January 11, 2002

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

The Camera as Witness to 'Bloody Sunday'

By HOLLAND COTTER

	Photograph by Fulvio Grimaldi/Bloody Sunday Trust The Derry Civil Rights Association said its banner in the march on Jan. 30, 1972, was smeared with the blood of Barney McGuigan when British troops opened fire after a confrontation at a barricade.
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	Bloody Sunday Trust A photograph from The Belfast Telegraph, at the International Center of Photography, shows mourners gathering after Bloody Sunday in 1972 to bury the dead at Creggan Cemetery in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

HOTOGRAPHY walks many fine lines. Democratic and prolific by nature, it undermines old genius-at-work, precious-object ideas of art. At the same time, it keeps laying claim to art's special powers and perks. One of its traditional selling points is objectivity. Yet it's a medium of calculation: of measured light and chosen angles, of zooming in and editing out. These opposites define its tensions.

Such tensions can be felt even in an exhibition as anti-elitist and programmatically didactic as "Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972" at the International Center of Photography. The show doesn't pretend for an instant to be art. Most of its dozens of pictures are digital scans of umpteenth generation press prints, images made to be transferred to newsprint and valued for information, not formal finesse.

The pictures all have one subject: they are documents of a specific event at a certain place on a certain day. But in the context of the show they are also something less passive and more passionate than that. They are prosecution witnesses called to testify exactly how that event happened and who was responsible. They are pieces of legal, moral and emotional evidence on which ultimate verdicts of innocence and guilt rest.

"Bloody Sunday" refers to Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972, when an outburst of political violence erupted in the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Londonderry in British-ruled Northern Ireland. Derry, as Catholics call it, had been a center of political unrest throughout the decades of the so-called Irish Troubles. In the mid-1960's government troops patrolled the streets; a Catholic neighborhood that called itself Free Derry and was guarded by the Irish Republican Army declared its independence from British jurisdiction.

Around this time the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed, modeled on the nonviolent black civil rights movement in the United States. It organized mass demonstrations to demand equal rights in voting and housing. And in January 1972 it called for a march in Londonderry to protest government internment camps where people suspected of insurgent activities were being held without trial.

Thousands of people turned out, from international journalists to local citizens, including women and children, dressed in their Sunday best. A videotape made by one of the participants, William McKinney, suggests the event had a festive, upbeat feeling. To minimize the possibility of violence, the local branch of the I.R.A. had been asked to stay away.

The march was monitored, then disrupted by British paratroopers. As the demonstrators approached a barricade, armed soldiers sprayed them with purple dye and tear gas. Suddenly there was gunfire. The crowd scattered, but within minutes 13 men and boys, ages 17 to 59, had been shot dead; another man later died of his wounds. No soldiers were killed or injured.

The shots were heard around the world. The killings were front page news in Europe and the United States the next day. In Ireland the repercussions were explosive. Suppressed anger became overt. Violence increased. Families of the victims accused the British government of massacring unarmed citizens and demanded that the crime be acknowledged and punished.

Prime Minister Edward Heath responded by establishing a tribunal of inquiry that not only exonerated the soldiers but also suggested that their actions were provoked by demonstrators carrying guns and nail bombs. After the report was filed, families of the dead men campaigned to have the case officially reopened. In 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair convened a new investigation. It is still in progress.

"Hidden Truths," which first appeared in 1998 and has traveled widely since, is an accumulation of forensic material pertinent to the case. Organized by the independent curator Trisha Ziff and the Bloody Sunday Trust and installed at the photography center by Brian Wallis and Kristen Lubben, it begins in no-nonsense narrative style with a sequence of photographs reconstructing the events of that afternoon: the march, the spraying of the crowd with dye and gas, the shootings.

As with any chaotic incident filmed rapidly and under extreme pressure with hand- held cameras, individual shots rarely tell a complete story. In a sequence of pictures by the Magnum photographer Gilles Peress that appeared in The Sunday Times in London, a man named Patrick Doherty is seen inching on his side along the ground, a white handkerchief tied around the lower part of his face.

He doesn't appear to be wounded; the handkerchief suggests he is trying to hide his face. Only a picture outside the sequence, of a medic hovering over his dead body, makes it clear that he was trying to escape the line of fire. And only pictures by other photographers reveal that handkerchiefs were worn as armbands by marchers and were later used as protection from tear gas. (Many of the photographs and a map of Londonderry are in a fascinating interactive computer data base in the show.)

Once photographs appear in print, their weight and meanings are up for grabs. This is evident in newspapers that appeared the day after Bloody Sunday, copies of which are in the show. The London Times report on the killings is cool; visuals are played down. In The Derry Journal the writing is openly accusatory; most of the space is given to pictures of the march, the victims, the grieving families and later of the funeral.

In the newspaper's presentation of photographs, the line between neutral information and editorial emotion is blurred. This is also the case in "Hidden Truths." As if to reinforce the evidentiary nature of its selection of photographs, the exhibition supplements them with physical objects intimately associated with the Bloody Sunday victims: a watch, a necktie, a notebook found in a pocket.

Some of these prosaic, aging things have been used as evidence in the investigations; boots worn by Patrick Doherty when he died were recently requisitioned for that purpose. But placed in exhibition vitrines they take on a reliquary aura, like the personal effects of saints. Their glamour transfers to the pictures around them, turning visual documents into icons. Elevation to iconic status is what turns photography into art, with all the ideological privilege and power of persuasion that implies.

There are, of course, no clear rights and wrongs in such transformations, unless maybe when commerce comes into play, which isn't the case here. (All the prints in the exhibition will be donated to a nonprofit Museum of Civil Rights being built in Londonderry.) Icons can be, after all, healing, communally binding things.

As an example, one might consider a photograph of a crowd at the Bloody Sunday funerals. It originally appeared in The Belfast Telegraph, and it's a remarkable picture. People as far as the eye can see look toward the camera; they form a kind of human landscape, a turbulent, turned-up field fading to a misty hill. The picture was taken in Londonderry on Feb. 3, 1972, but the faces — grave, perplexed, stoical, unreadable — could be from many other times and places, including Lower Manhattan in the last four months.

Indeed, all the tensions and ambiguities inherent in photography — its factuality and its manipulativeness, its accessibility and its pretension, its political passion and its ethical indifference — are sure to make themselves felt in relation to the flood of images generated by the World Trade Center catastrophe and the war in Afghanistan. The International Center of Photography will contribute to the drama with a rotating exhibition called "Aftermath: Photography in the Wake of Sept. 11," which opens today.

``Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972'' remains at the International Center of Photography, 1114 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212)860-1777, through March 17.