Christopher Stewart's series of photographic images were recently exhibited in the Schindler Factory in Krakow in May.
15 Aug 2013
Christopher Stewart (School of Arts and Communication) has been photographing international systems of security and surveillance for the past ten years. Through a now extensive network of contacts the ambition of Stewart’s project has burgeoned to ever more mysterious, secretive organizations (often, curiously, carrying out their chilling business in public places - airports, hotels, roads and passageways - “while the public go about their business none the wiser”).
It took months, sometimes years, for Stewart to gain access to some of the places he has photographed. In some cases, with negotiations apparently successfully completed, he would be denied at the last moment; contacts would fail to show up, or he would lose the security personnel he was attempting to shadow. Kill House adds a further, successful chapter to his work, but access to it was something he wasn’t expecting. “It is the surprises encountered out in the world”, he says, “and the ability to use photography to represent them, that ensures the enduring relevance of documentary even when our relationship to this ‘genre’ has become, shall we say, more considered”.
But what exactly is Kill House? Named by the people who use it, it is designed to train private military personnel to fush out domestic homes in a war zone, in particular in Iraq (where a recent estimate suggests some 25,000 of these people are operating) and Afghanistan. It is a place to learn to attack an enemy with ‘extreme prejudice’; a place designed where, as Stewart suggests, “form follows fear rather than function”.
The images which constitute this series were made during his second visit. The first photographs he made there were more literal, more descriptive of the purpose of the place; harsh, flash-lit pictures of figures in the midst of combat: “They show you what you might expect a war zone to look like - lots of smoke and violence”. Stewart rejected them because they gave the viewer too much information and left little to the imagination. Indeed, it is surely more poignant to leave us to speculate on what might happen here in this dystopian arena. In so doing, Stewart’s photographs ‘resonate with so much we know but maybe wish we didn’t’. Close scrutiny of the virtually black photographs reveals - emerging out of the gloom - deep gouges in the hard concrete walls, dark stains on the floor, locked doors, ochre rust and discarded bits of seemingly useless furniture which might, if we didn’t know better, be nothing more than props in a simple stage set.
Kill House is located somewhere on the vast, un-peopled plains of Arkansas, deep in the American mid-West. This much we know, but there remains much we don’t. It is a building of indeterminate size, although Stewart’s photographs do take us on a form of ‘journey’ through the space. Similarly, we don’t know what it looks like on the outside. Presumably it is an innocuous building much like any other, but is it safe in a military camp or is it just out there somewhere, locked but otherwise unprotected, because it has nothing to hide? It is after all only a space, “a structure”, Stewart tells us, “that is potentially nowhere and everywhere at once”.
I have often wondered why Stewart is allowed to see and photograph such things. Are the men and the manoeuvres he shadows really real? Whether or not they are, one can only assume ‘they’ want people to know about this. If just a little is allowed to seep out then it fuels the insecurity we already feel. It reminds us there is a real danger out there. It also warns us – and perhaps even this is part of the agenda – that there are people out there who, in the name of protection, are truly terrifying and whom we mess with at our peril.
This text is an extract from ‘Theatres of War’ written by Professor Mark Power (School of Arts and Communication and Magnum Photography member) and was commissioned for the catalogue to accompany the in-ernational section of the Krakow Month of Photography that he was invited to curate. The exhibition was held in the Schindler Factory in Krakow in May 2007. The other participants were Lisa Barnard, Luc Delahaye, Luc van Kesteren, and Donovan Wylie.
The series of photographic images, ‘Kill House’, was also exhibited as part of two solo exhibitions last year at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool and at Gimpel Fils in London. The work has been featured/reviewed in Art Forum, The Guardian Newspaper, Source Magazine and the Socialist Review. Christopher Stewart is Course Leader for the MA Photography and Principal Lecturer in the School or Arts and Communication.
