A response emailed to me recently about 'The Incommensurable Banner':
"I was in the gallery yesterday, briefly as I had to leave my daughter outside,
I will come in again but I wanted to put forward some thoughts.
The images are dreadful. One’s mind stops and reels in horror from them, as it always does with such images.
The display of these sorts of images is not a new idea and the notion that by showing people the horror of war you prevent it is, I am sorry to say, entirely discredited by the example of history.
In an historical context I would associate the display of photographs of wretchedly mutilated bodies in order to resist war with the First World War (especially by the pacifist movement in the 1920s and 30s) and Vietnam and the most affecting images of those conflicts present live suffering; the burnt girl fleeing her village, the wounded man carried on the back of a comrade or the last moments of an executed suspect. In my opinion images that present corpses in such a state of destruction have a tendency to distance us from the event that led to their death.
I am sure that these images and this installation are well intentioned but they tend to de-humanise the victims.
Photography is an extremely blunt instrument when it comes to this sort of imagery. The nature of the imagery is to preach to the converted. It serves as form of impromptu shrine before which the supporters of a particular point of view can perform their obligations.
These poor people deserve the right to have their bodily remains respected. Personally I find that these sorts of displays only extend the dreadful humiliation of the victims."
