On the war path

Photographer Simon Norfolk returned to Afghanistan to re-trace the steps of his 19th century counterpart John Burke, says Tina O’Sullivan.

BURKE + Norfolk is a new exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork that features the work of the contemporary British photographer Simon Norfolk and the Irishman John Burke (circa 1843 — 1900).

Norfolk started his career as a photojournalist, but was inspired by the political unrest in Afghanistan to become a fine art photographer. A chance encounter brought Burke to hiss attention: Burke was the first photographer to work in Afghanistan — during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80) — but he had largely been forgotten.

“Two years ago, I was in The National Media Museum in Bradford,” says Norfolk. “One of the archivists, who knows that I’m just an Afghanistan nutcase, said, ‘have a look at this’. He had one of the John Burke albums, which they’d never even copied for their archive. The problem with Burke is that he only made these albums that were original photographs glued into books, they’re not printed on a press. So very few were made.

“There’s nothing written about Burke. There’s no diaries, no notes, so it’s all stuff that I’ve compiled from little bits of information. Mostly from church records. He seems to have gone to India about 1857 with his father. There’s no mention of any family; they may have died in the Famine. His father joined the Royal Artillery and John, the son, got a job as an apothecary, grinding chemicals. Like a lot of people, his father died within two years of arriving in India. Because John had these skills grinding chemicals, he was taken under the wing of another Irishman, another Catholic, called William Baker, who was quite a well-known photographer. Baker gave him a job preparing the chemistry for his photography, and then John moved into the company. He married Baker’s sister and eventually took over the business. He took over most of the photography as well. He was a commercial photographer.”

Norfolk went back to Afghanistan with a different outlook, and with Burke as his ‘silent partner’. Impressed with how Burke didn’t set up photographs in the normal style, Norfolk set about emulating him. Burke photographed the Afghans as people, not as propaganda shots to prove they were savages, as so many British photographers did. Norfolk wanted the same outcome today.

“I didn’t go to Afghanistan wanting to re-photograph his pictures from exactly the same point of view,” he says. “You could do that, but it’s a kind of a physics optics experiment. But what if I went back to Afghanistan and had that kindness towards Afghans which is absent from most of the photography from Afghanistan? What would John Burke photograph if he were to be there now? What would he find interesting? Where would he go to make pictures? He wouldn’t go out on patrol and take photographs of soldiers in a ditch, which is what 99% of photo-journalists that come out to Afghanistan do.

“What John Burke would find is the cities, the towns, the streets, the people, the characters, the players. That’s what I wanted to photograph, and that side of Afghanistan is, bizarrely, relatively unphotographed, even though it’s been drenched with media coverage. In actual fact, the media coverage has been a very narrow band. You either see pictures of soldiers in a ditch shooting or you see black-and-white nose cone footage of a bomb landing on a house. Or nowadays, you see a few atrocity images: you have soldiers urinating on dead Taliban, or something like that.”

Norfolk had used the collodion wet-plate technique when taking photographs, but modified this to gain access to military operations.

“This is my first experiment with digital photography,” he says. “In the past, I’ve used big wooden cameras called field cameras, which shoot on 4 x 5 inch sheets of film. That’s what I used until this project, but I knew that I wanted to go on to some military bases to shoot photographs and you have to be prepared to show the military what you’ve shot if they ask for it. You are always going to have problems with any kind of film. Taking film through airports is becoming impossible, so for the first time I shot this with a digital back on the big wooden camera, but with a funny bit of carpentry that was arranged to get this digital back on. It didn’t work very well. Half of the show’s shot that way and half of it’s shot with a digital back on a digital camera.”

Norfolk copied Burke’s collection of prints and brought them back to Afghanistan on his laptop. This helped him identify where Burke had been and allowed him retrace his footsteps. This led him into the city of Kabul to document the day-to-day life of people in a war zone.

“When I was there in 2001, I was photographing Kabul in the golden light around dawn. Photographing all the ruins of what they’d bombed. That golden light was vaguely hopeful because I thought the war was over. I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? In fact, my government spent nearly a trillion dollars smashing the hell out of this country. So, this time, I photographed it in a blue light. That blue is a sort of disappointment, a sort of bitterness about that opportunity wasted. And that money, blood and treasure wasted: we could have done so much with that goodwill and all we did was turn it into this petty bloody mess of vengeance and violence. A sort of game for the military industrial complex to try out some new technologies and sell some weapons.

“David Cameron stands up on TV and says the reason we’re fighting there is to make the streets of London safe. Are you kidding me? He can’t believe that. He’s made the streets of London a lot more dangerous with this stupid game. What we’ve done, in the meantime, is destroy this beautiful country with these lovely people. I have friends there: it disgusts me, and I do feel bitter.”

Peggy Sue Amison, of Sirius Arts Centre, in Cobh, first showed Norfolk’s work in Ireland in 2002. Amison got him involved in a 2005 Capital of Culture project: he went with the Irish defence forces to Liberia and Kosovo.

Burke + Norfolk was shown in the Tate Modern in London in 2011, but Norfolk wanted to give Burke a show at home. “When I finished this body of work,” he says, “I came back to Peg and said, ‘can you find anywhere to show this for me’? Not that I need to get some shows of the work, but because I want to put Burke back into Ireland. I want to find out more about his Irishness and what he thought of himself. I think the best way to do that is to put the show up on the wall and see what people come to see it.”

* Burke + Norfolk is at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork until Jun 20