I've come to Tate Modern where I'm going to look at the new exhibition
Conflict, Time, Photography
There are images of battlefields, of conflict zones
taken in the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, even years
after the act of violence took place
This is Don McCullin's Shell Shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue in South Vietnam in 1968
Don McCullin was right up there in the front line.
He had access, that's almost unimaginable a generation before or a generation after
and it is just an overwhelming physical impression of the effect of violence on the human body
This room really gives you a sense of the scale
of modern industrial warfare
These are all images from Kuwait
after the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991
It was a short war in the end but one that's left a long and enduring physical legacy
The footprint of modern war is deeper and much harsher than wars that have gone before
Now we are leaving behind thousands of tons of junk
the detritus of war
I was really stopped in my tracks by this installation here
These are pictures from the Congo a year after the formal supposed end of hostilities
The legacy of the violence, the physical scars
people that have been tortured and brutalised
millions of people displaced living in camps like this
There's not a single weapon in any of these pictures
It's of people who are traumatised by the unspeakable violence that they've witnessed
that's been perpetrated against them or their families
These are the unmistakeable concrete structures
the German bunkers
Hitler liked to believe that his empire would be everlasting
and yet these photos were taken 65 years after these structures were built
his empire's gone
and they're rotting away back into the sea
This is what happens to all the dreams of all the conquerors and dictators
that ever lived
ultimately in the end their empires crumble into dust
These are four photographs taken on what was the Western Front
during World War One
and I'm always struck every time I visit the Western Front
that when we humans can hold the memories of these wars and conflicts in the past
the earth itself doesn't really care
The earth recovers
the trees reforest the landscape
