Only With The Heart – David Pratt’s War Photography

From Derry to Kandahar and from Donetsk to Bogota, we have lived on a dangerous planet.It’s all too easy for us sheltered in our liberal west European oasis to forget or ignore the horror that is daily life for so many people in war zones across the globe. And maybe that’s why David Pratt – The Glasgow School of Art educated photographer and subsequently war correspondent for numerous dailies – asks us to look at these images with the heart rather than the eyes.

So what do we see here through seventy-odd black and white snaps from zones of conflict?
Death, destruction, bewildered children, stoical and enduring women, the lame, the mutilated, the wounded, but most of all, ubiquitously in these zones, we see the men and boys and their tools for laying waste, for killing and doing down to nothing their fellows and all their works.

So much for the study of our species at work, and if you follow Pratt’s instruction then your heart will be ragged with shame and despair before you are half way through.
Pratt takes his cue ‘with the heart’ from French writer and explorer de Saint-Exupery, but perhaps his intention can be understood as something very similar to the critical tool of the ‘punctum’ as theorised by another Frenchman , philosopher Roland Barthes. In every photo which affects us strongly, according to Barthes, there is for the viewer one intense and subjective effect which leaps out, moves the heart, if you like, or as Barthes puts it, is ‘the accident which pricks, bruises me.’

Thus in Pratt’s photos: the cupboard containing prosthetic legs has two shelves, simple metal rod legs on the top, moulded calf shaped ones at the bottom. Each foot has a battered old shoe already fitted. The three men and a machine-gun atop a hill waiting –and we see near us that the hill is made of spent cartridges.

The two fearsome Croatian boys and their AK47’s –one has a golden cross –symbol of Christian suffering – dangling over his jersey.Our gaze alights on these puncta –suddenly, unexpectedly, these banal objects shock us. It’s not that the plain depiction of mutilation, death and destruction has worn us down to compassion fatigue, but these details which leap out at us with their ordinariness, their object histories that we recognise and elaborate upon immediately, those things ‘bruise’ us, they give us our living and unforgettable touch from the daily horror that is our world.

War: with Pratt we truly are at the heart of the matter. 

Only With The Heart : David Pratt War Photographs – SOGO Gallery , The Saltmarket, Glasgow