As we all know, the objective and mission of the photojournalist is to show us the reality of the world. And in order to capture that reality, they go to dangerous and tragic places at the expense of their lives. I see them as the conscience of our humanity; they represent for me what is left of our humanity. -- Alfredo Jaar
Fueled by Jaar's obsession with the Rwandan genocide and, more specifically, the outside world's failure to respond, this project is an extended meditation on the role of the photographic image in the public forum. The unfolding of this project over the course of six years traces Jaar's struggles to reanimate the documentary photograph.
Jaar traveled to Rwanda in August 1994, just after the killings had ended, and took something like 3,000 pictures -- of the wrecked cities, in the refugee camps, at massacre sites.
But the pictures defeated him.
So for his early works, he drew on sources other than photography. His first series, which he would title "Signs of Life," came about when he stumbled on a wrecked post office. There, he bought up the last of its picture postcards produced, in happier days, by the Rwandan Office of Tourism and depicting the standard tourist sites -- wild animals, mountain views, scenic lakes. At the same time, he began collecting the names of survivors of the genocide and incorporated them into messages that he inscribed on the cards. CARITAS NAMAZURU IS STILL ALIVE! RUBANDA TRESIFOLI IS STILL ALIVE! Then, he mailed the postcards off to friends and colleagues around the world.
So for his early works, he drew on sources other than photography. His first series, which he would title "Signs of Life," came about when he stumbled on a wrecked post office. There, he bought up the last of its picture postcards produced, in happier days, by the Rwandan Office of Tourism and depicting the standard tourist sites -- wild animals, mountain views, scenic lakes. At the same time, he began collecting the names of survivors of the genocide and incorporated them into messages that he inscribed on the cards. CARITAS NAMAZURU IS STILL ALIVE! RUBANDA TRESIFOLI IS STILL ALIVE! Then, he mailed the postcards off to friends and colleagues around the world.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Conceptual Art recognizes the reference to On Kawara's postcard series from 1969-70. "I am still alive!" his message read. But where Kawara's work is laconic, Jaar's is gut-wrenching. Gone is the dry (solipsistic?) wit, to be replaced by a passionate cri de coeur.
Jaar's second effort to engage with Rwanda was made for a public art project, originally in Sweden. Asked to create works for 40 lightboxes installed throughout the city of Malmo, he stripped his message down to its barest element: stark black on white text that repeated the words "Rwanda, Rwanda, Rwanda" -- on the theory that, since the news reports and photographs had so utterly failed to move us, maybe yelling would work.
Not until "Real Pictures," the third in the series, did Jaar begin to deal with the photographs themselves, but only by entombing them. He selected 60 images of the thousands he had taken, printed them, and then shut them away in black linen boxes on which he silkscreened written descriptions of the image within.
On first encounter, you might easily have thought you had wandered into an exhibition of neo-Minimalism. Like "Signs of Life," this installation spoke to recent art history as well as to current events. But unlike Donald Judd or Carl Andre, Jaar was very much interested in expressiveness. The gallery space where this work appeared was darkened, much like a Medieval chapel, and walking through the installation was a somber experience. Jaar describes this piece as “a cemetery of images.”
After the fourth installment, a text-based projection called "Slide + Sound" that provides a timeline of the genocide, Jaar began to unveil some of his photographs. But his strategy remained decidedly anti-spectacular.
In an Art 21 profile, Jaar describes his struggle with the Rwanda Project, "There must be a way to talk about suffering without making the victim suffer again. How do you represent this, respecting the dignity of the people you are focusing on? That’s why the Rwanda project lasted six years. I ended up doing twenty-one pieces in those six years. Each one was an exercise of representation. And how can I say this? They all failed. I kept looking for the perfect way to communicate that experience to my audience. Of course, there is no way: you cannot represent reality. The work is always the creation of a new reality. So how do you build this new reality that, one way or the other, translates the lived experience?"
Perhaps Jaar is right. Perhaps all these pieces did fail. Perhaps that's all they could ever do because, at the end of the day, photographs are no substitute for experience. To make a photograph, or any other representation of the world out there, is to abstract (literally, to take away). So how can we expect anything more from the camera than a post-mortem of yesterday's news?
Still, look into the eyes of Nduwayezu and try to forget what you know about what he saw and about what we chose not to see. And tell me that what Jaar has shown you doesn't matter.
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You can see Jaar's Rwanda Project at his website, where you'll also be able to read the excellent essay "A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar," by David Levi-Strauss. In addition, you might want to read the Brooklyn Rail interview with Jaar, Levi-Strauss, Phong Bui, and Dore Ashton (where I found the quotation that opens this post).
