Daniel Nelson

Human Rights, Human Wrongs exhibition: Biafra c 1968

Human Rights, Human Wrongs exhibition: Biafra c 1968

Image by Carlo Bavagnoli

I was short of time – always an unhelpful circumstance in which to view an exhibition – so I looked at the 200 photographs at the Photographers’ Gallery in London without reading curator Mark Sealy’s background notes.

What I saw was a lot of pictures of conflict around the world between 1945 and the early ‘90s, plus a few other images, including portraits and unclassifiable oddities such as Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah laughing with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and a delightful sequence of a man nabbing King Baudouin’s sword as the Belgian sovereign motorcades his way through Leopoldville in the Congo.

Some of the photographs are haunting:  Warsaw Ghetto corpses lying in front of houses, two people hung in a public place  in 1949 Syria. A few are shocking. There are many men with guns, too many police always on the side of the status quo, too many children. There are also too many images from or about the US. That’s not surprising since the exhibition is drawn from the archives of Black Star, a US-based agency whose most important outlet was the US-based Life magazine.

Nevertheless, the exhibition covers a lot of places and situations. It’s wide-ranging but underwhelming.

Sealy’s introduction – when you’ve put aside the jargon of “notions”, “problematic” and “linear perspective”–  is about wanting to make visitors aware of the Eurocentricity of their view of the world,  how “a western media perspective … has had a huge effect on our reading and understanding of world events”, how despite Africa’s complexity and differences it is reduced to a few “signature frames” (such as the exhibition’s Biafra Baby shot), about the way “the black figure, the non-European subject, is often photographed in the most broken of conditions”.

“And, at a time when vast swathes of people – the refugee, the asylum seeker, the economic migrant – have no rights at all, are in fact ‘no ones’,” he concludes, “it seems a matter of extreme urgency to consider political humanitarian development in today’s context.”

I am an admirer of Sealy’s work but these comments strike me as unoriginal (which doesn’t necessarily matter if they are important truths) but, more important, are not illustrated by the exhibition. Perhaps it’s a question of labelling, or of the way the pictures are grouped, perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently receptive, but I didn’t get these messages from my viewing. I just saw a lot of photographs.

+ Talks programme19 FebruaryPhotographing Protest, 6.30pm, free; 26 FebruaryThe Invention of News Media, screening of More Out of Curiosity, which follows the protests of a group of radical football supporters in Egypt, plus Ronnie Close, Ben Burbridge and Stephanie Schwart, 6.30pm; 3 MarchHelena Kennedy QC, 6.30pm, £7/£4; 7 March, curator's tour, 3pm; 19 Marchcurator's talk, Mark Sealy, £7/£4; 26 MarchUseful Images?, 6.30pm

+ MARK SEALY'S INTRODUCTION

·         Human Rights, Human Wrongs is at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, W1 until 6 April. Info:  7087 9300/ info@tpg.org.ukhttp://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/human-rights-human-wrongs-4 


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