Iraq & Afghanistan: The Sublime Image of Destruction Brighton Photo Biennial 2008

As, through the 1990s, photography rose to unprecedented prominence in the museum, with many art photographers making very large, finely resolved prints to hang on gallery walls, one genre emerged about the depiction of war. Art photographers followed the armies, not usually working on the front line but in the wake of the destructive forces, documenting, often with large format cameras, the image of destruction. Some of them, such as Luc Delahaye (FR) and Simon Norfolk (UK), had been or remained photojournalists who turned to this form of art photography. Like other museum photography, some of the images establish a relationship with the tradition of painting. They seek to make pictures that are quieter, more resolved and thought through registers of the destruction of war than the quotidian and news-driven work of the photojournalists. At the same time, the use of large cameras encourages in this genre a deportment, stateliness and distance, literal and sometimes emotional, from its subject.