On Drawing Death and Dying: Part Three by Dave Jaffe.

   On Drawing Death and Dying Part Three.




           The invention of the camera in nineteenth century Europe enabled many people to take pictures of the dead. Roger Fenton may have been the first war photographer. He was British and went to photograph the British soldiers in battle against Russian troops in the Crimean war that erupted in the middle of the 19th century.
     Then came technical innovations that made it even easier to record the dead and the dying. "Lightweight cameras came along using 35 mmm. film that could be exposed 36 times before the camera needed to be reloaded," writes Susan Sontag. "Pictures could now be taken in the thick of battles, and exhausted begrimed soldiers could be studied up close."
      Along came the Spanish Civil War in 1936. This was the first war in which war photography came of age. A war photograph by Robert Capa of a Spanish Republican soldier falling and dying on a hillside became famous. The photo took up a whole full page in a 1937 issue of 'Life' magazine. Capa became famous and lived a charmed life,  until he stepped on a land mine in the French Vietnamese War in the early 1950's and died.
    If the Spanish Civil War was the first photographer's war, the U.S. war in Vietnam became the first t.v. war. On the t.v. screen in black and white from about 1963 to 1973, pictures of dead and dying U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese were flashed around the world.  Yet photographs too played a part in shaping public opinion. In fact, in the 1950's, 60's and 70's photographed images of the dead and the dying were everywhere. "These memorable sites of suffering," writes Susan Sontag, "documented by admired photographers were mostly taken in Asia and Africa."
    Art critics like John Berger and Peter Fuller disagreed over whether photos of war swayed public opinion. Berger argued that photos of war casualties had no impact on people's views on war. Fuller didn't agree. He believed that photos of suffering people did turn people against war. Controversies also raged over whether showing pictures of the dead, the dying and even the very old was good. In the 1980's my sister objected to my drawings of my ageing father. "They make him look terrible,"
   she said. "Draw something nice."
     Susan Sontag wrote one of the most important books on photography rightly called 'On Photography'. Yet as she lay dying, her sometime partner, famed photographer Annie Liebovitz took many pictures of Sontag.. Some people objected to this. In the 1970's prominent fashion photographer Richard Avedon photographed his father who was dying of cancer. Here too, some people thought that Avedon was wrong to do this.
     I don't take a stand on this issue . I'm just one of hundreds of thousands of obscure artists who copy other people's styles and my work will never be noticed. In any case, my attempts to draw dying people failed. At this point in what's left of my life I'll stick to drawing people and trees. It's so much easier.