DAVID HEMPENSTALL | CAMP SLAYER
Several months have passed since David Hempenstall submitted his work ‘Camp Slayer’. Much time has passed. Maybe I am loosing the authentic desire of writing. Everything goes too fast for me. Yet this afternoon I’ve checked this series again and I found that there is a thread that unites the many istant shots gathered by David in Iraq. As Dan Rule has written well, is what they conceal rather than display, which makes this project different and intriguing.
So writes the critic Dan Rule «Eschewing the politicisation and dramatism of war photography, these tightly framed photographs capture mere snippets of the pragmatic, everyday details: tyre prints in dust, a fuel drum, the rusted wall of a shipping container. But what makes them so effective is what they choose not to disclose. A crudely laid concrete path leads to nowhere; the entrance to a nylon tent remains securely zipped. These snapshots, crops and abstractions act as evidence of something much greater and more sinister.»
David rather than to question the possibility to recount with one click a whole war, reminds us that the idea of war itself may be too tragic to be represented. And this part binds to the true experience during which the photographer has made these images. «Camp Slayer is made up of 165 Time Zero Polaroid prints made on the US Military base of the same name. I made these photographs while working on the exhumation and documentation of mass graves in Iraq from mid-2005 till early-2007. The photographs explore the occupying force’s use of the former Presidential Palace complex on the outskirts of Baghdad».
I think that David is able to recover the feeling of helplessness and, above all, of incomprehension that we feel when we look at the innocent victims of wars. We can not give us a reason. At least, not as human beings. (Steve Bisson)