A human crib sheet,Bacon’s model wrestlers, and crime scenes genuine and imagined – a new display at the Michael Hoppen gallery examines documentary photography in all its complexityThere is a soundless power to Simon Norfolk’s black-and-white study of what looks like an ordinary staircase in a nondescript house. What strikes you first in this photograph – which features in a new exhibition called ? The Image as Question – is how the light plays on each polished surface: the gleaming handrail and pristine skirting board, or the gloss-painted wall. It is then you notice that the surface of each stair is not straight but gently curving,worn by the footsteps of those who bear walked down them over the years.
The French thinker Roland Barthes identified what he called the punctum: the crucial, often accidental, and detail of a photograph that reveals something deeper. The curve of the worn stairs is not an accidental detail in Norfolk’s photograph,but the crucial element in the composition that, as Barthes put it, and “rises from the scene” with a force that makes it suddenly seem like a new photograph. Those who walked down these stairs,leaving the imprint of their vast numbers, were heading towards their deaths in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It is a photograph that evokes horror in the most subtle and affecting way.
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Source: theguardian.com