In 1998, Prime Minister
Tony Blair convened a new investigation. It is still in
progress.
"Hidden Truths," which first appeared in 1998 and has
traveled widely since, is an accumulation of forensic
material pertinent to the case. Organized by the
independent curator Trisha Ziff and the Bloody Sunday Trust
and installed at the photography center by Brian Wallis and
Kristen Lubben, it begins in no-nonsense narrative style
with a sequence of photographs reconstructing the events of
that afternoon: the march, the spraying of the crowd with
dye and gas, the shootings.
As with any chaotic incident filmed rapidly and under
extreme pressure with hand- held cameras, individual shots
rarely tell a complete story. In a sequence of pictures by
the Magnum photographer Gilles Peress that appeared in The
Sunday Times in London, a man named Patrick Doherty is seen
inching on his side along the ground, a white handkerchief
tied around the lower part of his face.
He doesn't appear to be wounded; the handkerchief suggests
he is trying to hide his face. Only a picture outside the
sequence, of a medic hovering over his dead body, makes it
clear that he was trying to escape the line of fire. And
only pictures by other photographers reveal that
handkerchiefs were worn as armbands by marchers and were
later used as protection from tear gas. (Many of the
photographs and a map of Londonderry are in a fascinating
interactive computer data base in the show.)
Once photographs appear in print, their weight and meanings
are up for grabs. This is evident in newspapers that
appeared the day after Bloody Sunday, copies of which are
in the show. The London Times report on the killings is
cool; visuals are played down. In The Derry Journal the
writing is openly accusatory; most of the space is given to
pictures of the march, the victims, the grieving families
and later of the funeral.
In the newspaper's presentation of photographs, the line
between neutral information and editorial emotion is
blurred. This is also the case in "Hidden Truths." As if to
reinforce the evidentiary nature of its selection of
photographs, the exhibition supplements them with physical
objects intimately associated with the Bloody Sunday
victims: a watch, a necktie, a notebook found in a pocket.
Some of these prosaic, aging things have been used as
evidence in the investigations; boots worn by Patrick
Doherty when he died were recently requisitioned for that
purpose. But placed in exhibition vitrines they take on a
reliquary aura, like the personal effects of saints. Their
glamour transfers to the pictures around them, turning
visual documents into icons. Elevation to iconic status is
what turns photography into art, with all the ideological
privilege and power of persuasion that implies.
There are, of course, no clear rights and wrongs in such
transformations, unless maybe when commerce comes into
play, which isn't the case here. (All the prints in the
exhibition will be donated to a nonprofit Museum of Civil
Rights being built in Londonderry.) Icons can be, after
all, healing, communally binding things.
As an example, one might consider a photograph of a crowd
at the Bloody Sunday funerals. It originally appeared in
The Belfast Telegraph, and it's a remarkable picture.
People as far as the eye can see look toward the camera;
they form a kind of human landscape, a turbulent, turned-up
field fading to a misty hill. The picture was taken in
Londonderry on Feb. 3, 1972, but the faces - grave,
perplexed, stoical, unreadable - could be from many other
times and places, including Lower Manhattan in the last
four months.
Indeed, all the tensions and ambiguities inherent in
photography - its factuality and its manipulativeness, its
accessibility and its pretension, its political passion and
its ethical indifference - are sure to make themselves felt
in relation to the flood of images generated by the World
Trade Center catastrophe and the war in Afghanistan. The
International Center of Photography will contribute to the
drama with a rotating exhibition called "Aftermath:
Photography in the Wake of Sept. 11," which opens today.
``Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972'' remains at the
International Center of Photography, 1114 Avenue of the
Americas, at 43rd Street, (212)860-1777, through March 17.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/arts/design/11COTT.html?ex=1011757874&ei=1&en=d64093bfa0674890
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