BURKE + NORFOLK – PHOTOGRAPHS FROM AFGHANISTAN
2012-04-30In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a series of new photographs in Afghanistan, which takes its cue from the work of nineteenth-century Irish photographer John Burke (c. 1843-1900). Burke was the first photographer to make pictures in Afghanistan. He accompanied British forces during the invasion that became the Second Anglo-Afghan War from 1878-1880, producing albums of prints for sale. Virtually unknown today, Burke was a precursor of the contemporary photo-journalist producing work that went beyond reportage. His images do not reinforce British colonial values, but allow for a critical and nuanced reading of the relationship between the British forces and their Afghan peers.
Simon Norfolk (b. 1963) is a landscape photographer whose work over the last ten years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word ‘battlefield’ in all its forms. Norfolk’s photographs re-imagine or respond to Burke’s Afghan war scenes in the context of the contemporary conflict. Conceived as a collaborative project with Burke across time, this body of work by Simon Norfolk is presented alongside John Burke’s images. Rather than artificially restaging Burke’s compositions exactly, Norfolk identified contemporary equivalents, researching and travelling to Burke’s vantage points and developing a digital equivalent of his collodion wet plate technique. Norfolk finds many of the original locations of Burke’s work and conveys modern parallels with their subject matter depicting soldiers, bomb-sites, tented communities, alongside images of contemporary culture such as internet cafés and radar stations.
Opposite – Kabul ‘Pizza Express’ Restaurant behind the Muncipal Bus depot (2011), Simon Norfolk
Exhibition runs through till June 30th, 2012
Crawford Art Gallery
Emmet Place
Cork
Ireland
