PHOTO:Koen Wessing-The indelible image,Part I
Roland Barthe, in his seminal work Camera Lucida, discusses at length one of Koen Wessing’s 1979 photos from Nicaragua that depicts two nuns walking past armed soldiers. The juxtaposition, or duality, as Barthes calls it, is noteworthy to Barthes; it is this duality that creates the picture’s punctum, the thing that makes the viewer pause and look again (Part II).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jeu de Paume Archive
The exhibition “Koen Wessing, The indelible image” presents a collection of 80 photographs selected, more often than not, with the approval of Wessing himself. Wessing’s work reflects post-Second World War history: decolonisation, violence and brutality in Latin America, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the war in Yugoslavia, apartheid in South Africa and the resurgence of China. Koen Wessing was born in Amsterdam on January 26, 1942 during the German occupation. His father, Han Wessing, was an interior designer; his mother, Eva Eisenloeffel, a sculptor. He died on February 2, 2011, just before a trip to Chile. He was very ill but had wanted to go to the vernissage of “Indelible Images”, the first exhibition in Santiago of his famous photographs of the 1973 military coup and the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government. Koen Wessing grew up after the war in an intellectual milieu in the Netherlands. Many of his generation were highly aware of the violence, misery and genocide that only ended immediately before or after their birth; they were brought up in the climate of reconstruction, resilience, optimism and social progress that shaped their teenage years. Several great photographers had helped produce false papers for the benefit of Jews in hiding, or taken harrowing photographs of the last winter of the Second World War, the “winter of hunger” during which thousands of Dutch people died. This is what documentary press photography was all about at the time, alongside photographs that glorified the reconstruction of the Netherlands. Both genres were deeply rooted in the new photography that had emerged between the two world wars. A younger generation of Dutch photographers, Ed van der Elsken, his Hungarian wife Ata Kandó, Johan van der Keuken and many others, began travelling and working abroad at that time, and Wessing taught himself to become a photographer, working as an assistant to Ed van der Elsken for two years. A born globetrotter, Koen Wessing began by hitchhiking across Europe. Later, he would often finance his travels by borrowing money and going wherever the fancy took him. In May 1968, it was to Paris. In 1969, he took photographs in Het Maagdenhuis, the occupied administrative centre of the University of Amsterdam, he built a temporary footbridge across an alleyway between the university and the building next-door to circumvent the police blockade and get his rolls of film out for processing. The story became a legend. Koen Wessing was one of the few photographers who documented the 1973 military coup in Chile against Salvador Allende’s progressive government. The Chilean images were published in his famous photo book “Chili, September 1973”. After the military coup in Chile Wessing paid a first visit to Nicaragua in 1978, to photograph the family of Somoza whose regime started to crumble at the time. Afterwards he went back to Nicaragua several times, picturing its change and devastation. The photographs from El Salvador show the horrific events during the funeral of archbishop Oscar Romero. Tens of thousands of mourners who had gathered for Romero’s funeral mass in front of the cathedral in San Salvador eventually fleeing in terror as army gunners on the rooftops around the square opened fire. The complete photo selection forms a coherent whole, depicting Latin America from a period of about 12 years. Some of Wessing’s images remain etched in your memory as soon as you’ve seen them. They don’t seem to relate to a particular moment in the past, but to something more universal. His photos show us the “god-forsaken of the earth”, but without dehumanising them, without making victims of them: they remain fellow human beings. Koen Wessing often sought out people who were mourning the dead he had encountered, or people searching for their disappeared loved ones, their “desaparecidos”. In the photo from the series “Nicaragua 1978”, at a road junction on the edge of a village, two nuns walk past three patrolling soldiers. The road surface is shattered and the houses show no signs of human habitation. The eyes of nearly all the people appear to be focused on the photographer, making him part of the picture. These gazes and the dynamics of walking lend the image an undeniable tension, an almost theatrical character. These qualities and, above all, the photographer’s visible involvement in the event that he is capturing are typical features of Koen Wessing’s work. This picture is part of Wessing’s 1978 report about the city of Estelí in Nicaragua, which had been bombed by President Somoza’s army in an attempt to put a stop to the Sandinista offensive. The context of the photograph and Wessing’s position in the narrative, which he created in order to provide insight into a harsh social reality, are of at least equal importance. On view are also screenings and a filmed interview with Dutch filmmaker and director of photography Kees Hin.
Info: Curator: Jeroen de Vries, Jeu de Paume- Château de Tours, 25 avenue André-Malraux, Tours, Duration: 17/11/18-12/5/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 14:00-18:00, www.jeudepaume.org
