My first impression was one of formal beauty. The view itself is restricted, revealing little more than the rock face and a glimpse of ocean or sky. Yet the cliff faces are richly textured, the color palette restrained yet somehow lush.
But as I spent time with them, the images began to move. Nakagawa’s technique—he stitches together individual images to create an impossible whole—acts on the viewer's experience and the scene before you becomes vertiginous. Standing on the cliff’s edge, you lose your balance.
All this transpires before you even know that you are looking at places where people died. The photographs depict the "suicide cliffs" where scores of people took their own lives rather than risk capture by the American military in final battle of World War II.
(For more on these photographs, see my last post.)
During the months after I heard Nakagawa speak about these pictures, serendipity introduced me to two other pieces of work—a photographic series by Stephen Chalmers and an essay by David Campany—that enriched my understanding of what I was looking at.
Chalmer’s pictures came to me in the form of the latest issue of Contact Sheet. The series, titled Dump Sites, document those places, now gone back to nature, where serial killers have disposed of their victims’ bodies. Before reading Mary Goodwin's accompanying text, I leafed through the issue and thought I was looking at an odd assortment of landscapes; some seemed like fairly conventional pastoral views while others looked to be documenting those leftover places that hover at the edges of our shared lives—empty woodlands, culverts, drainage ditches, abandoned quarries.
For both photographers, the experience they create for viewers is indirect, an act not of memory—the event, now long past, is beyond anyone but the perpetrator’s grasp—but rather of commemoration. As Chalmers explains, “As a latecomer who has visited these sites, months or years after the event and the associated media coverage, one is immediately struck by the absence of spectacle, the beauty of the sites, and their silence and stillness.”
In language that might as easily describe the Bantu pictures, he goes on: “The images in Dump Sites offer a spectral, haunted kind of evidence of the sites’ historical uses, and they rely explicitly on a spiritual ‘experience of the place’ to commemorate the destruction of a life…. I hope these images are read as having a ‘psychic weight’ or gravitas. I also hope that these images avoid the derivative pathos of sites of tragedy and clichés of prefabricated sentimentality.”
The Late Photograph
The Campany essay, Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on “Late Photography,” traces a history of the documentary photograph from the early large-format, long-exposure era, through the heroic “decisive moment” interlude, to our current anything-goes moment.
Campany argues, persuasively, that decisive moment photography—the format that many consider the ne plus ultra of documentary image-making—is a historical artifact whose time may well have passed. His thinking is both straightforward and subtle. The straightforward part rests on the observation that, starting in the 1970s, video took over the roll of “being there.” (Video captures account for almost a third of all "news photographs," Campany informs us.)
The subtle bit focuses in on the question of what remains for the still camera to do. What he sees is something that looks an awful lot like what people were doing in the 19th century: think Roger Fenton’s The Valley of the Shadow and Sophie Ristelheuber’s Fait. Or George Barnard’s Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina and Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero work. In both cases, the photographs depict not the event itself, but rather its aftermath. 
The subtlety enters in as Campany turns to the differences behind these historical parallels. For, resemblances notwithstanding, Ristelheuber, Meyerowitz, et al. are after different game than were their 19th-century forebears. They photograph in full knowledge of Capa and Cartier-Bresson; what is more, they photograph in the omni-presence of moving pictures. This one-two punch leaves anyone interested in documentary work with a dilemma: if the value of documentary image-making lies in communicating the decisive moment to as broad an audience as possible, what is a still photographer to do after streaming video has taken the field?
The answer, in Campany’s view, is something he calls “the late photograph.” That is, the still photographer records what remains after the dust has settled, revealing to us the wounded landscape of our collective folly.
The Nature of Mourning
As a writer, I can’t resist pointing out that in most of the cases I've cited here—Nakagawa’s Okinawa, Ristelheuber’s Gulf War battlefields, Chandler’s crime scenes—the photographs rely on language to reveal their full meaning. That Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero images are immediately readable without captions is, I would argue, a happenstance of history; give them fifty years or so and they will be as opaque as pictures of the devastation after the suppression of the Commune of 1870 are to us now. The future will forget most of our obsessions.
That language and image work together is as it should be, I believe. For the power of these photographs as images derives from their ambiguity. They draw us in with their beauty and only then deliver the eulogy. Such is the nature of mourning: the heart-wrenching collaboration of love and loss.
