Les Cavaliers du Diable
How does one photograph war? Certainly not by repeating pictures of corpses, answers the author who decided to re-appropriate images and subject satellite views of burnt villages in Darfur –with at least 300,000 dead between 2003 and 2006– to another treatment, posing the question in a radical fashion. Freed of their colours and converted into black and white negative, the Google Earth captures become graphics. We will not find information, but we will, indisputably, have the form. This is no different, to tell the truth, from what happens with images created from the tradition of photojournalism that can only constitute part of an information process in a particular context accompanied by texts, figures, graphics and layout. The information could not be derived from the actual image if it were produced in the photographic tradition or by the sophistication of recent technologies. Satellites –which sweep everything, monitor everything– supply us with shapes. Shapes to be deciphered. In this case, denoting tragedy.
