Pictures from the Killing Fields

Two photo exhibits challenge eye and heart

by Christopher Millis

"FACING DEATH: PORTRAITS FROM CAMBODIA'S KILLING FIELDS", At the Photographic Resource Center, through November 7.

"GROUND LEVEL", Photographs by James Nachtwey, at the Massachusetts College of Art, through November 26.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls . . .

-- Czeslaw Milosz

The poetry to be enjoyed and suffered in the current exhibit at the Photographic Resource Center belongs to that rare, visceral kind so immediate and upsetting, you get confused, like the first time you read The Diary of Anne Frank. The images on display of 50 or so children and women, men and boys and girls, were done by one of the photographers for the Khmer Rouge: they're a record of people who were about to be transported to a field outside of Phnom Penh to dig their own graves before being butchered with a blunt instrument applied to the base of their skulls, the way cattle are killed in slaughterhouses. And they were the lucky ones. Others were tortured and took days or weeks to die. Of the 14,200 persons who passed through the converted high school in Cambodia's capital designated S-21, where the cache of negatives was discovered and later developed by Chris Riley and Douglas Niven, seven survived.

Among the disquieting elements of the exhibit is that for the most part every single image you behold is of someone who ought to be alive today: the 18-month-olds and eight-year-olds and 30-year-olds should have added 19 years to their lives instead of nitrogen to the soil. There's a sense of attending a massive wake after a disaster so great that a plane crash seems trivial by comparison. And the wake is dizzyingly, relentlessly personal. At least a plane crash leaves only body parts. Here you face the last, knowing, revealing faces of souls on the brink of departure. You can't help but look.

The crude, deliberate uniformity of the photographs, with their makeshift white backdrops and usually freestanding figures, provides the visual ground against which variations occur. And the most haunting variation lies in the expressions of the faces of the people Pol Pot killed. These expressions range from bold to broken, from terrified to resigned. What's chilling is the underlying acceptance that unites the images, the appalling sense that nothing else matters except imminent, anonymous death. Even fear itself fails to matter in the face of inevitable demise. All that's left is the final opportunity to look while being looked at. That's what gives these photographs their monumental power.

The nature of the looking in these frames, the profound and penetrating quality of the stares, is unlike anything else. You sense the detention period for the victims was brief; only a few cases suggest spirits or bodies broken by protracted degradation. The eyes are not occluded by disease or famine or depravity; neither do the faces wear the millennial fatigue of those who have known generations of ostracism and prejudice. This was not a racial but a political holocaust, and so the victims' visages and postures maintain a peculiar brightness and vitality, rendering their deaths doubly obscene. Had any one of them managed to escape, a life might have continued normally, and that sense of emotional and social proximity to the regular machinations of the outside world comes through in the clarity with which they face the photographer. For all their desperation, the expressions are open, revealing, unguarded. And devastating.

Perhaps it is the candor of these people, not to mention their frequent beauty, in the context of the deaths they knew they were mere hours from, that makes one circle their images with a sense of bereft helplessness. The pictures put us momentarily back in their lives, and an irrational part of us refuses to believe in the following day, in their split skulls and spilled blood -- it insists we should be able to do something. The act of beholding their pictures becomes a failure to resurrect, and a retroactive failure to anticipate.

None of these reactions describes what happens when you view James Nachtwey's photos of the starving and wounded, the mutilated and assassinated living in different war zones around the world.

Nachtwey has been a pre-eminent photojournalist for three decades, and the massive exhibit of some two hundred of his oversized color and black-and-white photos at the Massachusetts College of Art represents the first time his work has earned a gallery showcase. Yet for all that the Cambodian photographs share with Nachtwey's work a sense of crisis, Nachtwey is too much a storyteller and a formalist to deliver the foreboding doom that comes through in the crude Cambodian imagery. Nachtwey's photographs are mediated by intelligence, morality, an astute compositional sense, and a certain professional distance, no matter how powerful the scenes they depict. The pictures from "Facing Death," on the other hand, are comparatively stupid, immoral and proximate. They enjoy all the subtlety of electric shock.

Nachtwey's narratives typically devote a dozen or so connected photos to a single geographic place undone by war of one kind or another. In one series he looks at the violence that took place around the first elections in post-apartheid South Africa; in another, he looks at the men in the newly reinstituted chain gangs in Georgia. Also included are groups of photographs set in Northern Ireland, El Salvador, India, Bosnia, and Somalia. What they all share are scenes of astonishing cruelty rendered with detached passion and lyric skill. A father holds his dying daughter in a field in El Salvador like a remake of Michelangelo's Pietà. A man throws water from a small bowl onto a burning truck in Northern Ireland in a gesture of pathetic hope and defiance.

Nachtwey's immense gift at framing scenes of unnerving tension and sorrow with an architect's sensitivity to balance and form is also what keeps his exhibit from being harder-hitting. He knows how to make violence palatable for major magazines and newspapers -- which means he knows how to keep it under aesthetic wraps. Nachtwey's very artistry ultimately gets in his way; he's the Richard Avedon of the AIDS wing in the Romanian orphanage, the Herb Ritts of the Killing Fields. Nothing's too horrible that it can't sell. The photographer never, for instance, follows a single individual across more than one frame; he's interested in people not per se but as emblems of whatever story he happens to be shooting. It's too bad -- were his gifts to be directed differently, they could help change and not simply charge the world.