Humanity in War

A new exhibition opens this week at the Red Cross Museum in Geneva. Called 'Humanity in War' the exhibition documents 150 years of conflict, using photographs from the Red Cross archive.

The time span of the exhibition is no accident; photography itself came into being in the 19th century, and the Red Cross movement celebrated its 150th anniversary just last year.

"Photography and the Red Cross both emerged in the second half of the 19th century," explained Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"The immediacy of the new medium allowed it to show the nature of warfare as never before; its brutality and the suffering it inflicted on both combatants and civilians."

Pictures speak louder than words

From an archive of over 100,000 photographs, the Red Cross museum curators, together with aid workers and war photographers, chose just 40 of the most powerful to best illustrate a century and a half of conflict.

"These particular photographs were chosen because they really speak for themselves," said exhibition manager Sandra Sunier.

"They allow us to get close to the visitors, to touch their emotions. And that’s why we’ve really kept our captions very short: you don’t need words with these pictures."

The exhibition begins with a grainy black and white photograph of two soldiers from the American civil war, and ends with a colour still of an elderly civilian man outside his destroyed house in Lebanon.

In between, a seemingly endless series of wars is depicted, from the Franco-Prussian conflict of the 1870s, to the horrors of the concentration camps in World War 2, to last year’s fleeing civilians in Sri Lanka.

Moments of Humanity

But the exhibition lives up to its title "Humanity in War" too. There is a dramatic photograph of one soldier tending to a wounded comrade in the rubble of Stalingrad.

In addition, several of the pictures exhibited were taken not by professional photographers, but by Red Cross workers in the field. As such, they provide an insight into the work of the Red Cross movement.

The overriding impression from the exhibition however is of the appalling suffering which modern warfare inflicts on the most innocent of civilians: women, children, and the elderly.

That impression is borne out by the cold statistics of war; at the battle of Solferino in 1859, the battle which inspired Henri Dunant to found the Red Cross movement, there was just one civilian casualty.

Today, the vast majority of those who suffer and die in wars are not men in uniform, but civilians.

And so the exhibition contains pictures of young girls in Liberia, forcibly recruited as child soldiers, carrying guns almost bigger than they are. There is a picture too of two young boys in Rwanda, separated from parents who may now be dead, trying to comfort each other. And there is a picture of a young girl from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a victim of sexual violence.

Aid workers memories

Not surprisingly, the exhibition evokes memories from Red Cross workers who have worked in war zones themselves.

Carla Haddad Mardini was a delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq. At the exhibition, she was particularly struck by a photograph of women in Basra, mourning over the remains of a bombed house.

"This picture speaks to me because it reminds me of my experience in Iraq in 2003 at the peak of the conflict," she explained.

"If you look at the picture, you have these Iraqi women in Basra mourning their dead, and their loved ones are just under the rubble. There is no headstone, and I think this picture speaks for its self, it’s worth a thousand words."

It is because pictures like these do speak so much louder than words that they are so powerful. The Red Cross hopes these images, by confronting people far away from the battlefields with the reality of war, may encourage more effort to prevent conflict.

"Photographs are not cold documents that merely prove something happened," said exhibition contributor and war photographer James Nachtwey.

"They put a human face on events that otherwise appear abstract or ideological. No matter how overwhelming an event, what happens to people on the ground happens to them individually, and photography has a unique ability to portray events from their point of view. Photography gives a voice to the voiceless. It’s a call to action."

Author: Imogen Foulkes
Editor: Rob Turner