Newsnight Review discussed the exhibition of war photographs by Paul Seawright at the Imperial War Museum.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Hidden is photographs by Paul Seawright at the Imperial War Museum.

Bonnie Greer, a lot of newspaper photographs at the time, he's had much more time, more reflection, has he made good use of that time?

BONNIE GREER:
I found is a very moving exhibition. I was very happy to hear him say that he wasn't making a specific comment about Afghanistan.

For me these photos are narratives about the futility of war itself. The real aftermath of war.

These could have been photos of Verdun in 1915; they could have been the American civil war in 1863; they could have been Philippi in 42BC.

He absolutely shows us just what the end result of war is. And the photo I really loved was the one with the camels that comes into the distance, because after war, if there is an aftermath of the war we're about ready to enter, humans find their ways back on to these bombed out landscapes.

I also liked the way this show has been hung. It is in a glass-enclosed space and there are no descriptions of the photos, so it's unmediated.

So you bring yourself to these pictures. I think it's a very beautiful, beautiful exhibition.

LAWSON:
Mark Kermode, it's very striking that there are no people in these photographs. They are all absences. I thought that was very clever, because that's what the aftermath of that war is about.

Osama Bin Laden is gone, nobody knows where he is, if he's anywhere. The Americans have gone. They've moved on to something else, and all that comes across.

MARK KERMODE:
Yeah it does, and I found that partly troublesome, because I've been so impressed in the past by the photography of Don McCullen, war photographs that show you people, because I believe that they would then put people off the idea of war.

The idea that we've now become so saturated with those images and, in fact, they don't mean what they used to mean.

And in fact what he is doing to some extent, this phrase "peripheral vision" - he's looking to the side of the conflict and you're seeing it out of the side of your eye. This idea of looking at the place in which these things happened is actually telling more than looking at those pictures that have become so iconic.

The best one for me was there's one in which, there was a couple, there's a landscape, which looks like it has a load of molehills on it. You can't figure out whether they're graves, are they land mines?

And it turns out that what they are, are places where land mines have been dug out by hand because you can't go searching for them with metal detectors, because it's so much iron ore in the ground.

And that sense that the landscape has become organically corrupted by the war, I thought was very powerful.

And I have to say, even at the same time as being distressed, that images that people seem now to be redundant, I thought that what he was doing was powerful but troublesome.

LAWSON:
But is he saying they're redundant?

I thought his political point is that the caravan has moved on. That Afghanistan is now forgotten.

The gaps in his pictures, they stand for the dead, they stand for Osama, they stand for the Americans, all gone.

KERMODE:
He's says that people criticise his pictures for not having people in them, but in fact they're completely full of people, they're full of the ghosts of people, and that is true.

But I still think it's partly a reaction to what has become a tradition of showing suffering, of showing iconic images of violence and death and saying, "OK, that doesn't any longer mean what it used to mean 20, 30 years ago," and if it doesn't mean that any more, then I think we really have moved in a way that is rather worrying.

LAWSON:
Miranda Sawyer, he's in a tradition of war artists who, in the past, tended to be official, approved by the Ministry of Defence - he's unofficial, sent by the Imperial War Museum. Has he made good use of that freedom he had?

MIRANDA SAWYER:
Yeah, I mean, because what he's done very, I mean, you know. Some of the stuff that you were saying I agree with, but I think it's quite interesting, I mean he describes himself as an artist and not a journalist. I think that perhaps what you were looking for is something that's more journalistic.

I think that because he, he, you know, he took the 128 rolls of films and he just chose these ones to show. And I think that that's a very deliberate, it's editing decision. That's what he did.

And what struck me when I saw it was that, what you realise is that it's about land. You know, war is about land. The people don't really matter, the people want the land. When you look at them you think this is before and after war, its during war, the whole thing is about that. That eventually everything goes just to this, this apocalyptic thing, its got its full of you know, bones, it's also full of mines.

But underneath it all, you know, I was also struck by the idea that, you know, if you see scenes like this in the American West, you can gambol through with the wind in your hair.

And underneath this is like an oil pipe. That you can't even see, is layers upon layers upon layers, within this landscape. That once you contemplate it, it seeps into your heart.

LAWSON:
I agree they're very powerful, but it brought to mind an argument, which anyone who's written for newspapers and magazines has had with the photographer they send with you, that the photographer thinks the pictures work on their own and they don't need any words.

I was troubled here that Mark's told one story about what those mounds are. That they can't use metal detectors and so on. I referred in the introduction to this, to what seems to be the Nike swoosh, is a tick. Now, we know those things because we ask people, I, in fact, asked the photographer. The people going aren't told any of that. Is there enough explanation of these?

GREER:
That didn't bother me so much. I think he's daring us to feel, he's daring us to put aside all our notions about war photographs. You know, we're in an age of photography, he's saying, "go in there and feel this."

You know what he reminds me of? Remember that scene in Patton when George C Scott is standing over the battlefield and he says, "there was a battle here." And you're thinking, "what is he talking about?" He's talking about a feeling, and that's what this man wants you to have when you walk in, take all the notions out of your mind and feel: what was the absence here?

SAWYER:
And also that, you see the resonances as well. You know those, you know those arches, there's a couple of arches that had been blown up and they're lit so that the light comes through and I kind of thought of, you know, stepping out to heaven, and stepping out to hell. And actually I thought of, there's an island off Senegal where all the slaves were kept before they

GREER:
Goree, Goree. Yes. The big archway.

SAWYER:
Yeah, and I thought of that. When they step out. And that's got, you know, superficially nothing to do with Afghanistan, but it brings these ideas into your head.

LAWSON:
I know, I know the Imperial War Museum will say they haven't got the space, but it shocked me that there are only ten of these pictures. And it's pitifully small isn't it? There should have been many more of them in this exhibition.

KERMODE:
Well it's funny. I mean it works in two In one hand it works to completely refine your attention. Because if there's only ten pictures in a room, what you do is you look for a very long time individually at them, and in fact, I mean as you said, there's hundreds and hundreds of images and the fact that these are the ones that have been chosen so specific

I have to say, of the ten there were two that I actively didn't like. I mean the close-up of the tacks I couldn't get a handle on at all, for example. But I don't think because, because of the way his images are constructed, because they're not of people, because they are of these landscapes that are fairly anonymous, actually those ten will serve as well for the whole wealth of them, you know.

SAWYER:
And they give that atmosphere as well.

GREER:
Remember that you're walking from a space that's got armaments in it, it's got masses of things. And you're walking into an abstract space.

SAWYER:
It's like a chapel almost.

GREER:
Yes, it's a chapel, thank you. And it's abstract as well, and it's very beautifully laid out, for that reason I would think.

SAWYER:
Yeah, I mean that, that's exactly what struck me. You know, you walk into the Imperial Museum, War Museum and it's full of armaments, you know and then you kind of, you're cluttered around, and there's lots of Italian students pointing at stuff. And then you walk into this small, quiet space and you, it gives you the opportunity to think about what you think about war.

LAWSON:
Well, if there is a new war coming, a general feeling that maybe they afterwards should send Paul Seawright, whose pictures are at the Imperial War Museum in London until March 30th, before touring to Cardiff and Dublin.