Shedding New Light on War

Light in Wartime, an exhibition on view at apexart in New York City, brings together photographers whose works shed new light on war, both forensically and symbolically.

“In a world so hounded by images of war, many of the photographers featured in Light in Wartime challenge the conventions and limitations of traditional reportage, underlining the tensions between art, fiction, and photojournalism” writes the gallery in the press release for the exhibition.

The images included in Light in Wartime address themes of displacement, war, and the aftermath of conflict. And, they explore the gap between understanding wars as historical happenings versus their representations in the entertainment world, political realm, and collective consciousness. The exhibition offers new ways of looking at conflict by turning the apparatus of photography and various apparatuses of war, such as heartbeat detectors, x-ray machines, sniper holes, and infrared film, upon themselves, to create photographs that act as metaphors.

The photographers included in Light in Wartime are: Vartan Avakian, Allan deSouza, Ziyah Gafic, Rula Halawani, Nilu Izadi, Seba Kurtis, An-My Lê, David Levinthal, Richard Mosse, Jo Ratcliffe and Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini.

Drawing from experimental photographic processes, the works in the show “illuminate hidden truths and bring forth the presence of absence.” Questions are raised about the reliability of historical accounts such as news and imagery, which significantly determine how war is transmitted, understood, and remembered. The viewer, says the gallery, “is forced to step back and reconsider how the images around us construct reality.”

Light in Wartime
organized by Rola Khayyat
apexart
Through July 28, 2018