Photographs by Simon Norfolk Imperial War Museum, London, until 28 August
On 17 April 1975 the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, captured the city of Phnom Penh and so took complete control of Cambodia. It was, they declared, year zero. During the next four years, over one million Cambodians died as a result of malnutrition, torture, and forced labour. In Simon Norfolk's exhibition of photographs, the remains of the dead confront us with the fact of our own survival.
Norfolk spent three years photographing sites of genocide or mass slaughter. Cambodia, Rwanda, Vietnam, Auschwitz, Ukraine, Dresden, and Armenia—it's a list that comes complete with its own moral turbulence. Yet Norfolk's black and white pictures resist the sensational. Instead they record the ghoulish “map” of Cambodia made entirely out of skulls and femurs, or the Rwandan classroom with its floor full of small skeletons apparently untouched since the moment of the children's murder. But quickly, perhaps too quickly, skulls lose their power to disturb the viewer. They become, instead, a kind of disembodied prop.
In contrast, Norfolk's photograph of the interior of a deserted gas chamber in Auschwitz is full of durable menace—perhaps the less we see, the more we imagine and the more we speculate. I repeatedly scanned the bare room searching for the smallest clue as to what had gone on. I noticed the spy hole in the door. Did the camp guards use it to check that the people inside were dead? And why was there a drain in the middle of the floor? Norfolk describes Auschwitz as “the moral equivalent of Copernicus,” whose very existence forces us to recalibrate our own ethical measurements.
Norfolk's landscapes, though, are even more disturbing. In one sense, the pictures of the Omaheke desert can be read as striking endorsements of a benign divinity. Momentarily, I was overcome, seduced by the glorious patterns conjured in the sand, the movement of the wind, and the play of light and shadow. Then I remembered where I was, and I read how in 1904 the Germans in German South West Africa drove the remnants of a tribe of nomadic cattle herders, the Herero, into the Omaheke and then waited for them to die of dehydration. These landscapes make us wonder about the coexistence of the beautiful and the ugly.
Walking around the exhibition, I was increasingly gripped by a particular state of agitation. I saw snow on a telegraph pole near the massacre of 600 000 Armenians in 1915, and it looked like the crucifixion of Christ. I saw a dark handprint on a courthouse wall in Kigali, Rwanda, which must have been made using blood.
W G Sebald, the author of melancholy narratives, wrote: “We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” For me, the most affecting of Simon Norfolk's photographs allow us a glimpse of other people's horror.
Figure.
Norfolk's photo entitled, “The sons of a man poisoned by Agent Orange”