Simon Norfolk
For most of it I have no words, 1998
Image:
17.5 x 17.5 cms
6 14/16 x 6 14/16 ins
17.5 x 17.5 cms
6 14/16 x 6 14/16 ins
9430
Provenance
Jagged Art, London, acquired in January 2003Exhibitions
'Landscape Trauma' at the Centre for British Photography, London (8 June - 24 September 2023)
Signed and numbered 1/10 on the label. A landscape photographer, Simon Norfolk's work questions the concept of 'battlefield' in all its forms. He has documented some of the world's worst...
Signed and numbered 1/10 on the label.
A landscape photographer, Simon Norfolk's work questions the concept of 'battlefield' in all its forms. He has documented some of the world's worst war-zones and refugee crises, and photographed supercomputers used to design military systems or test nuclear missile launches.
Norfolk's extraordinary body of work For Most Of It I Have No Words(1999) investigates the landscapes of genocide. It begins in Rwanda (1994) where partially clad skeletons and violated refuges still bear witness to individual lives and deaths.
The images travel back through time, drawing a thread through an array of twentieth century events: Cambodia's Year Zero in 1975; the free bombing zones developed from 1962 in Vietnam; the use of the defoliant Agent Orange; extermination camps in Auschwitz; the bombing of Dresden; the mass graves of the Ukraine; and the fields of Anatolia where Armenians were marched to their deaths.
The series concludes in the Omaheke Desert, where the sands of the Namibian desert have erased the final traces of Herero nomadic people, killed under German colonial rule in 1904.
For Most Of It I Have No Words documents the act of forgetting as the physical reminders of genocide disappear from the landscape, and away from our consciousness.
A landscape photographer, Simon Norfolk's work questions the concept of 'battlefield' in all its forms. He has documented some of the world's worst war-zones and refugee crises, and photographed supercomputers used to design military systems or test nuclear missile launches.
Norfolk's extraordinary body of work For Most Of It I Have No Words(1999) investigates the landscapes of genocide. It begins in Rwanda (1994) where partially clad skeletons and violated refuges still bear witness to individual lives and deaths.
The images travel back through time, drawing a thread through an array of twentieth century events: Cambodia's Year Zero in 1975; the free bombing zones developed from 1962 in Vietnam; the use of the defoliant Agent Orange; extermination camps in Auschwitz; the bombing of Dresden; the mass graves of the Ukraine; and the fields of Anatolia where Armenians were marched to their deaths.
The series concludes in the Omaheke Desert, where the sands of the Namibian desert have erased the final traces of Herero nomadic people, killed under German colonial rule in 1904.
For Most Of It I Have No Words documents the act of forgetting as the physical reminders of genocide disappear from the landscape, and away from our consciousness.