The faces are crudely drawn, there is an abundance of female flesh on show, bodies are out of kilter, and the uniforms are not an accurate depiction of those worn at the time.ĭespite all this roughness, there is an emotional truthfulness in these prints a truthfulness compounded by the fact that Goya did not show them during his lifetime. Though they are a template for photographic reporting of the spectacle of war, at the same time there is an astounding level of inaccuracy in these etchings. And that is what The Disasters of War amount to. But before atrocity photography, there was atrocity art. These are atrocity pictures, photographs that satisfy what Susan Sontag categorises as our fascination with disaster at a distance.
Goya’s cartload of bodies are reprised in a pair of almost identical pictures of dead cholera victims by James Nachtwey and Sebastiao Salgado’s from Goma, while the execution of prisoners find an echo in Li Zhensheng’s images of Cultural Revolution China or Christian Simonpietri’s gruesome picture of prisoners being bayoneted to death in Bangladesh. Yet at the same time they are a template for the photographic reporting of war, condensing in those 82 etched images a visual model that you can find equivalence for in the history of photography.ĭimitri Baltermants’ Grief, made in 1942, shows a muddied field of civilians massacred by Nazis, with grieving relatives reaching over to identify their murdered loved ones.
The Disasters of War show horror and atrocity before the advent of photography. They show the effect of war on the civilian population and, in his etchings of the aftermath of the war and the restoration of a flawed monarchy and church, the ways in which suffering, corruption and war are linked to wider structures of power.įrancisco Goya: The Disasters of War, Plate 15, Y no hay remedio (“ And it cannot be helped”) / Public Domain They are etchings, not photographs, but they are complete in their depiction of atrocity there is death, mutilation, torture, execution, rape, pillage, starvation, sorrow, disgust and despair in unflinching detail.
MADE THE ART FOR THE SUFFERER AND THE WITNESS SERIES
These are Goya’s Disasters of War, a series of 82 prints made between 18 that show the horrors of war and its aftermath during the Spanish Napoleonic Wars. There are children screaming at what they have seen, wealthy Spanish passing by the skeletal forms of the starving, the caption reading ‘Do they belong to another race?’ The horrors continue: a man standing cap in hand, his face skeletal and gaunt, a pile of the dead and dying at his feet or there’s the cart dispatching its cargo of corpses for burial, a man clutching the ankles of the floppy corpse of a dead woman, the white flesh of her thighs showing as she is taken away for burial in a mass grave. Behind the soldier stands the woman’s mother, knife in hand, about to stab the rapist in the back. Francisco Goya: The Disasters of War, Plate no.9 No Quieren (“They do not want to”) / Public DomainĪnother picture titled No quieren (translation: “they do not want to”) shows a fur-hatted soldier grabbing a woman, his arms gripped around her waist as she claws at his face and eyes.
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