Hidden

Afterimage, May-June, 2004 by Bruno Chalifour

HIDDEN

BY PAUL SEAWRIGHT London: Imperial War Museum, 2003.

Paul Seawright is the current director of the Center for Photographic Research as well as the Dean of the School of Art, Media and Design at the University of Wales College, Newport (Wales). He represented Wales at the 2003 Venice Biennale. He was born in Belfast in 1965, and most of his projects prior to Hidden (commissioned by the Imperial Museum, London) had to do with the "troubled" reality of Northern Ireland. His landscapes, "full of tension and ambiguity," told of "the existence of a generic malevolence within the landscape." One of them documented in a rather elliptic but nonetheless powerful way the Royal Ulster Constabulary; another one, Sectarian Murders, revisited the location where the corpses of people (of all ages), who had been executed, were found.

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In June 2002 he was chosen by the Imperial War Museum to go to Afghanistan and photograph. The images he brought back and that constitute the body of the work shown in Hidden, a book that can be considered as the catalogue of the show of the same name, are extremely minimalist "catastrophic" landscapes, a crossing between the Lewis Baltz of San Quentin Point and Richard Misrach. Where Norfolk (in Afghanistan: Chronotopia) focused on the apparent impact of three war periods (Soviet, Taliban, and American) on the "civilian" landscape, including here and there a lonely Afghan male presence against a desolated background of ruins, Seawright concentrated on deserted expanses of gray land scattered with exploded or non-exploded mines or shells. One particular image, Image, looks like a very precise quote, are-actualization of Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855): no casualties shown, just empty shells. Seawright's photography is about recording traces, it is composed of subtle yet powerful statements about the sound and the fury, the fruit of man's violent impulses and thirst for power. Take him to Macbeth's glens and Seawright will photograph the few ominous trees in such a way that Macbeth himself would mistake them for men in arms. The estheticization of "violent" landscapes is not new; when it is successful, and it is here, it adds an ambiguity to the land, a sense of eeriness, that can be extremely compelling. It is true that the largest of the original prints of the show (see The Valley, in Afterimage vol. 31.3, p.7) enhances these characteristics whereas they are slightly subdued in the book. With this work Seawright achieves a rare artistic testimony as well asa new step in the very coherent body of his work. Commissioned landscapes can be challenging, especially when most of one's work has been completed on well-known and traveled terrain, and when one has only a limited time to spend in a totally foreign land in order to make the commissioned work. The one remaining question is whether what the photographer is showing has more to do with the visual culture that he and his viewers share than with his subject. The fact remains that such a project is rather intriguing, almost paradoxical, and definitely creative, partly because it was commissioned by a War Museum. The quality of its execution, its multilayered implied and metaphoric content, as well as the reproduced photographs in the book, may appeal to the readers as much as the show seems to have already seduced a good number of curators and galleries.