The architecture of lingering war in everyday life: photography and the double time of military apparatus

Abstract

Time is a problem that war photography has to solve. Photojournalists have to be ‘in the right place and at the right time’ if they want to capture military action. Yet the speed and the surprise built into the core of such events means that war is mostly documented post factum. Instead of picturing dramatic action, most photographs show how effectively time deletes the damage to war, how quickly the drama disperses in everyday life. The temporal parallax inherent in the medium is explored by photographers focusing on substantial traces of war left in architecture built to last in time. The essay discusses how the elided trauma characteristic of Lithuania, an Eastern European country, can be detected from the architecture of war presented in photographs. It focuses on the following series by three photographers: (1944–1991) by Indrė Šerpytytė (2009), Surveillance (2015–2018) by Valentyn Odnoviun and Back to Shul (2018) by Richard Schofield.