Giuseppe Prode on "Broken landscape"

He is one of the most accomplished of today’s photojournalists. In his work he records news, facts and events in rapid succession, from every corner of the earth. Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, Liberia, Angola, Sudan-Darfur, Uganda, Iraq, the Tsunami in south-east Asia, Hurricane Katerina in the Southern United States, the prison in Guantanamo, the death of John Paul II, the earthquake in Pakistan, Afghanistan.
To observe and inform, in an age in which “the news” reaches us 24 hours a day, and makes events which happened only a few hours ago already seem old. We live in an everyday madness, running ever faster, assimilating almost nothing, in a kind of passive addiction. Photography should not be like this, no: it should force us to stop and reflect, to give contours to the surrounding facts, the stories lives lived, which gradually become overwhelming. A large number of the photographs selected for this exhibition show wars, illness, and grief, and the involuntary subjects are people. It is impossible not to be struck by the devastation visited similarly upon the soul and the flesh.
In 1938 Virginia Woolf published The three guineas, and of it she wrote: “…not feel pain on account of these images, not to withdraw horrified in the face of them, not to be driven to abolish whatever may provoke a similar devastation, a similar carnage – these would, in moral terms, be the actions of a monster...” These were considerations written on the edges of a debate on the Spanish Civil War, but they are still relevant today.
The advertising slogan for Paris Match when it first came out in 1949 was “the weight of words, the shock of photographs”: photographs were published in the newspapers to get a profound reaction from the readers. Now that all seems normal. Try, for example, reading and listening to the various contributions sent from the front line in Iraq: they are like an accountant’s report, an – atrocious – reckoning of civilian and non-civilian victims, which we take in with a half-grimace, immediately sedated by the “good news” that follows.
No, we are not all monsters. I still believe in the generative power of photography, in the capacity to fix ideas that this art form has. I also believe that the work of Paolo Pellegrin and many of his colleagues, is not expended on us in a mere contemplative moment.

Giuseppe Prode