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Captured for History, Wall Street Journal

Captured for History
By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH
August 15, 2008; Page W7C

When Ovation TV planned a week of war-themed programming, there was no way of knowing that Russia's assault on Georgia would make it seem timely. Even so, "The Art of War" series, which begins Aug. 17 and includes music, opera and Hollywood movies about war or conflict, takes up a timeless theme.

One documentary in the series, "Genius of Photography: Right Time, Right Place" (9-10 p.m., EDT on Thursday) needs no peg. While it features some war photographers, it also explores the ways in which still pictures have shaped our perceptions of broader human history.

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A World War II photograph by Robert Capa.

Most people are familiar with the work of Robert Capa, and his iconic images from World War II, including the beaches of Normandy. Some are shown here, along with the work of soldier-photographer Tony Vaccaro. Both men repeatedly risked their lives to make a record of what they saw; yet we are invited to discern subtle differences in their point of view. Mr. Vaccaro says that while Capa shared Hemingway's idea that war was somehow romantic, when the two photographers discussed this, he told Capa, "Bob, you are dead wrong."

Pictures taken when the Allies entered the Nazi death camps helped provide evidence, and a record for posterity, of the Holocaust. The work of Polish photographer Henryk Ross invites a different kind of scrutiny. Along with 164,000 other Jews, Ross spent much of the war inside the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, where his official duties included taking pictures for identity cards. Forced to "collaborate" in that sense, Ross was in fact a brave subversive, sneaking to the train depot so he could document deportations.

Yet his most startling images include the ones of ordinary ghetto life that show people going about their daily lives, celebrating marriages and even smiling in what look like happy scenes. These are not German propaganda. As one survivor of the Lodz ghetto explains, everyone was so hungry that they were "eating the walls," but they did indeed look for and experience a kind of victory in small, normal joys -- there were concerts in the ghetto and even hairdressers. Although she lost everything in the war, she explains, the discovery of a Ross photograph that includes her sitting next to her first love as he holds an accordion is treasured proof of a youth that the Nazis failed to eradicate entirely.

EVOLVING APPROACHES

Along with images from other scenes of loss and desolation -- Hiroshima, Ground Zero and even decrepit 1955 Detroit -- "Right Place, Right Time" itself is a snapshot of evolving approaches to photography. You might think that still pictures have been eclipsed now by film and video. Not so, says one commentator. During a war, TV crews may be at the front, "but then the photographers come in and make something more...of an analysis." And what informs us more deeply after a suicide bombing: a picture of blood on the streets or a photograph of a simple object, like a watermelon, that has been used to conceal a bomb inside it?

There are no answers here. Nor, presumably, in another entry in Ovation's "Art of War" week -- a music film entitled "War Oratorio," which was shot in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Uganda as an "artistic statement about the globalization of warfare." (Sunday 8-9:30 p.m.) Not for everyone, perhaps. In an era when no other channel is devoted to arts programming, however, Ovation offers a home for exploration of this sort.

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