A seminar presented by Josie McCall
Sophie Ristelheuber
War photographer. We envisage men taking ‘eye-witness’ images of unfolding events. Action and heroism. The war photography of Sophie Ristelheuber is different.
In 1984 her series ‘Beirut’ contained documentary images of the damaged buildings of the Lebanese capital. Although no images include bodies or victims, the viewer is conscious that they are there.
The book and installation ‘Aftermath’ produced in 1991 is a study of the Kuwaiti desert shortly after the Gulf War. Many photographs were taken from the air, showing the remains of broken crates, tin cans, a pair of boots and other debris being slowly covered by the desert sands.
The series ‘Every One’, produced in 1994, contained photographs taken in a Paris military hospital presenting images of wounds and abrasions to bodies with no reference to their nationality, or causes of the injury. The installation included an artists’ book, with text from Thucydides’ ‘History of the Peleponesian War’, and formed part of ‘Warworks: Women, Photography and the Art of War’ V & A 1995.
Val Williams, previewing this in Creative Camera, commented ‘The people Ristelhueber photographs have been violated and damaged, and she studies their features and their skin with a meticulous eye. The photographs are quiet, redolent with pain. Ristelhueber reminds us that war is neither science nor art, but a crushing of skin and muscle, a cutting and tearing of the flesh, the making of outlandish patterns on a perfect surface.’
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Images as crisis points *
Sophie Ristelheuber is concerned, first and foremost, with the ambivalence of things, the porous borderline between reality and fiction, the dialectical relationship between work and image, and the variable hierarchy of figures of speech, be it iconographic or linguistic speech: the said and the unsaid, more for less, part for whole. One of the artist’s latest pieces, La Campagne (The Countryside/The Campaign) produced in 1991-1997, achieves a peak-like form in which the vectors of her particular arrangement all converge. It is made up of three groups of five to ten large photos stacked higgledy-piggledy against the wall at ground level. These black-and-white and colour photos were printed digitally, so as to achieve a simple poster-like rendering, and affixed to thin board right to the edges, in such a way as to convey the notion of temporariness and removability. Vertical in format, some of them actually curve. At first glance, the overall impression is that of a stroll in rural surroundings, where the atmosphere is calm, even bucolic. The photos overlap, so they are not all totally visible but we glimpse here, a cart horse, there, a pine forest, and bathers in a waterfall nearby a picturesque village, and over there, a meadow dotted with dandelion flowers or alternatively a quite vertical view of a hillside planted with small trees, and, last of all, a country lane apparently cut off by a flooding river. However, in no time at all, the impression of tranquility gives way to a vague sense of oppressiveness. The perceptual interpretation, which wavers imperceptibly from the start, becomes blurred, slight signs of destruction appear, and the frail interpretative scaffolding collapses. We then see that the horse in the foreground is trotting in front of a deserted building whose windows have all been shattered, we realise that the dwellings nestling in the green field near the bathers, as well as the other dwellings in the other photos, are all destroyed and empty. Even without knowing that the village with the bathers is Mostar, that the flooded lane was due to the excavations following the discovery of a mass grave, that the dandelions are growing right beside a brand new cemetery, that the hill is the one the survivors of the Srebrenica massacre fled across, and that, in a word, the place is in ravaged Bosnia.
* Ann Hindry - Sophie Ristelheuber
(Paris:Editions Hazan, 1998) 63-9
‘La Campagne’ was included in TRACE International Exhibition, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.
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‘Steps in Space’ published 2000 by Aperture included a photograph by Ristelheuber.
‘Details of the World’ published 2001. Photographs by Ristelheuber and text by Cheryl Brutvan.
‘... the photographs of Sophie Ristelheuber convey a world at once intensely personal and objectively restrained. Her camera embraces the scars of human existence, whether the devastation of a war-torn landscape, the furrows of a suture, or the hidden wounds of remembered childhood, conferring on each a personal resonance that echoes far beyond the events portrayed.’ - Publisher.
Ristelheuber challenges our perceptions in several ways. Our expectations are lulled by the iconographic nature of the images, however the first impressions are untrustworthy. In earlier works, the nature of our perceptions of situations, most effectively in war zones, is shown to be governed by media coverage, and as such is biased and uninformed. Ristelheuber gives an alternative view, concentrating on the effects and aftermath for the people and places caught up in the conflict, effectively demanding that there be a reconsideration of the conflict from the perspective offered.
I am interested in the concept of perception and how it can be changed and influenced. Iconography plays a large part because of the wide acceptance that certain images represent certain fixed things.
In ‘Soldier of Liberty’ I have endeavoured to connect two opposite meanings simultaneously to one piece, using shadows to present the two familiar and iconographic silhouettes of the ‘Statue of Liberty’ and an American soldier. The expectations of the viewer are that an object would throw a unique and recognisable shadow. The object in this piece throws two distinct and recognisable shadows, and can be viewed as two distinct and recognisable silhouettes depending on the physical standpoint of the viewer, thereby raising the question of the true nature of the icons presented.
Ristelheuber challenges perceptions by presenting an alternative view. I am attempting to present the familiar and iconic in such a way that the viewers’ perceptions alter when their physical standpoint is changed, questioning the reliability of their view as ‘truth’.
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