made history: close looking

My favorite photos in the gallery show are the pair Tchaikovsky and After Tchaikovsky, of the soldiers with the piano. In the first image, five soldiers sit and stand around a piano in a bombed out home. In the following image (the frame immediately following the previous image on the contact sheet, the wall text informs the viewer), the camera zooms in toward the broken wall, past the piano, to the (now only) three soldiers who are pointing their guns toward something outside the frame. The wall text implores us to question where the other two soldiers from the previous frame have gone. Into a bunker to hide? Ran away? Killed?

I think this pair of images exemplifies the reasons I like this whole exhibit so much. The pictures themselves ask powerful questions, questions that it is unlikely we will ever be able to answer. The exhibit is well planned to lead the viewer to these questions: wall texts guide the way the viewer reads the images. By calling the viewer's attention to the five soldier/three soldier difference in the Tchaikovsky images, the wall text also opens up the images to further narrative examination and interpretation. Whose house was this? Who are the soldiers shooting at? Where is the rest of their unit?

Many of the photographs are evocative even without a wall text, but I found the texts incredibly useful for getting into the time and place of these images, for being able to relate to many of the subjects as people and not as representation. Of course, some of the subjects are meant to be seen as people in true situations, but in fact, I learned in the gallery talk that some of the images were staged. In these images, the viewer is forced to call into question sincere feelings that one might have for the subjects: sympathy for the dead, fear for fighting soldiers, or joy at a victory must be examined more critically once the viewer finds out that not all the images are "authentic" or documents of actual (unstaged) moments.