Simon Norfolk gave up photojournalism so that he could record conflict in a new, more painterly way. Aidan Dunne is impressed by his work, currently on show in Cork and Cobh
Simon Norfolk made the photographs in his exhibition Welcome to the Hotel Africa as artist-in-residence with Irish soldiers keeping the peace for the UN in Liberia. It wasn't an obvious assignment for Norfolk, and the results are not what you might expect. He is essentially a landscape photographer, not a photojournalist. Also, he is best known for Afghanistan: Chronotopia, a mind-boggling exploration of a country devastated by war.
One thing that sets his work apart from photojournalism is the fact that he uses neither 35mm nor digital SLR cameras but an unwieldy wooden 5in-by-4in plate camera, a formidable object that must be mounted on a tripod. Exposure times are usually prolonged, and taking a photograph involves Norfolk draping a blanket over his head. The difference in visual quality is startling: these are huge, incredibly detailed, deep-focus images.
If the Irish soldiers were, at first, unsure of where Norfolk was coming from, they were exceptionally helpful and accommodating - and in the end, he feels, they understood what he was trying to do. "At first there was this feeling of: When are you going to get the guys jumping out of the personnel carrier? But they realised I wasn't going to do that, and they gave me anything I wanted. I think the coolest thing is that, although they weren't quite sure what I was doing, they had the courage to let me get on with it and help me in any way I could. They were also very good to be with, very patient, very easy going. I regard what they are doing as noble."
The Liberian photographs are being shown in pairs, each one taken inside the army camp partnered with one taken outside. "Broadly speaking, on the inside there is a sense of light, of resources, of possibility, the will to get things done. Outside there is emptiness, powerlessness, a ruined landscape. Every second person who writes about Africa drags in 'heart of darkness' as a metaphor. I wouldn't pretend that the situation in Liberia is anything other than terrible, but there is possibility; there is a source of light."
Against the order and domesticity of the UN camp, with its containers of supplies, its neat row of personnel carriers and its soldiers' quarters, there is, for example, the epic expanse of the ruined post-industrial landscape at Buchanan, once a thriving port for the export of iron ore. Sections of disassembled railway tracks stretch into the distance. It's as if the panorama has been weirdly picked apart. "What happened was that everything was nicked," Norfolk explains. "People took everything they could." But they had only their hands to work with. If it couldn't be taken apart by hand and carried away, it remained.
You can also see a cross section of Norfolk's other work at Lavitt's Quay, in Cork, where Welcome to the Hotel Africa is on show, including images from Afghanistan and Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Sirius Arts Centre, which is responsible for bringing Norfolk to Ireland in the first place, is showing Refuge, consisting of new photographs from an ongoing project. "Wars create certain kinds of landscape. Sometimes obviously so, as in Afghanistan or Iraq. But, equally, I see refugee camps as battlegrounds. Something happens 300 miles away and the result is the creation of an instant new landscape."
An eventual publication, based on various kinds of militarised spaces, from a French supercomputer used to design nuclear armaments to more literal battlefields, is still a couple of years away. His point is that our comfortable societies are inextricably linked to wars elsewhere, and saturated with military technologies. The computational devices currently used to guide missiles to their targets, he suggests, will filter through to civilian use when the military no longer regards them as indispensable.
He began as a photojournalist, working for left-wing magazines before becoming staff photographer for Living Marxism in 1990. He covered Northern Ireland, eastern Europe and the first Gulf War. But he became increasingly dissatisfied with the strictures of photojournalism. "It describes things but doesn't explain them. It's how we know there's a war in Iraq, what is happening day to day, but my problem with it is that, like so much journalism, it offers up all its meanings immediately; it's instant. The subjects I was trying to deal with were too complicated for it."
It was then, around the mid 1990s, that he turned his attention to landscapes of conflict, at first using a medium-format camera to produce images that were more expansive, more considered than reportage photography, that invited questions and interpretation.
The remarkable visual quality of his images, his choice of subject matter and his poised compositions invite comparison with classical painting. "I very much wanted to engage with ideas from painting, with the sublime, with the role of ruins in classical paintings, even with the kind of golden light that suffuses a Lorraine. The tonality I can get with the camera is the tonality of painting. I want to print and show the work to the scale of paintings." Lorraine, aka the great 17th-century French landscape painter Claude Gelée, is a key interest of Norfolk's. "If you look at the history of paintings of ruins, Lorraine's paintings were very political. The classical ruins in his work were a pointed comment on the empire-building of his time. He was implying that the French and British empires in the making would also crumble and pass. All that would remain was awe at the power of God. I felt some of that awe in Afghanistan - not at the power of God, I have to say, but at the power of contemporary weaponry. Since 9/11 I feel that I've been witnessing the building of a new American empire, and I have to respond."
Norfolk has just won a major award at one of the world's leading photographic festivals, in the French city of Arles, and his work is now in the collections of many museums internationally. Yet he is distrustful of much of the contemporary art world. "A lot of modern art is vapid and narcissistic, full of self-references," he says. "Artists are concerned about their relationship with Saatchi or Gagosian. I'm sorry, but those concerns are just not enough when the world is going insane. That's what I want to talk about."
Welcome to the Hotel Africa is at 21 Lavitt's Quay, Cork, until September 2nd (Tue-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat-Sun 11am-4pm). Refuge is at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, until September 4th (Wed-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat-Sun 2-5pm)