THE WORLD’S theatre of despair is not short of players, and Tom Stoddart, the photojournalist, has seen some of its worst excesses.
The first substantial retrospective of his reportage over the past 20 years, iWitness, opens this week in London. The show is backed by the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation for relief charities, as a thank-you for the £500 million the British have given it over its 40 years.
The open-air venue for the show (appropriately, it is free) is on the South Bank of the Thames by City Hall, a busy pedestrian space. Stoddart’s 100 photographs are hung on 32 pillars 3.5m (11ft) high.
“This is very exciting for me,” says Stoddart. “I didn’t want an exhibition in a gallery full of my friends drinking wine. I wanted the public to see this and remember it. I don’t buy into this notion of compassion fatigue. People do react and they do remember.”
iWitness is divided into themes that focus on particular conflicts and calamities. Their titles — such as Famine, Siege, Loss, Scourge — underscore the biblical proportions of the scenes depicted. This is a record, as Stoddart’s agent, John Easterby, neatly puts it, of “humanity in extremis”.
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Exodus, for example, documents the horror of a cholera outbreak in a Rwandan refugee camp. In Famine, the suffering in Sudan in 1998 is sickeningly evident: a starving mother lays the tiny body of her child in a grave; a man in rags carries a sack suspended from a stick — you assume he is carrying produce or perhaps an animal, then the shape emerging from the sack becomes clear: thin human feet.
Another continent, another year, another war: a cellist in tails weeps by a grave in the Lion Cemetery in Sarajevo during its four-year siege. And in Aids-ravaged Malawi — in a poignant reminder that Africa is a continent of orphans — a tiny girl in a pretty dress toddles past two coffins.
These are distressing but strikingly beautiful pictures — and from this paradox comes their resonance. Stoddart is wary of the hubris of his profession, and will not hear any mention of the word “art” in connection with his pictures. They exist, he says, to inform and educate. But you are struck by his watchfulness, his unerring eye for shape, shadow and light; the subtlety and grace of his observations, his understanding of loss.
“Photographers have a fundamental right to be in these places, to get the images that can influence public opinion and politicians,” says Stoddart. “A picture really is worth a thousand words. Think of the consequences of those digital images from Abu Ghraib prison. What piece of writing could have forced Donald Rumsfeld to apologise on TV?”
Does he worry about intrusion? “I use a short lens, never a telephoto, so my subjects know I am there and can turn away. I always ask permission before I take sensitive pictures, and I spend a long time building up relationships with people. You must have trust. I knew the name of the man I photographed in an Aids hospice climbing into a bath. He knew why I wanted to take that picture. If ever I feel it’s wrong, and I am not welcome, then I put the camera down.”
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Winning the trust of his subjects brings other rewards. These landscapes of horror are punctuated by flashes of normality and tenderness: an emaciated girl with an empty bowl cuddles a skeletal child, withered from hunger and dehydration. The girl smiles and nuzzles the child’s hand which pats her face affectionately.
It’s a moment replicated by adults and toddlers all over the world; in well-fed families it passes without comment, but in famine-ravaged Sudan, it seems miraculous and lifeaffirming, a light going on when all appear to be going out.
“The spirit of people in terrible situations draws me to them,” says Stoddart. “This strength they have to reinvent themselves, to carry on with life.”
Stoddart has written that these are “sad but necessary” images. Yet he is rarely, if ever, commissioned to cover these humanitarian disasters. With newspapers and magazines increasingly peddling entertainment instead of news, there is little space for photojournalism that still obeys that venerable ideal of “shining light into dark corners”.
“Editors prefer feelgood stories these days,” says Stoddart. “They shy away from using images that are shocking. Our news is dominated by television, gossip and celebrity. But there should always be a space to remind us that not everyone in the world lives like that.”