Christine Spengler works as a war photographer since the 1970’s. Here carrier in photography started with an accident. On a trip to Chad where she took a few photos of two Toubou fighters heading to battle hand in hand. She used a Nikon there she borrowed from her brother who have already been working as a fashion photographer. Somewhere I read that she still uses that camera sometimes. Her first assignment took her to Northern Ireland where she photographed the war and protest for The Nylon magazine. Her subjects were mostly children and civilians of the war. In 1979 she went to Iran to document the Iranian revolution. Being a woman, she was allowed to go places which were forbidden to man, that added a lot to the uniqueness of her photos. I wouldn’t say that she is a pure documentary photographer. Through her pictures we can see that Spengler has a strong statement about war. Against war. And besides that, here photos are not only to tell a lot about her opinion but it’s a medium she used to let the world know about the untold stories of the victims of war. She let the people and the especially the children and women to speak to the world. In an interview they asked Spengler if it was hard to work as a woman photographer in those conflicted countries with so different cultural backgrounds (Just to mention a few: Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Chad, Northern Ireland). Her answer confirms what I first thought about her approach to war photography (or anti-war photography) when I first saw her works on an exhibition to Nice. She said: “on the contrary, it always worked in my favour, because as women we have a special sensitivity; I always tried to empathise with the women who were victims and they would ask me to photograph them and tell the world what was happening to them.” One of here most famous photos is a landscape she took in Cambodia after the bombardment of Phnom-Pen in 1975. While this type of grandiose landscape photography which is shows some similarities whit the style on Ansel Adams photos, we can say it does the work as her ‘Ars Poetica’.
Through this strongly composed, dark and sadly chaotic and still a bit calm image she express a lot about here feeling the war. About what a conflict does to the world and human’s life.
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November 2019
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