Docudrama

Olive Pierce at the Maine Photo Co-op

By Chris Thompson

“CLASSROOM, BASRAH,” part of the show “Between the Tigris & the Euphrates.”

I remember the wooden desk I used to scribble on in elementary school, and its stone-hard seat I squirmed in while my teacher tried to teach me

and 50 other kids that mix of geography, history, and mild prejudice known as social studies: “The cradle of human civilization” – the words are still ingrained – “was an area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers called ‘The Fertile Crescent,’ a rich farmland that may have been the real Garden of Eden.” The teacher was quick to elaborate on the class textbook, telling us all that this land was now just a big desert; as far as the Maine public school system was concerned, nothing of interest had happened in what is now Iraq since Adam and Eve got the boot. Islam who?

“Classroom, Basrah,” one of the photographs in the current show at the Maine Photo Co-op, shows six young Iraqi schoolgirls being distracted from their lesson by the presence of the American lady with the camera. Each girl has an expression on her face that is entirely different from the others, but they all seem amused or at least pleasantly perplexed by Olive Pierce wanting to take their picture. From the photograph’s description, we learn that the United Nations’ sanctions against Iraq prohibit pencils because they “might be used for camouflage.” Military intelligence strikes again.

The principal at this school told Pierce that supplies have been so few for so long that the education that the children receive is “a joke.” What becomes painfully clear — and the stark power of the photographs in the show have a message so clear you’d have to be a member of Congress to ignore it — is that the sanctions against Iraq are neither civilized nor peaceful; they are in effect a war against the physical, mental, and spiritual development of an entire culture.

The revolution in visual culture that began in 1839 with Daugerre’s first photographs became the means for a parallel revolution in the engagement with social issues. The genre of documentary photography in America, with its well-known representatives like Walker Evans’s depictions of the conditions of American migrant workers, Jacob Riis’s images of urban poverty in New York, and the work of Berenice Abbott (a mentor for Pierce later in her life, her work is now showing at the Portland Museum of Art), has its origins in Matthew Brady’s use of the camera to document the horrors of the Civil War. We may think ourselves savvier about the ways images can be doctored to back up all kinds of rhetoric, but the frank immediacy of the photograph, especially in black and white, can have an impact as visceral in 2000 as it was in 1864. Pierce channels this power into a hard-hitting humanitarian portraiture.

In the image “Mother and daughter, Amarah children’s hospital” a young girl lies weak and awake on a hospital bed, and her mother, cloaked in a black chador, sits at her feet. The mother’s eyes are elsewhere, not on Pierce, not on her child, as she deals with the likelihood of her daughter’s death from a condition that, if her doctors had access to even the most basic supplies, could be avoided. Pierce has kept her slightly out of focus. The comfort promised by the maternal figure is unhinged by her disturbing presence. This tension is played out in visual terms: Pierce uses the mother’s massive shape to dominate and weigh down one corner of the image, but as soon as we focus exclusively on this dense space it seems that the mother herself is light as a feather, about to drift away.

All of her photographs have this dynamism. In “Girl and mother, Baghdad”, everything leans to the right of the picture plane at an impossible angle, as if old woman, young girl, and even the tree in the foreground are pulled by the same force; things look like they have to come tumbling down, but somehow they stay standing.

Whether she is taking photographs in the hospital, the classroom, or the marketplace, Pierce communicates intense encounters with people who — caught in a network of oppression woven from the UN campaign and the indifference of the world (including Iraqi elites) to its effects — go on with their lives as their world is methodically reduced to rubble. Her visions of Iraq do not depict the desert netherworld occupied by a single oil-hoarding despot that we are often lulled into imagining, but a place inhabited by people with lives as real, complex, and fragile as our own.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.