"Sari Sapon's photographs are extraordinary in their combination of subtlety and power, as they suggest, with controlled understatement, the horror of war, and at the same time, the possibility of hope."
- - Howard Zinn
"I have not painted the war, because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt war is in these paintings."
- - Pablo Picasso
THE DELUGE: Reflections on War
These works represent my reflections on war; reflection as a meditation on the disasters of war—the human and environmental tragedy—and as its counterpart, the appearance, the shadow of truth.
This series began during the first war with Iraq and continues today. Initially, I was struck by the abstract images presented to us in the first war of the computer age, to massive death and destruction filtered through the lens of a controlled media, images designed to promote rather than to criticize, to disguise rather than to enlighten. Particularly haunting were the scenes of the oil fields in Kuwait, of fires punctuating a dense, lifeless atmosphere of perpetual darkness. These images symbolized a complex story of environmental terrorism, imperialism, and the war for oil – and of the power of images to obscure the truth.
With few exceptions, that war was documented as a sanitized abstraction. Heavily censored and seen from afar, we consumed aerial views of the killing fields rendered blurry from a safe distance. 3-D graphic infomercials showcased the latest techno-gadgets of the military machine, free advertising for their latest fall line of products. Individual suffering was obscured in the crosshairs of a lens, dissolving in the fiery inferno.
From Kuwait to Mosul to Aleppo and Ukraine, the cycle of war continues. This series represents the abyss, the annihilation of war: the power to obliterate, to slaughter its people, and scorch the earth.
At times the image betrays its source and represents an idealized notion of beauty, like the studied patterns of nature to which Da Vinci alludes. Am I honoring the old masters when I surrender myself to the beauty of the fire, or am I paying homage to the new masters of war, of smart weapons, and precision bombing?
Photographs of water and light allude to the deluge descending upon us like the biblical floods, but the same image can be interpreted as a rebirth, of revelation - the purifying waters in which we find salvation. The promise of hope.
Are these images of the apocalypse or the story of creation? The contradiction is part of their mystery; I allow the image to evolve in either direction, as I am open to the viewer's interpretation.
Note: This imagery, reflecting human and environmental violence has haunted me to this day. My work continues to reflect the human and ecological decimation of war and now the manmade disasters of climate change, in Syria where fire is used as a tool of war to target oil fields and crops, the Amazon of Brazil where forests are torched for political and economic gain, and the windswept firestorms in California and Australia where record heat and low precipitation has produced an unprecedented crisis.