Hi, I'm Helen Lewis. I'm a journalist and I'm a museum geek.
My name's James. I'm the head of public history at Imperial War Museums.
Helen Lewis has joined James Bulgin, at Imperial War Museum London, to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask... about how recent conflicts have shaped our world. In this series, we're exploring the role of the war artist, filmmaker, and photographer in capturing seismic moments of contemporary history. And in this episode, we are looking at how art, photography, and film have captured different scales of destruction in the Twentieth Century.
I remember a firefighter running up to me and asking me if he could use my phone to call his wife. And he couldn't get through and he couldn't get through. And then he had to go and I remember I had this phone number on my phone and thought... do I call? I don't know if I call her, or do I not?
From No Man's Land to mushroom clouds, we'll look at the people that have documented over a hundred years of conflict.
The huts in which they suffered are destroyed by fire. We must cleanse the world of the filth and pestulence of this place...
On our way, we'll encounter artistic works that have captured some of the darkest moments in human history. All so that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.
There's people sitting down amidst dead bodies and people who were obviously in terrible distress and there's one woman crying and being sick - And my immediate thought was, how could you see this and go back home and not have it haunt you for ever?
All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor and this is Conflict of interest It is a crisp, autumnal afternoon; and James and Helen are making their way towards Imperial War Museum London.
I love museums, but I have never been, not that I can remember, to the Imperial War Museum, which is strange 'cause I lived in South London for a long time. And it's, let's be honest, of all the museums, it's maybe the most impressive looking from the outside. Right?
Well we like to think so.
I'm interested to see a gallery here that is specifically focused on something thematically.
Okay.
I think that's really nice to break out one slice. Rather than trying to either give you the kind of iconic highlight or to give you the kind of waterfront. I think, I guess galleries can be a bit more quirky, can't they? They can be a bit more led by individual taste.
Are you surprised that the Imperial War Museum has a substantial art gallery as part of its public offer?
It's not something I would've thought about, but it makes a lot of sense to me because people have always been fascinated by - even before war photography - war paintings, having official artists. I'm pretty sure the Army had an official artist.
Yeah they did, the war artist commission. Yeah. Yeah. They did. We'll see some of that inside. Perhaps it is something which a lot of people don't necessarily know that, the museum has a really substantial and actually, significant collection of art, which, as you say, bears witness to over a century of conflict now.
Helen and James will be joined by a third voice: Suzanne Plunkett, Reuters' Chief Photographer for the UK and Ireland... and a photojournalist for almost 30 years.
I spent two long assignments in Kabul, in Afghanistan after the war in 2002, and 2003,
And we've got some of Suzanne's work in here, right?
Which is amazing. And it's such an incredible thing to be able to see this work with the person who created it. . Narrator: We have arrived at our first object. On certain podcast apps you can glance at your phone as you listen, to see some of the works we're discussing.
So I'm presuming that this is a first World War painting. We've got a few bits of kind of concrete and pillars and what looks like kind of corrugated iron and then all these tree stumps that have just been, cut off kind of six feet from the ground. It it, is a landscape of total, total destruction. And the color scheme reflects that too, right? That it's very muted tones, but then it has these patches of ochre. It's it's almost like the, human-made bits are kind of leaving the landscape.
But am I right?
You're not wrong. It's it is a painting called Menin Road by artist called Paul Nash. It's interesting that you see it as a, completely just about a rural landscape because actually what it. relates to, in its historic context, is The Battle of Menin Road. So there was a road, but the road itself has been completely subsumed, which is one of the things that Nash was really kind of interested in portraying. The total level of destruction.
All of the, kind of the nature has almost been obliterated and we just see it sort of fragments remaining.
Suzanne, does this look like any landscape that you've photographed in your career?
It does. I covered the, Indian Ocean tsunami in 2005. And I remember feeling like you can't get a photograph to show the scale. And it was not until we got into a helicopter and could kind of see from above, but even then there was no human element. So it did feel like it just went on and on and on.
It's kind of interesting, isn't it? 'Cause we always, perfectly reasonably, summised that we're kind of at the whim of nature because nature has this kind of extraordinary strength and power. But here we see that humanity has almost kind of demonstrated its own capacity to be as destructive as nature. And I suppose that's one of the things which is so significant about 20th century conflict, modern conflict. And this is at the front edge of that. This idea that, battles aren't contained.
These wars are so huge and vast. They have the capacity to completely destroy.
What year would he have painted this?
So this was just immediately after the war. So, Nash had served in the war. He'd actually had this sort of strange quirk of fate that he had been serving, as an officer in, 1917 in Ypres. And his unit had happened to have a relatively quiet time whilst they were there. He, one strange moment, stumbled over and broke a rib in the trench so he was taken off the line. And after he'd gone, back to recuperate, his unit was wiped out in an attack or virtually completely wiped out.
So he escaped it, in one of those really strange quirks of fate that he just happened to break a rib, which took him away. When he came back to the front, he came back as an official war artist. So he was there to observe. And he painted this afterwards. And it's really interesting because, as this was happening, his own relationship to his kind of beliefs about the conflict were changing quite substantially
That story is so interesting to me, 'cause I've just noticed that there is one tree still standing, right? Amid all of the other trees have been wiped out, which is kind of presumably what to some extent he must have felt like he was the - and, lots of men in that war must have felt like I'm the one person I knew who came home.
Particularly given the broader context in which this happens in 1917, it's really, difficult to overestimate how significant the battle of the Somme had been the year before. 1916, which had been this huge, loss of life and huge number of casualties in this battle on the first day. And then that sustained itself over the, the weeks and months that followed. So, It's the, it is the sort of story of the First World War really that, it, it was a kind of a, paradigmatic moment.
Suddenly mankind demonstrates that it has this propensity almost to create this sort of total destruction. As you say, it meant that, even if there was never quite a lost generation, which is one of the myths that emerged from the war, it was certainly the case that virtually everybody would've known somebody who'd been lost. And it really kind of laid waste to a lot of the big ideas that had underpinned western civilization and certainly British civilization and culture.
This idea, this idea is the certainty of the rightness of, everything and, the likes of Freud and, Marx and all these people coming through and challenging these preexisting - Nietzsche's coming. So, so there's a lot happening at the same time. And you do see this, this sense that somehow who we are has changed and our relationships ourselves has fundamentally changed.
But also that I think you're right, that if you think about modernism being an artistic and a literary movement about the kind of, it was about destruction, right? It was about throwing away formal old rules that maybe this was a time when they felt, hang on a minute, actually things are going to change in social ways, which they did. I wrote about this in my, book. Women moving Into factories and jobs. You come out of this in 1918. Women get the vote. Women get the right to sit as magistrates.
They have often, throughout the First World War, been earning their own wages. The kind of, the social disruptions of the twenties are quite hard to understand unless you understand that, you moved a huge population of men to another country and the women kind of were left behind doing different things. And I wrote about them, the women's football teams, during the first World War that happened in the factories, they had ladies football teams. 'cause the FA suspended the men's league.
And one of them, Dick, Kerr Ladies, went on a tour exactly of a battlefield like this immediately after the war had ended, they went and played French players who all played in berets, which I find, very charming. But, the descriptions in their diaries of what it was like to just drive through mile after mile of France that was, had been just blitzed, run over, and there was, there were just tiny little pockets of villages, but still littered with barbed wire.
. I don't think - it's hard now to appreciate, even when we see images of war on tv, what it's like to just - everywhere as far as the eye can see is, has been destroyed.
Yeah. There's that. And Graves has that line in, is the title of his book, Goodbye To All That. And, obviously he's talking about something specific. But I would think it pertains so well to that whole sentiment of saying that's all gone. That our version of the world and the structure, the certainty of the structures of kind of gender norms and class norms.
And the aristocracy, the great houses suddenly, fall into disrepair. Labour costs are much higher because there's fewer, men of working age. It's what kind of, yeah, it's what ends Edwardian Britain, isn't it? And then the, Britain that emerges from it is very different.
Yeah, there's, Freud has this whole kind of man is no longer master in his own home. This idea that even certainty of self can't be relied upon anymore. So the first World War kind of demonstrates this. But what is, in, in retrospect really chilling, is that actually this augered in the age of something much bigger and you're talking about some of the wars since, and things like the tsunami, you suddenly realise that this is not an abearance. This is actually the start of something.
This is, the humanity kind of defining new terms under which it will exist.
James. I'm loving this. This is like the classiest guided tour ever. This is my dream, this is my absolute dream. You get someone to ask them questions personally, and they can't run away!
We move on from modernism to something with a touch of surrealism. Again, if you check your phone on certain podcast apps, you can see what Helen sees.
instantly when I saw this, I thought it's got The air of a, René Magritte or a Salvador Dali. There's something surrealist about it. You've got bits of broken walls and a bit of a face of a statue. Someone maybe bathing half naked in a, a lake. But there's also a peeled off poster, and then... I'm not quite sure what's happening on the right hand side.
It looks like sort of wallpaper has come off a, wall somehow, but there are a lot of slightly confusing elements it's not giving me a lot of help about what it's about. James, help me!
Yeah, no, sure. I can completely understand that. The picture relates, specifically to the Spanish Civil War, and specifically to the bombing of Guernica as part of the Spanish civil War.
So that's 1930s?
1930s, yeah. . Helen: And that's Guernica as in, which people will have heard of in the sense the Pablo Picasso giant painting. So this is the same incident? It's the same incident and it's, but it's a really significant incident. The Spanish Civil War is one of those wars, which, has kind of perhaps receded a little in the kind of public popular imagination or the collective memory, but really significant for a number of different reasons.
Not least because the bombing of Guernica was this, again, kind of enormous transgression. The first time that there was, was bombing of civilians in an urban target like that. It ushers in a new era.
So there's a noticeable difference from, the subjects that Nash was working with, which had to do with sort of spaces of conflict, which is not to say that civilians weren't caught up in the First World War, of course there were, but, moving into this space, suddenly there's this new dimension of human experience whereby bombs can drop from the air. And, we might think about that today as being a given, because that's pretty established.
But putting ourselves back in the position of the 1930s when something like that has never happened before, is huge. But it's still pretty terrifying, isn't it? 'Cause now the thing I think that people find hard is the idea of, unmanned, drones essentially, and the idea that someone can be sitting at essentially with a video games controller in the middle of Nevada and they're killing people thousands of miles away. Yeah, exactly.
For quite, but very much born out of this sort of initial moment where that, kind of Rubicon is crossed. So, so what we see here is, in contrast to the Nash painting, the fragments, the sort of shards of. human spaces in a, way that human spaces are more absent from the Nash painting. it's almost like the focus of conflict is becoming more about the role and the positionality of the civilian in conflict and their sort of fundamental vulnerability under the weight modern war.
The artist himself, John Armstrong, wasn't there during the Spanish Civil War, but it had this huge impression on that whole generation. Because of course, the other thing about the Spanish Civil War, which is kind of extraordinarily romantic in its own way, is that all these artists from across the world obviously went over there en masse
Yeah, and George Orwell too, right? Turns up and on the front lines, gets shot in the neck and ends up having to be invalided out. But there was a sense that it was. there was a movement behind it, right? That it was, happening in someone else's country, but it was part of a kind of political movement that young avant-garde people would ally themselves to.
Exactly. And it really kind of activated and motivated this generation of artists, together. And in fact, Paul Nash established a group called Unit One, which was quite short-lived, but Armstrong was a part of it. So there was a connection between those two artists. And then, Armstrong becomes this person who's one of many people galvanized by the Spanish civil War.
But I was thinking this, painting for me, you get this on the floor here, there's this sort of fragment of a, what looks like a, a statue
But huge right. That's what threw me back. I dunno. Suzanne, did you also, when you looked at this, think there's a slight surrealism to it? Because the, bit of the statue is just so vast that it, almost, it, it just doesn't feel like it belongs in the same way to the rest of the painting.
Yeah. It looks like the, painting is in layers. Which photojournalist always kind of try to strive to get in layers into their work. But it does look like a Dalí or a De Chirico, but it's got this kind of sinister edge, you just feel like something wrong has happened, even though it's just in the posters that are expressions of the people that - Helen: Yeah, people screaming in the posters or shouting and then a tree half growing out of what looks like rock.
Yeah.
Have you had a situation somewhere, you've, taken a photo and you've seen something in it that just profoundly feels like it doesn't belong there?
So I haven't been on a front line, but I've photographed the, aftermath and almost daily life after. And you'll see sort of when I was in Afghanistan, I remember being in towns where, people are going about their daily life. And meanwhile, the buildings are falling apart. They're in pieces. There's, and there's still people with, Kalashnikovs walking down the street casually and you're saying, oh, good morning to them and thinking, what's going on?
Yeah,
Exactly.
One of the problems I'm guessing about photographing the aftermath of conflict is we have such a well established idea about the kind of visual clichés of it, that trying to find the freshness in that, that brings, that actually tells a new story and an accurate story, rather than slotting into
Those clichés, which you don't want to fall into. And trying to find a human story to sort of, you know, pin to the wider theme.
But that whole concept of incongruousness as well is really important I think. Clearly that's something which Armstrong had - we could presume - Armstrong had in mind as he's working on this, but, that sort of surrealism we talk about Dalí et cetera. I think it, it does suggest that there is something broader going on to do with representation and almost like the, kind of escalating crisis of representation that the sort of mimetic form of art.
Which, the Nash is still in its own way, mimetic, you still recognize it as a landscape, you don't need to be told that. Whereas for this one, we recognize elements and fragments of it, but it's composition is disorientating. It is incongruous. and there is an incongruency about this. And I, always sort of feel like in, in a way this bit of statue suggests like the destruction of the great cultures. Do you know what I mean? It looks like come from
It does look like Roman or Greek doesn't it? Doesn't it?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
I almost feel like in places I've been, this could exist. You know like at first when I looked at this, I went, it's surreal. It wouldn't ever be when you look at a Dalí, there's melting clocks and it's crazy. But when you look at this, this could exist.
The physics almost hold firm, don't they? The physics seem authentic and plausible. Just... it's just their composition.
Just has a deep sense of wrongness about it, doesn't it, this painting? Which I think is it kind of compelling is it conveys an emotion and a mood as much as any, much as visual information. So was the Spanish Civil War one of the first wars to be exhaustively covered if it was attracting all these artists and writers?
Yeah, there's
Wasn't Hemingway in there as well?
Was Hemingway there well? Okay.
Yeah, And what it also did is on a historical level, is kind of introduced the world, and again, Guernica's a part of that - but to the realities of what modern war was likely to be like. So it, sort of, set a precedent, I suppose, when the second World War followed. That's not to suggest there was any kind of direct relationship or causality or anything of that nature, but it meant that the types of weapons that would be used in the second World War were witnessed in the Spanish Civil War.
And it, really kind of gave people an enormous cause for concern. Because whilst nobody could have possibly predicted the course of the Second World War, or indeed whether or not it would actually happen at all, nevertheless, it did suggest that if there were to be another World War, it would be of a very, different order.
I think it's hard for us to remember now, but if you were alive in 1910, you might have been born when the Civil War happened, right? the Civil War in the America in the 1860s, which is still people lining up in, across a field and walking at each other. And your life could have covered that, just incredible industrialisation war. So there would've been people around for whom this was, just completely new and not the way that things had been done.
For sure. And, you've gotta remember even things like flight, for the first World War, like the RAF was only formed during the First World War. The idea of airplanes being used in combat was new because airplanes themselves were pretty new.
And presumably such a souring of a dream in the sense that you read people writing in the 1890s and 1900s about things like electricity and industrialisation, and that was, it was, this huge, exciting engine of progress. And then you begin to see through the first World War and then the Spanish Civil War, the downside of that, which is you can do everything much more efficiently and at much greater scale, including killing people.
We move on this time to one of the darkest moments in human history. Helen and Suzanne witness a newsreel from the end of the Second World War filmmakers educating allied audiences on the Nazi genocide of the Jewish race
Here in Belsen, just one of their concentration camps, people are still dying at the rate of 40 a day. German soldiers under a British Guard carry the pitiful dead from the huts in which they had been herded. These men died from deliberate starvation and neglect. It was too late to save them. They were too weak to take food or respond to medical care.
the Holocaust Memorial Day focuses on the, liberation of Auschwitz. And there are good reasons for that. And Auschwitz has become this kind of real focus of, holocaust, memory. And there are good reasons for that too. Belsen,. for Britain, is particularly significant because Belsen was liberated by British forces.
So where is it, in Poland? In Germany?
No, it's Germany. So, but it's an unusual site, actually. Belsen, for the majority of its existence didn't exist as a concentration camp in the way that other sites did. It was a transit camp, and it was a site where so-called privileged Jews were kept, or exchanged Jews, in the hope and anticipation that they could kind of be swapped as part of kind of grotesque deals on the behalf of the Nazis.
as the Allied Forces closed in on Germany from both the east and West, the Nazis began a grim evacuation of concentration camps moving prisoners deeper into the Reich. This retreat resulted in the harrowing death marches. Columns of emaciated prisoners forced to travel long distances under brutal conditions Many succumb to exhaustion, starvation, and violence with around a third dying on the journey. These marches marked a catastrophic final chapter of the Holocaust.
By the time the survivors reached Germany, the shrinking territory left fewer sites to hold them amplifying the horror.
Belsen became the site to which the majority of people were evacuated just because it was the most sort of, convenient, I suppose, given other things that were going on. So what it meant is that at the point of liberation, in April 1945, there were about 60,000 prisoners in Belsen with virtually no provision for them. That's far, far, far more than any other site of that nature. What had also happened at that stage is that the Nazis, or Germany, had completely lost control of the whole system.
I.e. communications networks were breaking down, supply lines were breaking down, et cetera. So they weren't able to do anything to support or sustain that population at all. So when these people arrived, there was absolutely nothing there for them.
I think one of the most shocking things about the footage is the bit when you go from seeing the prisoners who have obviously in most cases starved to death, to seeing the Camp Commandant who looks sleek and plump and all the women who worked there and, and just the kind of the shocking, difference - visuals bring that home to you in a way that a written description even maybe wouldn't.
Yeah, I think one of the things I think about the footage which is so significant and the Belsen footage is, sort of dominates all of this liberation footage, because there's so much of it, because there were so many people there in the AFPU, the Army Film and Photography Unit, was there to capture it. It's really sort of defined the way that we think about these things in a lot of ways.
But what I always think is really striking about it's so striking, as you say, and so immediate, that it has sort of, in a way, indulged this myth that the allies knew nothing about these things until they arrived at the gates, which of course they did. They had a really comprehensive knowledge of what was going on throughout. But exactly as you say, there was something about seeing it or being able to visualize it, which was transformative.
And so I always think we could talk about versions of knowing. We could know intellectually, but to know, because we see it is transformative.
The other image that I find just very striking just now is there's people sitting down amidst dead bodies and people who were obviously in terrible distress and there's one woman crying and being sick. And interesting thing is that's not everybody, right? I don't know how you felt when you saw this, Suzanne, but I thought, my immediate thought was, how could you see this and go back home and not have it haunt you for ever?
Do you put your camera down and help, or do you take pictures in hopes that it will bring help in?
RIght.
I, yeah, I find that the story of Kevin Carter, who took the very famous photo during famine of the child being stalked by a vulture and then won a Pulitzer for it, but then was then haunted by the question of 'and what happened next?' And he couldn't answer that. To me, that kind of encapsulates the photojournalist's dilema right, which is what are you there to do? Right? Are you there to record it for posterity or do you have to put your humanity aside to some extent to do that?
Because you are a kind of emissary of the rest of the world to bring this stuff home.
Right, and it, and he ended up... he did help the child... but I think it it felt like he was bullied by people not understanding and jumping on seeing these photographs thinking you know, that's kind of when the conversation started. for a lot of photographers.
There are really difficult, ethical questions which continue to exercise anyone working with this content and this footage about what you should or shouldn't use. I think you're seeing people in such terrible levels of suffering and degradation, and their bodies, particularly people who've haven't obviously had the ability to give their consent to be filmed.
Something which we talked to a lot of different people about when we were working on the galleries and consulted a lot about, because on one hand it exists within historical record, so to, to not use it means that you are kind of eliding that part of the, archive. But on the other, you do run the risk of sort of further exploiting people who have already been so egregiously exploited and assaulted in their lives.
How much of this made it back to Britain? Obviously there was a huge amount of footage collected, but did people, were people able to see it? Were they, not happy to see it, but were they, were they in a place to be able to receive and understand that this stuff had happened?
Yeah they were. I think they, it sort of made itself kind of felt and seen in various different forms. It was obviously front page, the newspapers was a big thing, and for example, Josef Kramer, who you were just alluding to just there, he was the Commandant at Belsen, who extraordinarily, and this is a whole other story, chose to stay in post when he knew that the allies were coming because Belson, when it was liberated, was still behind enemy lines.
And there was this concern from the Germans - obviously entirely about their self-interest - concern from them that if the allies were to fight through into Belsen and the prisoners were allowed to escape, then , typhus would become rampant because there was so much typhus within the camp. So they brokered this kind of agreement that Belsen would be within the zone of protection, which is how the Allies arrived there. And Kramer was still at his post when they got there.
But then in the British press he became known as the Beast of Belsen. And these sort of various titles come out quite often, very gendered and quite misogynist. There's, Irma Grese became The Beastess of Belsen. These, The Bitch of Belsen. So all these various names associated with it. So the pictures were in the papers. The film was seen in newsreels, et cetera, and it did have a really significant impact on the way that people thought about things.
And what it also became, and it was a post-rationalisation, but it became something which really rationalised the entire war. There's this whole sense of saying 'and this proves what we were fighting for'.
That was even, I think in the voiceover, which was, if it hadn't been for the Battle of Britain looking at a pile of bodies, this could have been, this could have been you.
I noticed that. That was very - James: Yeah. it's quite unapologetic, isn't it.
Obviously to put a very strong, patriotic kind of spin on it, that you could see that the people not being allowed to just digest these images as they were, they were delivered with a message behind them.
Yeah. But the Holocaust has this real problem in the collective memory, in that there's almost sort of two - and a number of scholars have talked about this - two different versions of the Holocaust. There's the version of the Holocaust that actually happened. And there's the version of the Holocaust that's been sort of reconstructed in culture. So, films and
There's always a mythology with any event that is that big and happens on such a massive scale.
Exactly. But the sort of challenge with the Holocaust is that, that sort of quote unquote myth of the Holocaust and that's how Tim Cole describes it as well, has almost completely displaced the actual historic one. So the details and the references and the understanding that people have gleaned from all of those kind of mythologised versions have really distracted from the reality of what occured. And I think the Belsen footage makes this point actually.
One of my big, concerns about some of the cultural recreations of the subjects is that they really tend towards this obsession with the idea of systemisation and bureaucratisation and, that kind of thing. Whereas I think actually the Holocaust was far more messy, iterative, brutal.
Right, which is what The Zone of Interest tried to capture, right? The idea that it was happening next door to people's gardens. And you had to actively ignore that something weird was happening at the end of your road.
Yeah. And of course, people didn't - I think, again, this idea is one of those prevailing myths, and it became obviously a natural defense mechanism afterwards to say, I didn't know about it, I didn't know about it. Even at Nuremberg, senior Nazis were seeking to make that case. It really doesn't bear any close scrutiny. In fact, one of the things we display in the galleries is a letter from a lady called Eleonore Gusenbauer, who lived near Mauthausen concentration camp.
And she wrote to the Commandant at Mauthausen during its operation, and she said, it was a letter of complaint to him, she said it was very distressing for her as a, civilian living nearby to have to witness and listen to prisoners dying, these protracted, agonising deaths. And what she said is, she would be much more happy if they could either kill them quickly or do it away from public gaze so that she doesn't have to deal with it.
We move again to another scene of destruction
So, I'm looking at a black and white photo of a mushroom cloud, and I'm presuming this is a test fire? One of the ones in the Pacific, is that what I'm looking at? One of the very first tests?
No, this is, the actual one over Nagasaki. This is the real thing, yeah. Nagasaki was obviously the second of the bombs that was, dropped. Part of a series of events that have this massive significance for humanity. We were talking previously about science and the role of science and conflict and technology, and, the atomic science was such a critical part of the scientific movement in the early part of the last century.
And at first there were these hopes that it had this propensity, or this potential for humanity to revolutionise everything and to allow us to be our kind of better selves and everything. And of course, what actually happened is the atomic bomb was created. And in extraordinarily quick order. It's really easy to lose sight of this, that this science was moving so fast. So fast.
And this group of scientists, which, it's a project which started in this country actually, which, again gets forgotten. Not saying that's something we should be proud of, but it, I think it's important to know-
It's strange, hell-for-leather, isn't it? I was reading about William Shockley, the physicist, and there was, there was something very strange happened, that basically all of the, the physics community, in the late 1930s and 1940s in America, suddenly they all just vanished to Los Alamos. And then no one heard from them. But there must have been that incredible sense in this, in the community. Oh, something's up.
Yeah. And these extraordinarily smart people, as you say, the sort of people who would, in other circumstances have been in laboratories and nobody would've heard of, they'd have just been getting on with their stuff and making these really important discoveries, but suddenly they all convened in this place.
Suzanne, can I ask you about how you feel about the aesthetic qualities of this image? Because it's obviously, I presume, taken out of a plane, is that right? But it's, but it's quite badly cropped. I don't mean to-
it is...
...pernickety.
It's niggling me a bit
So you're cutting off a bit of the mushroom cloud and it, it takes a moment. Now we know it's an iconic shape. We sort of know what it is, but it actually doesn't convey a lot of visual information itself. What did it make you think when you first saw it?
Well at first, yeah, I thought the crop was bad, but I thought how did they get that picture? Because if that was the actual one, that's so and how did the person in the plane survive? And it must have just been taken-
Really fast. No, there's a lot of risk for them as they were doing these things, because of course, the nature and scale of the blast for these things is massive. So they were various sort of maneuvers that they had to follow once the device had been dropped and they had these kinda sunglasses and stuff in order to, protect their eyes and stuff.
So I suppose in a way, the poorness of the framing evidences the sort of the liveness of the moment because they would've just had to grab the shot and then get out of Get out of there.
That makes sense.
Yeah. And not knowing how big it was gonna be. What always strikes me about these things is that they are, if you didn't know what was beneath it, there's almost like this, almost like a sort of an ethereal beauty about it. the shape and the form. It's just that, it's the knowledge that beneath it is such-
And that's this reflection and the- yeah.
And to be a photographer in that situation, I can't imagine there's anything comparable in your career that you just look at and think, no human in history has ever looked at this before. It doesn't happen that often.
Yeah. This was only the third bomb, they did the one, the Trinity test, before they left, and then there's the bomb and Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. So this is the third time this had happened.
My Grandfather was in World War II and he was on, in Bimini when they did a test? And it made a huge impact on him. He talked about it endlessly. And with me he wanted me to have this photograph before he died so I could kind of go out and tell the world exactly what happened. He was very shaken by it. really? Yeah.
I think one of the strange things about it is when within the context of the war, there had been more people killed in bombing raids in conventional bombing raids in Japan than were killed during the atomic bombs. So I sometimes wonder if it's sort of the clarity of the difference it made that emerged slightly later, but it clearly changed everything.
I presume that in some ways the morality of that was like, we have to end this war before, while we're still ahead.
It turned out that the Germans were nowhere near it.
But that's one of the great ironies, isn't it, of the Holocaust, is the fact that so many brilliant European scientists had all left because they were Jewish. And there's that description of it as being essentially a Hungarian school science fair project, right. The Manhattan Project. But the Nazis fell behind technologically because they had driven out their best scientists through racism. It's an extraordinary historical irony.
Yeah. they denied themselves the capacity through their own sort of prejudice and bigotry. Yeah. and thank god they did because it's, obviously the ends never justified the means in that respect, but the, I do shudder to think sometimes what would've happened had Hitler had the bomb at his disposal.
We have come to our last object: two photographs taken by one of today's guests...
So, Suzanne, we've finally come to your pictures from your time reporting on 9/11 on the terror attacks that took down the World Trade Center. And the thing that first of all strikes me is it's almost like the bottom one is almost like a kind of a blizzard. Like it's a snowfall, people are covering their mouths, they're running away, but there's just so much dust hanging in the air. And the same is true of the other one, which is of someone being interviewed, but the streets are white.
It's, and I have to say, is that one of your abiding memories of that day? I always wonder what did it, smell like? It must have smelled like burning as well, right?
It, it was, yeah. It was a horrible smell. It was, my overriding memories are just of complete confusion, but trying to make sense of it. I came out of this, actually this subway station sort of about a few minutes before the towers came down. And I remember looking up and you could see the towers. I was about two blocks away and you could see them. And at that point the planes had gone in and I was thinking, how are they gonna put out that fire?
Like we didn't really, we weren't really thinking what it was. I wasn't thinking terrorism. So I came out of that subway station and was setting my camera settings for the beautiful sunny day and then someone yelled, they're coming down and I was thinking it would fall, a tree in the forest. You don't know which way it's gonna go. And I was not 110 stories away from- so I thought it's gonna come and hit me.
I ran and hid under a car and then kind of had that moment of this is not gonna do any- this is not gonna work. And then got out from under the car and you could hear kind of this huge noise. It was really loud and then it was just quiet.
Was it like metal groaning noise? That's what I feel like I can remember from TV reports at the time. Just this kind of sort of wail of kind of steel coming apart.
Yeah. You can hear- I've found the recording of exactly at that moment where I had photographed some people kind of running away in horror and you can hear just things, breaking and falling and screaming and then it's just absolutely quiet. So in this picture here, the one that looks like a blizzard, it was just absolute silence and no one knew what to do.
And I remember thinking, I need to capture the horror of this, and this is a recurring thing and showing the scale and just sort of wandering around lower Manhattan. - Helen: to me because it's, again, it's one of those things that's hard to put yourself back at the time that it happened, right? Because it became so much a justification for the war in Iraq, and therefore so politicised.
But you didn't have any idea about that or any idea about the way that, that your photographs could later be used. What, did you think you needed to get down on film? What was the thing that you thought, this is important, this is what I- what are the things that you were drawn to photographing? It was everything because it was such a strange scene. It wasn't your every day. It was, you can see people, there was women without shoes, people with shoes in this dust.
People weren't crying and screaming and that's what I was looking for. It felt like there was this sort of silence and everyone was probably just as confused as I was. But you're right. It's the detail. So the guy that's being interviewed on TV is still clutching a can of soda. It's just like he's sort of cracked open a Sprite or something.
And that guy, he's using his newspaper to try and filter-
Yeah, and there was this cough that you had after, it was sort of the 9/11 cough and everybody had this horrible cough and you knew who was down there and who wasn't. And I remember taking this picture because I wasn't used to- this was before mobile phones, so it was almost like this last generation of photographers who were capturing iconic images. We weren't taking selfies of each other. We weren't photographing ourselves.
We weren't- and I remember this is a weird picture but I'm gonna to shoot everything. Right. And thinking, why am I taking a picture of the reporter?
And you were shooting on film as well?
No, this was digital.
This was digital? Okay.
This was an early digital camera. And that's why they're so small is the file
sizes were very small. Ah, Yeah. Interesting.
When did you send your photos into, was it AP you were working for at the time?
It was, yeah. I probably took pictures for about... 20 minutes? And then thought I have to get these on the wire, I have get these on the wire. And I went into this sort of vitamin/beeper shop New York kinda places and they were letting people in and then they closed the gate and people were almost banging on the gate to get in the shop because, we thought, this is before the second tower had fallen and so we were taking shelter and then, it was crammed.
And I was saying, can I use a phone line, can I use a phone line? And I, thought, and can I plug my laptop in thinking, just thinking of the job, thinking, I need to keep my laptop charged today. I don't know what I'm gonna see. And took out my enormous mobile phone, connected it to my laptop, sent three pictures, that was all I could get out. And that was when my office went, she's okay. Oh, thank God. And then, my parents were calling and, they could tell them, she, she's all right.
we see pictures. And I did not take as, as many pictures now if I had gone back, now, you shoot 3000 pictures at a football match and I probably took about 500 pictures that day.
Do you have an emotional response to seeing that?
I do. I feel like I do get a shaky feeling whenever I talk about it I start feeling shaky and, almost cold. I don't know. It's chilling and just going right back there. It was such a vivid memory of the day. Every single thing that went on. I remember a firefighter running up to me and asking me if he could use my phone to call his wife. And he couldn't get through and he couldn't get through.
And then he had to go and he dashed towards the, Ground Zero, at that time I didn't- and I remember I had this phone number on my phone and thought, do- and for weeks- What can you tell her? Do I call? I don't know if I call her or do I not? Did he sur-, I don't know who he is-
And you still don't know?
I still don't know. No,
Our time at the gallery is almost at an end, but there's just time for a Cup of tea in the cafe and a chance to decompress.
I think what will stay with me from looking around that gallery is the difficulty of capturing the scale of war and actually that ability to stand back and put it in perspective. That war is simultaneously something that happens to individual people, often changing their lives forever, ending their lives, but also that it, it is something kind of a, mass event.
And also that it's something that happens to the people back home and there is always a kind of contest about what images that they're getting beamed back to them, and the difficulty of working in dangerous situations to, to tell the truth. I
think it's about the
hardest place to kind of claim that images are true. And photojournalism is always a kind of a huge debate about what does truth really mean. Can you ever capture some- the totality of a situation in a single image? And in war that is just so much harder than anywhere else. You are always shooting it from your perspective, which is by definition, a limited perspective.
But yeah, one of the things I'm really gonna take away is now I think from people born in Western Europe in the second half of the 20th century have had one of the most conflict-free existences of anybody in human nature. And that's not the default experience of humanity. And that's why, great to come to a museum like this because war is almost not the natural state of humanity, but it is something that has been a constant throughout human history.
and we're deluding ourselves if we think it's gone away. Maybe the Ukraine war has changed how people feel about that. But in the same way that 9/11, I think, changed how many americans felt about violence and destruction, that it was something that, oh, it happens here, it happens in Manhattan. And that's not ever something you've ever experienced before. James, Suzanne, thank you so much for being my guides to the gallery and to what it's like to be a photojournalist.
It was very mind expanding, which is what I always hope for when I come to a museum. And to me, the crazy thing about it is that I just, I've scratched the surface of the Imperial War Museum. We were walking through the galleries on our way there and I kept wanting to go off and go, oh, that's an exploded tank. That looks interesting. So, this was my first visit, but it will not be my last visit to the museum.
Good.
And that's where we must leave this Conflict of Interest and the Blavatnik Art Film and Photography Gallery. Thanks to our guests, Helen Lewis, Suzanne Plunkett, and James Bul next week on Conflict of Interest
And also there's the loss of life, isn't it? If you're asking people from the colonies to come and fight and then they don't come back. Absolutely. It's just, you know, what then happens?
Actor Susan Wokoma discovers the artist depicting the changing face of the British home front. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening and goodbye.