Thinking the ‘Event’ of War in the Photography of Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye

Abstract

This study examines how three contemporary art photographers, Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye, critically engage with the history, conventions and functions of representations of war. All three image-makers have established reputations in the international art world. Commentators have also placed their work under the recently coined rubric of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography that responds to military conflicts. Arriving days, months or years after battle has ceased to photograph traces of war and the destructive effects left behind, this ‘late’ mode of war photography is often contrasted with the temporal and spatial proximity to action endorsed by the ‘decisive moment’ of photojournalism. My analysis of works by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye focuses on examples of their practice made in response to military conflicts in the Middle East since the 1990s. These works are briefly contextualised within the historical evolution of war photography, and related to shifts in the conduct and media representations of war in recent decades. Additionally, the study investigates commentaries on aftermath war photography by theorists John Roberts and David Campany, among others. A significant aim of this project is to interrogate assumptions about what constitutes the ‘event’ (of war) that informs the current literature on aftermath war photography. My approach to this topic draws on Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of the divided structure of the ‘event’ as both resistant to representation and necessarily subject to representational translation. It is proposed that works of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye reflect this divided structure by simultaneously ‘speaking’ and ‘keeping silent’ about the event of war. Various historical and contemporary aesthetic theories are adapted to explore how each artist confects a degree of conceptual indeterminacy in their works. These theories include Jacques Rancière’s concepts of the ‘pensive image’ and ‘anachronism’, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s eighteenth century thinking of the ‘pregnant moment’ in history painting. It is contended that unlike much contemporary media imagery of war that circumscribes and directs interpretation, the photography addressed in this project delays, fragments or suspends cognitive resolution, thereby offering food for thought about the contentious topic of war.