At the entrance, a wall is covered with some of the most shocking photographs ever taken. In these images, part of The Incite Project's collection, humanity's capacity for evil is magnified and feels unchanging, an unfathomable sea of carnage and chaos. These famous photographs, which tick every trigger warning box and were shot primarily by white, foreign photojournalists, depict global conflicts and crises: Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Vulture and the Little Girl, the quintessential image of the famine that ravaged South Sudan in the 1990s; Malcolm Browne's photograph of a Buddhist monk shortly after he set himself on fire in protest against the South Vietnamese government in Saigon.
The latter is another Pulitzer Prize winner, published in newspapers, on postcards, and on Rage Against the Machine's 1992 debut studio album. There is also Richard Drew's The Falling Man, the image of someone falling from the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks, a photograph that came to symbolize the fall of America. Here too is the photo of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on the Turkish coast. There is an inescapable sense of an unequal world, of wordless, senseless brutality.
The purpose of these photographs, when they were taken, was to reveal some kind of objective, irrefutable truth-evidence beyond language that could move the world to its senses, to action. James Nachtwey saw himself as a messenger, and Don McCullin once said, "I take more than I bring. I bring hope, but I give nothing."
The confusion of "truth" and "reality" is the eternal problem of photojournalism. These things have all happened, but as truths they can only be partial. This disorienting, overcrowded show, with little context for the images beyond a few rudimentary texts, fails to address the ethical issues or damaging effects on either the subject or the photographer. Carter committed suicide, while the child he photographed reportedly survived. It also fails to address the problems with photographs becoming synecdoches for places and periods in history. In the years since, these photographs have been used for both good and bad purposes, to justify wars, to reinforce imperialist attitudes, and to perpetuate the savior mentality of the West.
Related: Don McCullin: 'Wherever I go, there seems to be violence and death'
The idea, I can only assume, is to let the images do the talking, to let the brutality touch you. And it does. It's hard to deny that we've become desensitized to images when we look at the charred body of an Iraqi soldier, captured in a close-up photograph taken during the Gulf War by Kenneth Jarecke; or the family lying lifeless, suitcases beside them, in a photo by Lyndsey Addario. Sometimes the bodies of those still clinging to life are even more poignant: Nachtwey's image of a skeletal man crawling on the floor of a feeding center during the 1993 South Sudanese famine is devastating. But since all of these photos have been published and seen in public before, you'd hope that you'd gain something in this museum setting. Just looking at them again feels like voyeurism.
No matter how faithfully a photographer tries to depict reality, there are always choices involved: every image is the result of decisions about framing, how and when to look, and when to look away. The idea of truth in relation to photojournalism and the ethical issues of both photographing and exhibiting charged scenes has been taken up by a new generation.
From the spectacle of violence captured by these icons of photojournalism, the exhibition moves to more ambiguous ideas of truth in series by contemporary photographers, seeking more subjective truths, research-based studies and concept-based work on global crises. But it is a struggle to connect the dots.
A small selection from On Rape, Laia Abril's groundbreaking project on sexual violence, which places blame on institutions and their failure to protect women. Abril photographs objects involved in the crimes, not the survivors. Poet and photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova document a Ukrainian family living in Donbas, on the frontline of Russian aggression, in the summer of 2019, an intimate picture of life during the war and its impact on domestic life.
There are saturated black-and-white photographs by Matt Black that document American poverty and feel generic. A series of works from Trevor Paglen's ongoing project The Other Night Sky - to track and photograph the world's secret government satellites, based on the work of amateur satellite observers - adds another dimension to the idea of truth-seeking.. But it is too much in too little space: the subjects that the photographers were so keen to highlight become diluted and the exhibition succumbs to the pressure of its own ambition.
Closer to the exhibition's attempt to probe the truth are a pair of images by Robert Capa and Max Pinckers and Sam Weerdmeester. The later image, taken at the same location 79 years apart, is Pinckers and Weerdmeester's response to Capa's mythologized The Falling Soldier, an evocative 1936 photograph passed off as an image of a soldier taking a bullet in the Spanish Civil War. But it was believed to have been staged by Capa. Pinckers and Weerdmeester visited the location, which had been designated by a Spanish academic, and took a new photo with a high-resolution camera-an attempt at an accurate representation without romanticism or uncertainty. The empty landscape, however, tells us nothing of the bloodshed it may once have contained. This exhibition may blur the truth and reality, but the combination at least gives you plenty to think about.
Jonas Bendiksen traveled to the Macedonian town of Veles, the center of fake news production for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The young news hackers of Veles made millions creating fake American news portals - and helped Trump win. But Bendiksen's images also masquerade as the truth: the people in the documentary-style photos are in fact digitally rendered avatars. Incidentally, the god Veles, who lends his name to the town, was the pre-Christian Slavic god of deception.
The Sainsbury Centre is probably the most radical museum in the UK. Over the last three years there has been a huge effort to show its collection as living beings, to ask existential questions through art. The Camera Never Lies, while serious, doesn't fit that vision. It misses the opportunity to ask essential questions about how images are consumed, how history is reduced through viral images, how the role of photographers and editors shapes our understanding of the world. This exhibition feels more like a reaffirmation of faith in a style of photojournalism that - as the exhibition itself proves - is no longer a viable or appropriate response. Yes, the gruesome side of humanity is disgustingly exposed. But where does that leave the camera?
* The Camera Never Lies: Challenging Images Through the Incite Project is on display at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich until 20 October.
