After the Fact

© Sophie Ristelhueber/Centre Pompidou, Paris/ADAGP, Paris, 2009

Sophie Ristelhueber, "Every One #8" (1994). Black and white photograph, 106 x 70 in. From the series "Every One" (1994).

Man Ray Mathew Brady Marcel Duchamp Cindy Sherman to Receive the Jewish Museum's Man Ray Award The Art of Persuasion Advice and Verse in London In Brief: Christie’s When in... Berlin

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Of all the dangerous elements coursing through the air in Kuwait during the first Gulf War — guided missiles, smoke spewing from the burning oil fields, stray bullets — the most insidious contaminants were minute particles combined of soot, crude oil, and sand. According to a 2002 report by the US Defense Department, Kuwait has the world’s highest concentration of "particulate matter," as it is known, a hazardous situation that is exacerbated by the region’s sandstorms.

Only an artist would be able to find beauty in an environment that cultivates this toxic dust, and that is exactly what happened when Sophie Ristelhueber, a photographer who lives in Paris, saw a small picture of the Kuwaiti desert in Time magazine in 1991. She was struck by its resemblanceto Man Ray’s 1920 photograph Dust Breeding, a desolate lunar landscape that is not a landscape at all, but a year’s worth of dust settled on the back of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), which Duchamp deliberately left facedown and untouched while he spent a year in New York. The photograph is the only existing document of this quintessentially ephemeral piece; Duchamp later "harvested" some of the dust and incorporated it into the work.

The idea of a scarred, ravaged landscape resembling a seminal work of art haunted Ristelhueber, and she began planning a trip to Kuwait, arriving in October 1991, seven months after the war had ended. This was not her first trip to the Middle East; she took pictures of a bombed-out Beirut in 1982. Nor would it be her last, since she would later travel to Syria, Iraq, and the West Bank. But her time in Kuwait would ultimately yield a benchmark not only for her career, but also arguably for the entire field: 71 stunning photographs published in 1992 as an artist’s book titled Fait (a word that means both "fact" and "what has been done" in French). The photographs include aerial shots that reveal wide swaths of desert studded with pockmarks and grooves. The deep, regularly spaced ruptures caused by explosives or tank tracks look completely benign from some 20,000 feet in the air, as though a child had idly drawn shapes in the sand with a finger. This former theater of war was already surreal terrain, but Ristelhueber, like Ray with Duchamp’s dust, focused on details that made it less recognizable,even otherworldly. Thus, close-ups of wrecked weaponry look like stills from sci-fi movies, while panoramic landscapes are apocalyptic scenes, featuring fiery horizon lines issuing dense streams of black smoke. As she recalls visiting the decimated country 18 years ago, Ristelhueber says she was "amazed" by the oil fires, which were started by the retreating Iraqi troops. "When I couldn’t find a plane that would bring me along to take aerial pictures, I would still go just to see it [the fire]. But it was already too romantic to shoot."

An aversion to romanticism is what guides Ristelhueber’s analytic but sensitive eye, allowing her to capture the ravages of war without catering to sentimental desire or using violence to seduce. When a recent exhibition at Jeu de Paume, in Paris, brought together her disparate projects, which have included interior shots of her family’s country home, sculptural installations, and films, it highlighted her ability to balance a distinctly poetic aesthetic (Ristelhueber studied the nouveau roman at the Sorbonne) with a need to identify horrifying truths about human nature. Steered by concerns that are primarily if not solely artistic, rather than documentarian or journalistic, she frequently makes decisions that challenge assumptions about the authority of the photograph. After touring the former Yugoslavia in July 1991, she was horrified by what she perceived as Europe’s failure to intervene in the fighting between the Serbs and Croats. To show her solidarity with the citizens of Sarajevo, she returned in 1994 to exhibit photocopies of Fait along with "Every One" (1994), a startling series of closeups of freshly mended lacerations. Many viewers automatically assumed that these were depicting injuries inflicted during the Balkan war; in fact they were patients at a Paris hospital. "Showing bodies with stitches was a work I wanted to do because I was thinking about the Balkan civil war," says Ristelhueber, "but I didn’t want to burden the Sarajevan people." By choosing instead to show images of scarred Parisians to the Sarajevans, Ristelhueber made a powerful statement: no matter where you live, you empathize with the pain and suffering of those who are being unjustly treated elsewhere in the world.