This exhibition takes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and in particular Article 6 – the right to recognition as a person before the law – as its guiding principle. Hence the decision by Mark Sealy, the curator, to omit Article 6 from the numerical list that opens the exhibition, and display it in magnificent isolation (against a purple backdrop, the colour of Western imperialist power) mid-way through. The exhibition is very much Sealy’s own provocative take on a selection of images drawn from the acclaimed Black Star Collection (originally an American photo-reportage agency founded by three German Jewish refugees). For Sealy, this potent collection presents a decidedly Western media perspective on history, “conceived from a very particular tradition of Eurocentric concerns”.
The 300-plus photographs, which appeared in publications such as Life, Newsweek and The New York Times, span the turbulent period from the end of the Second World War until the early 1990s. This was the period of the Cold War, bloody covert operations, the Vietnam War, South American uprisings, independence movements in Africa and the civil rights movement; and the images document human struggle and atrocities, contemporary figureheads and countless nameless victims. A side room furnishes us with easier fare – including a selection of YouTube excerpts of some of the most famous speeches (Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and others), stirring testimony both to the flouting of human rights, and to the inspirational courage of recognised figures who laid down their lives for them. But the curatorial thrust is that there is no room for complacency or sentiment: we are living in a time “when vast swathes of people – the refugee, the asylum seeker, the economic migrant – have no rights at all, are in fact no-ones”.
The exhibition also seeks to question photojournalistic practice: whose lens are we looking through? Who selects images for publication? Sealy points to the huge bias towards a received and dominant visual tradition, singling out the tendency to photograph Western soldiers in Christian poses, while presenting the African soldier as a savage or renegade.
Yet the photographs themselves tend to tell a more complex story. An Arthur Robles photograph from the El Salvador conflict magnificently evokes the Descent from the Cross, while Jim Pickerell’s searing image of a Vietnamese mother cradling her child is a harrowing Pietà. Matt Herron’s Selma to Montgomery is in the tradition of grand American history painting, silhouetting the marchers with unfurled flags against a glowering sky. In his and Charles Moore’s civil rights photographs, the white Americans are either faceless thugs (in helmets, wielding batons) or sullen bystanders – their poses suggesting defensive unease and latent hostility.
To 6 April (020 7087 9300)