Durden, Mark Cold War Pastoral, Black Dog Publishing, 2001; 112)
"The sense of recovery and healing is symbolically important. Landscape cushions the horror associated with war. Confronted with the appalling atrocity of genocide in Rwanda, the artist Alfredo Jaar recalled how he sought 'three respites from the desperation that surrounded us. We would photograph really horrific scenes, and minutes later, spontaneously we found ourselves taking a picture of the sky, a tree, or a plant'. I would not go so far as to see Kippin as a war photographer, but this sense of landscape as antidote and solace is relevant to these pictures.
Part of the problem with photography is the tendency the medium has to freeze and deaden that which it documents. Kippin worked against this by setting upa dialectic with within the single image and settign many of his secenes beneath beautiful and varied skies. One of the reccuring features of these earlier pictures, then, are the skies, influedced by Dutch landscape art and the paintings of such artists as Jacob Van Ruisdael and Albert Cuyp"
BOOK - Shake hands with the devil. The failure of humanity in Rwanda.
BOOK - Shake hands with the devil. The failure of humanity in Rwanda.
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