Simon Norfolk: Bleed
by Habitus · 03/22/07
You sometimes describe your work as “military sublime.”
What I’ve been doing for the past five or six years now is expanding on the meaning of the word “battlefield”—these places that have been ruined by war, or created for the purposes of war. And so the Afghanistan work is kind of the most obvious end of the spectrum. It’s also shifting things across space and time, so I’m very interested in the refugee camps that I did, which are like battlefields across space. The [photographs of the] Normandy beaches I did are a shift across time; that is, to return to a place sixty years later—on the same day, at the same time of day—that sixty years ago would have been filled with airplanes in the sky and soldiers and bombs. Moving the idea of “battlefield” across space and time, and into places you don’t quite think of [as battlefields], is at the center of my work.
What is the elapse of time and space that you capture in Bleed?
It’s been over ten years since the massacre of [Muslims at] Srebrenica. The men and boys who decided to fight their way out of Srebrenica followed a general direction; they fought across three Serbian lines and then tried to punch their way back through to their own territory. And through minefields and everything—
about two-thirds of them were killed in the process. So it was like following a band that’s about ten kilometers wide and about thirty-five kilometers long… All the mass graves are around that territory, across that landscape. So it was following this distance, and across twelve years, from the massacre site in 1995.
You have visited genocide sites from Bosnia to Poland to Rwanda. Are there certain things you now expect to find visiting these places?
It’s interesting how there are certain bizarre commonalities. Before I went to Auschwitz, I went to see a journalist who had been present about two years after the liberation. He said that when he went to Auschwitz, it was a big hole in the ground. And at the bottom of the hole was a pail with a spade. [Local people] had believed the Nazis were right, and the Jews were international capitalists—but where had their wealth gone? So the thinking was, they must have gone to Auschwitz with their gold and they must have hidden it before they were murdered. So these Poles had dug the site full of craters, digging for the wealth of the Jews.
Then I went to Armenia—Turkish Armenia—about a year later. I walked miles across fields to a church, which was in the middle of nowhere, with the sides collapsed. Inside, the whole floor had been removed and there was this huge hole dug down into the crypt, and even below the crypt. The thinking had been exactly the same: the Armenians controlled the wealth and finance and deserved to be killed. Th e people had gone through their graves, because [the Armenians] must have hidden their wealth in these churches. These churches really could have collapsed on their heads as they dug down into the foundation, looking for the lost wealth of the Armenians.
Is there a cost to you from spending so much time in places like these? Is there an emotional toll, a moral toll?
I think it’s made me better. When I first went to Rwanda, the first time there I was so terribly, terribly upset by what I’d seen and I thought I would never do anything else like it ever again. I went to see this fella and he said, “I know you won’t believe me now, but this is the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Your images don’t seem to register despair. There is still, it seems, a curiosity and sense of wonder.
I think the reason I don’t feel more sour about the things I’ve seen, or why I haven’t broken down over time—you know, many people have—is because all I have to do is switch on the evening news and my batteries are fully charged again. As soon as I hear someone say something stupid, or something makes me furious, I’m on the computer, trying to buy a plane ticket.
