Beyond the veil: photographs can be more powerful than art
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Version 0 of 1. How can you tell the truth about history in a visual image? The question is raised for me by the news that Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt is to receive an award for his outstanding contribution to photography at the Sony world photography awards, and will have a solo show at Somerset House this spring. All well deserved. But one picture by Erwitt especially haunts me. In November 1963, America’s assassinated President John F Kennedy was buried at Arlington military cemetery. Many harrowing photographs were taken that day – but the most powerful is by Erwitt. It portrays Jackie Kennedy with a soldier standing just behind her, his glittering insignia contrasting with the deep black hat and veil she wears. Yet what makes the picture extraordinary is what Erwitt sees through the veil. He captures the expression on Jackie Kennedy’s face with harrowing precision. Her features are scrunched up, her facial muscles collapsing in grief. Her eyes tell a story of unbelievable sorrow. Her mouth is a broken harp of sheer despair. If I had to compare this photograph with a painting, it would be Picasso’s Weeping Woman in the Tate. Both pictures penetrate the heart of grief. They reveal in a human face all the violence and cruelty of the world, and what it does to people. Yet anyone familiar with modern art will recognise a more obvious similarity. Andy Warhol made a series of paintings of Jackie Kennedy at Arlington. He derived them from photographs in Life magazine, which he turned into silkscreens and transferred on to canvas as black images on blue and white. Some of Warhol’s portraits are remarkably similar to the Erwitt photograph – they have the same configuration of a soldier at attention behind her. I don’t think the Magnum photographer was his source, but I’m not completely sure. One thing I am sure of is how different their images are in their meaning and emotional impact. Warhol’s funeral Jackies are powerful – especially if you have a cliched view of this artist as someone who refused or lacked feeling. He mourns his time here. But in doing so he makes Jackie Kennedy a symbol: her features are deliberately simplified, her face mask-like, her pain iconic. It is not true that Warhol exploits Jackie Kennedy’s suffering or makes it cool – rather, what he does is to turn it into the stuff of history painting. He is self-consciously representing a larger historic truth through her. This is similar to what David did with The Death of Marat – it is the grand universalising principle of history painting. Warhol here works in a very traditional genre of painting, for all his use of photographic sources. Erwitt, however, shows it just as it was. He does not transfigure or transform or universalise Jackie Kennedy; he shows us the true contours of her pain. I admire Warhol’s history paintings. But I see the simple crushing human truth in Erwitt’s great picture. And isn’t simple humanity what we need? |