Simon Norfolk: Bleed
by Habitus · 03/22/07
The photographer Simon Norfolk finds moments of beauty and wonder in the world’s most forlorn landscapes. From Afghanistan to Auschwitz, Norfolk documents the imprints of war—sometimes physical, sometimes physic—on its surroundings. His book Bosnia: Bleed is an impressionistic testimony to the mass slaughter that accompanied the war in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, he focuses on the sites of “secondary mass graves,” where the perpetrators tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. He writes, “They thought that, by intimidation and subterfuge, their dirty secrets could be preserved, held, trapped. Frozen.”
Norfolk spoke to Habitus from his home in Brighton, England.
Habitus: How did you end up coming to Bosnia in the first place?
SN: I had a good friend who was married to a Bosnian girl and I went to Bosnia during the war, but I didn’t really take any good pictures. I think I was a bit confused by it all, and it was difficult to really work out what was going on, apart from seeing what was happening in the surrounding 100 meters.
I specifically didn’t want to do something where I would return [to Bosnia] ten years after the war and say, “I feel the following people are to blame.” I’m not a specialist; but what did interest me was this idea of secondary mass graves; there has never been a war that had secondary mass graves like this.
Can you explain the difference between a secondary and a primary mass grave?
Before the war ended, people knew that there would be criminal proceedings. That’s never happened in a war before: the Nuremberg war trials were a surprise to the Nazis. So where people were killed in villages and buried in a soccer pitch or something, [the killers] went back to these places before the war ended and, using machinery, dug up the bodies and reburied them in difficult-to-find locations, to hide what they’d done. And what’s happened since the end of the war is that, little by little, the conspiracy is unraveling. A gangster dies in a village and someone makes a phone call to the investigators and says, “I think you should have a look at Slobodan’s forest.” On the Bosnian side, people are being repatriated and going back to their villages; they are going back to plowing the fields that [their families] have been plowing for hundreds of years and, suddenly, they’re pulling up bones and rags.
So the idea was to [comment on] this house of cards, this conspiracy that was built on hiding these bodies…and what it must feel like, over ten years, to see this conspiracy collapsing around you. Every day the truth unravels, and investigators take a step nearer, and you know that, sooner or later, they are going to find the 300 bodies you buried in the woods or that you threw down a mine shaft or that you tried to dissolve in an aluminum factory.
How did you find the particular sites you photographed?
A lot of it was from plowing through news reports in the Bosnian media. A few of the bigger mass graves, the more famous ones, I found that way. Th en I spoke to the people who were doing the investigating and they gave me maps and some ideas about where to find others. And then some of them I found by going back to reports that were written in 1994 and 1995. Just after the Srebrenica massacre, certain journalists managed to sneak into various places and they found certain mass graves. If you read the texts very carefully, you can kind of follow where they went. They’re not very explicit, but they say, “Go to the village, there’s a barn on the left. Go around that, to the top of the hill. On the right-hand side there’s some trees.” A lot of it was just detective work, really.
In contrast to your works that could, for lack of a better term, be described as documentary, you chose to do something with a very high degree of abstraction.
I’m very interested in the density of the way a place is covered and understood. Bosnia is somewhere that has been incredibly densely covered by TV and in photojournalism. It’s almost like Auschwitz: you almost don’t need to describe anything there; you can just use the word.
Bosnia is also a place that is very dense. It allows me to make pictures that are slightly more abstract, because I don’t need to educate the reader or explain where I am. I can take a few more risks.
There is this strong dissonance between what are, in some ways, very beautiful images and a very horrific literal meaning. Absolutely. I think that is the only thing that’s really consistent throughout all of my work: this idea of the polar opposites of beauty and horror, which are exploded together in these locations.
These are places with terrible stories, but they are nearly always extraordinarily beautiful. Afghanistan is an amazingly beautiful Asian country. Auschwitz is a 230-acre national park, full of deer and butterflies and all kinds of wild flowers and insects. You don’t see that in the rest of Poland, because it’s all been blasted with pesticides.
The same is true in Bosnia, which is an intensely beautiful place. The idea is to take together these two things, beauty and war, that our society separates totally. It separates our lives [in the West], with our featherbeds and cotton wraps… We’ll never see the horror of bloodshed in the streets and we’ll never have to fight in a war, which is done by professional soldiers. And over there is the rest of the world.
It’s also driven very much by an understanding of Romantic philosophy and a vision of “the sublime” in landscape photography—and, prior to that, in landscape painting—where these ideas of beauty and horror were brought together. They were used to produce something exciting and frightening and terrifying, but
also uplifting.
