This event is formidable enough in its implications, the reality of
it hard enough for us to rationally respond to without the further
psychological violence that totally frank photographs might inflict.'
Photograph: Dmitry Lovetsky/AP
Television cameras at the place where MH17 fell to earth couldn't help
panning back to reveal a vast, low-lying landscape of interminable
near-nothingness. A roadside cross, dark against a yellow and violet
sky, spoke of centuries of quiet farming and rural life interrupted
only by the wars that have churned up Ukraine's history, the tanks
that have rolled across this great empty space with its eerie,
Rothkoesque light.
Returning to the charred field, which in a second turned into a
monument to every war that has ever mulched the land of Europe, video
images join with still photographs in documenting a catastrophe like
no other. The visual evidence of disaster should by now be banal,
overfamiliar - and yet it is not, because humanity is always finding
new ways to destroy humanity. As Tolstoy said of families, all true
tragedies look different.
That is what makes them so dangerous.
The image of two planes flying into the World Trade Centre in
September 2001 was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Terror
thrives on the shock of the new.
The destruction of flight MH17 is,of course, by no means a proven an
act of terrorism, as such. Why it was apparently shot out of the sky
has yet to be established. But bringing down a civilian airliner with
a missile - even if, as appears all too possible, it was mistaken for
some other, more relevant target - is plainly an act of horror,
written in every twisted, broken, unrecognisable chunk of metal in the
images we cannot stop staring at. How is the world going to get past
these pictures?
Yet the strange fact is that they are restrained and sensitive. None
of the images being circulated by news media reveal the details
described by reporters at the scene. The Guardian saw "body parts"
everywhere including "a dismembered foot", while the New York Times
described children's books and playing cards, a man lying next to an
iPhone, and people whose clothes were stripped off them as they fell
32, 000 feet.
Rightly, the photographers and picture editors chose not to show those
things. The wreckage itself communicates all we need to know: more
than we need to know. While words, however shocking, leave much to the
imagination, photography is blunt and total realism. A picture of
something terrible has a direct ability to scar the mind that words,
mercifully, lack.
This event is formidable enough in its implications, the reality of it
hard enough for the world to rationally respond to without the further
psychological violence that totally frank photographs might inflict. A
century on, it is still sickening to see photographs of skeletal first
world war soldiers dismembered in their trenches.
And what more do we need to know? The severity of destruction in these
pictures reveals how the whole living world that is a passenger plane
can be reduced to ash and smouldering fragments in no time at all.
Looking at these grey pieces of a ruined world, you realise that
international flight is the emblem of a global society. People were
travelling across the world, for holidays or a conference, when they
flew into an airspace poisoned by the atavistic, primeval madness of
nationalism. In reality, all sides in and around Ukraine should be
asking themselves - what is this about? A border, a language, pride,
power games: how does any of that justify this landscape of
destruction? Look into these images and see what war is, in August
2014.
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