12 photographers document war and its aftermath

There are myriad ways that photographing war and its aftermath can be presented by a museum.

There could be an historical approach -- photography has been inextricably intertwined with war since the birth of the medium. The daguerreotype, introduced in 1839, was immediately hailed for its accuracy in depicting armed conflict. In the 1860s, the Civil War became the first conflict to be extensively photographed with images widely reproduced, seen and sold.

Since then, war photography has been seared into our collective image bank -- Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, the little girl burned with napalm running naked down a Vietnamese road, the man facing down the tanks in Tienanmen Square and hundreds of others.

Or an exhibition could concentrate on a specific conflict with multiple views of, for example, World War II, the Vietnam War, the war on terror, etc. Or it could collect the work of a noted war photographer, from the Civil War's Matthew Brady to World War II's Robert Capa to Vietnam's Eddie Adams.

For "Conflict and Consequences: Photographing War and Its Aftermath," the Sheldon Museum of Art has chosen another option -- presenting the work of 12 photographers who have spent their careers as journalists, documentarians and artists, shooting in war zones, capturing images of the conflicts and the results of the fighting.

All the photography in the show could be classified as contemporary. The oldest images date to 1978 when Susan Meiselas documented the Sandinista National Liberation Front's revolution against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

But the remainder of the images come from the 2000s, depicting aspects and impacts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, east African genocide and civil wars in Sierra Leone and Syria.

The latter images, by Andrew Stanbridge, aren't "ripped-from-the-headlines" shots of the ongoing battles between the Syrian army and ISIS and the resulting humanitarian crisis that has sent refugees spilling out around the world.

Rather, they are a series of four color prints from 2012, that illustrate the early days of the conflict -- a man shouting at the sky in the rubble of his destroyed home, a portrait of an al-Qaeda associated fighter, tattooed hands holding a machine gun and, potently, a dirt-smeared doormat with the face of President Bashar al-Assad.

Stanbridge doesn't want to be known as a "conflict photographer," but he educates those new to the field to the dangers of working in the hostile environments. Nor is he a photojournalist, like Kenneth Jarecke, whose three images in the show come from his acclaimed coverage of Operation Desert Storm in the 1991 Gulf War.

All the photographs in "Conflict and Consequence" are, by nature, documentary. But there is a distinction between journalism and art photography, a differentiation of intention and editing acknowledged by Louie Palu, who left the Toronto Globe and Mail to work as an independent documentary photographer and filmmaker.

"Photojournalism was limiting for me," Palu says in one of the exhibition's wall labels. "I started to ask myself, 'Why don't we see insurgents? Why don't we see see dead bodies?' Not having a newspaper editor always tell me what to do has become the most important aspect of my work."

To that end, Palu images from Afghanistan in 2010 show a wounded Afghan soldier in the cabin lights of the medevac helicopter evacuating him from a Taliban stronghold and a Army medic talking with a wounded American soldier on another helicopter.

One of Meiselas' photographs shows the body of a National Guardsman, killed during the fighting engulfed in flames, being burned with Samoza's official state portrait.

Beyond that, however, "Conflict and Consequence" doesn't contain any gruesome images -- by design.

"I don't think we wanted to be gratuitous," said Sheldon associate director Todd Tubutis, the exhibition's curator. "I wouldn't say it was designed around that, but we were aware of the impact of gratuitous images can have, their shock value."

Even so, the fourth-grade tours that regularly come to Sheldon bypass "Conflict and Consequence" and it is recommended that parents see the exhibition before taking their children.

"My goal," Tubutis said, " is to have parents have a look first, then, if they bring in their kids, say let's have a conversation about this."

The toughest material in the exhibition appears to be some of its calmest -- a trio of portraits of a mother and a child taken in Rwanda in 2007 by Israeli-born photographer Jonathan Torgovnik.

But the photographs from his "Consequences" series depict one of the ongoing horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide -- the women, members of the Tutsi tribe, were raped by Hutus and the children, age 12 or 13 when the pictures were shot, were born out of the violence.

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That has created difficult relationships between the mothers and the children -- visually apparent in the image of "Bernadette with her son Faustin," the mother with one leg sitting on the ground, the son standing on the opposite side of a doorway. In contrast, "Josette with her son Thomas" finds mother's arm wrapped around the shoulders of her son, holding him close.

Similarly, "In My Life," a series of images taken by Miriam X in collaboration with documentarian Sara Terry, tells Miriam's story through benign images of Sierra Leone, with captions that describe what the scenes represent to her.

Abducted at 11 by rebels, raped, made the wife of a rebel commander and forced to bear his child, Miriam X (a pseudonym) was a child soldier during the 1991-2002 civil war and her captions are heart-rending, whether talking about rape with a picture of an infant lying on its back on a dusty road or looking at a hole in the ground, saying it resembles a place where a woman was buried alive.

At the end of the series, the captions speak of forgiveness and a picture of Miriam in the shadows says that taking the photos helped her forgive herself and deal with what happened in her life.

"In My Life," like the photographs of Meiselas and those of the late Tim Hetherington, who shot U.S. troops in Afghanistan along with making his superb documentary film "Restrepo," are hung without frames -- putting an emphasis on the image on paper as opposed to that of an art object.

Another series of work, particularly resonant in the midst of the current debate over refugees entering the U.S., comes from Jim Lommasson, who collaborates with Iraqi refugees in "What We Carried: Fragments from the Cradle of Civilization."

Lommasson photographs cherished objects that the refugees have brought to the U.S., then asks them to write on the print, talking, for example, about the pictures of their home and numbers in an old cell phone, a Washington Post press pass and a family picture that details where each of those depicted now lives.

Palu's "Garmsir Marines" is another series that, in the exhibition, is targeted at University of Nebraska-Lincoln students. A collection of 13 straight-on, close-up portraits of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan in 2008, the "Garmsir Marines" are, with a couple of exceptions at 31, in the early 20s -- the same age as the students who will view them.

That is because "Conflict and Consequences" is an exhibition created to work within the university, used for studies beyond art and photography. It does that well for students -- and for those who will look at the images and contemplate their origin and ongoing meaning.

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