When something catches us off guard, something that makes us slightly uncomfortable or uncertain, something that challenges what we thought were our values and beliefs, then it’s a good thing…I think!
Today we visited the Museum of Photography in Berlin, the day started gray and rainy, so we negotiated our way via the extensive and efficient Berlin public transport system to the other end of the massive Tiergarten (Berlin’s largest public park), and after a reviving coffee, made our way to the Museum.
We had arrived early and visitors were thin on the ground (always a blessing). We were told to cloak coats and bags etc. in the cloak room and signs everywhere signs proclaimed that photography in the Museum was strictly banned. The first thing I noticed when we got inside was every second person seemed to be whipping out their phone and taking photos, often ‘duck-faced’ selfies in front of the exhibits. The patrolling guards didn’t seem to bat an eyelid; it seems to be part of the Berlin Shtick that you do not pull your fellow Berliners up over anything, that would be uncool. Two whole floors were given over to an exhibition by the German photographer Helmut Newton.
The exhibition, about which we knew nothing, featured his work and collections of his private property. Much of it is indeed erotica, but there is no doubt that, as a technician, he was brilliant. Lips that glisten like high grade porcelain pots and tight skirts that appear to be shimmering second skins. The really interesting thing was the audience; largely young and female, they seemed to be mesmerised by his vision of female beauty and sexual power. With many posing in provocative positions in front of his large photographic prints. Newton himself seems to have fixed look of gloating self-satisfaction, apart from a couple of photographs that were clearly family snapshots, in which he smiling and looking totally normal.
On the third floor of the Museum was an entirely different exhibition, the one we had come to see, called “Flashes of Light.” It was photographs taken leading up to, during, and after the holocaust. It has been curated by the head of photography at the main Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and features the work of many photographers, many of whom are now unknown. The premise of the exhibition was that photographs of any event, present a version of the truth about that event, not necessarily the objective reality of what took place. It divided the photography of this period, and of these events, into two categories; photographs taken by non-Jews, and those taken by Jews themselves. Its message seemed to be that the photographic record by non-Jews, often members of liberating armies, was often slanted towards serving a particular political or social purpose, and that photographs taken by Jewish photographers, often at the peril of torture and death if caught, was more about recording both the tragic fate and sometimes incredible survival of their fellow compatriots.
Many of the best known images of concentration camps at the end of WW2 were re-enactments staged by the various allied forces. I have deliberately steered clear of the more graphic images on purpose. The individuals involved (often willingly) are, to a large extent, reduced to vectors for a political message that the victors need to send about the situation, in this incident the heinous crimes of the Third Reich. The suggestion was not that this was ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’; just that the volition behind the images needed to be also taken into account when viewing those images. The photographs taken in the various ghettos by Jewish ghetto photographers are extremely poignant. Here we see people and their raw emotions, the fear, uncertainty, disbelief, sadness, resignation, defiance, and above all else the humanity.
In the exhibition were also excerpts of films and documentaries from that period, including the Nuremberg trial footage, but perhaps most powerful of all was a documentary on Leni Riefenstahl, and her making of “Triumph of the Will”, one of the most powerful propaganda films ever made. A smiling Leni chats to her cameramen from that time, about how they devised some of their more iconic shots, and there is no doubt as to the brilliance of the film-making. It’s just that the result, and how it was used to mesmerise the German people, is so chilling.
Anyway moving from Helmut’s boob and bottoms, stars and models, to images of old men, young children and ordinary day-to-day people ripped from their lives and brought abruptly face-to-face with their mortality, was disturbing. In an anteroom off from the main exhibition there were a couple of couches and in front of each a coffee table with a range of books, mainly in German. One very slim volume caught my attention as it was in English, it was “Regarding the Pain of Others,” by the American author and critic Susan Sontag. I sat down and read the first couple of pages and was hooked. Here is a considered stream of analysis, by a highly intelligent thinker, on what we might make of all this. Because all this is a hell of a lot to process, but its gravity demands that we not look away; that we attempt to understand what this makes us feel.
After we returned to our apartment in the afternoon, I read up on Helmut Newton. I knew that he was a German, but to my great surprise he was born, a jew, in Berlin and was incarcerated briefly in a concentration camp after the infamous Kristallnacht. He was eventually granted a passport and escaped with 200 others on a boat to Singapore and China. He worked in Singapore as a
photographer for the Straits Times, until he was arrested and incarcerated by the British. He was then sent to Australia where he was shipped, under armed guard, to an internment camp in Tatura, in Victoria, it was another two years until he freed. He worked as a fruit picker in Northern Victoria and eventually joined the Australian Army, as a truck driver. He married an Australian woman, who was to become a well known photographer herself under the pseudonym of Alice Springs. He opened a fashionable photography business in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, before moving on the Europe, the United States and fame.
Knowing this
about Newton made me rethink my assessment of his work and his possible motives. What I had dismissed as superficial and somewhat
vacuous was unlikely to come from someone with a history like this. His life had not been easy, his response,
through his work was probably as relevant as another response. It’s not that I changed my mind about the
work, it still doesn’t do a lot for me in terms of interest and inspiration,
but it became more interesting as a response to a difficult life. In his book “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the
French existential writer and philosopher, Albert Camus says that the absurdity
of life lies in the juxtaposition of the fundamental human need to attribute
meaning to life and the “unreasonable silence” of the universe in
response. When one’s life is thrown into
turmoil and turned so completely upside down, do any of us know what our
response is likely to be. For Newton it
seems that the beauty of the human body was enough to hold back the dark shadow
of despair, and who am I to say it should not be so?
What this did
was open a door for me into the, also human need, to judge everything that
surrounds us. Perhaps I have glanced
into that space that prompted Socrates to declare, “I know that I know
nothing.”