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JAAR'S studio holds thousands of photographs 
he had taken since leaving Chile over a decade 
ago for New York City, yet Jaar does not 
consider himself to be a photographer. Even the 
inclusion of Jaar's work in numerous 
photography exhibitions in museums throughout 
the U.S. and Europe has not convinced the artist 
of his specialisation. In the face of such evidence, 
one might regard Jaar's reluctance to own up to 
his profession as a kind of aesthetic conceit, a 
reaction to the historic, and somewhat continuing, 
denigration of photography within the pantheon 
of 'high1 art. Yet Jaar's reasons for resisting the 
label of photographers seem to reflect more 
substantial concerns. In some ways, Jaar's 
practice approaches journalism, which, 
supported by the assumptions and privileges 
afforded photography, could easily be misread 
<u a documentary project. 
Conversely, Joor's work would seem to support filmmaker 
Trirth Minh-ha's contention that, 'there is no such thing as 
documentary.1 While typically concerned with specific geopolitical 
conditions, Jaar's photographs moke no claim to offer 
the truth of a matter. Relying on conceptual strategies that 
implicate place and position in the production of meaning, Jaar's
work underscores the inevitable 
significatory gap between photographs 
and their subjects. This is not to say, 
though, that Jaar subscribes to a notion of 
reality or history as an unending procession 
of simulacra, if anything, Jaar's challenge 
to photography's representational 
authority serves to foreground material 
relations and lived experience. 
Jaar is keenly aware of the ways in 
which information, particularly in the guise 
of the photographic, is circulated through 
global media networks and the ways that 
information is offered up for daily 
consumption. In an advanced market 
economy where images are perhaps the 
most significant commodities, exposure is 
likened to knowledge and consumption is 
promoted as engagement. In response to 
he boxes were 
stacked and 
arranged in various 
configurations, 
acting as funerary 
markers for what 
Jaar called 'a 
cemetery of Images' 
this situation, Jaar brings together 
the visual codes and materials of 
documentary and promotion 
(which are already conflated to a certain 
extent) to undermine the very operations 
of those systems. Through carefully staged 
installations, Jaar's photographic work 
encourages a more complex exchange 
between viewer and image. 
As relations to information 
increasingly structure a whole range of 
social and political interactions, Jaar's 
work attempts to demonstrate how these 
relations enable some at the expense of 
others. In his investigation, Jaar is 
particularly concerned with the ways in 
which developing nations are pictured in 
industrial (or post-industrial) economies 
and how such representations support 
nations of First and Third Worlds and their 
attendant power inequities. Jaar 
understands that the ideological divide 
separating First and Third Worlds has 
real, measurable consequences. Over the 
Afruan Quarterly 
on the Am 
ViLl/N03 
past decades, Jaar's work has largely 
focused on a set of interrelated issues: 
population displacement and 
immigration, the exploitation of labour, 
and environmental degradation. A 
number of his projects have dealt with 
political, social and environmental crisis 
on the African continent. 
In 1989,Jaarreadashortarticlein 
the New York Times about the illegal 
dumping of toxic waste from Europe in 
the port town of Koko, in southwest 
Nigeria. With a suspicion that the few 
facts reported in the newspaper did little 
but downplay the actual situation and its 
global implications, Jaar travelled to Koko. 
Later, with the information he gathered 
through interviews and the thousands of 
photographs he 
took over a two 
week period, Jaar 
produced a 
number of 
i n s t a l l a t i o n s , 
collectively titled 
Geography = 
War. 
For Geography 
= War, 
Jaar exhibited his 
photographs from 
Koko as large, 
g l o s s y 
transparencies illuminated in lightboxes, 
situated in darkened spaces, the lightboxes 
presented Jaar's images in sequences 
that insinuated a cinematic visual 
language. The lightboxes also held 
transparencies on their backsides, which 
were visible as reflections in a set of small, 
framed mirrors mounted behind. To see 
the second images, which typically offered 
a counterpoint to their more ambiguous 
partners, viewers had to bring their bodies 
to an almost uncomfortable proximity to 
the lightboxes. In one series of lightboxes 
the facing transparencies graphically 
traced the path of the freighters that carried 
the toxic waste from Italy to Nigeria, 
while mirrors reflected images of stacked 
barrels containing PCBs and other 
dangerous compounds and children 
rummaging through the dump site in Koko. 
There was, however, no single vantage 
point from which all of the images could 
be viewed. The mirrors offered only 
fragments of the obscured photographs, 
fragments which changed as viewing 
positions shifted. The mirrors also reflected 
fragments of the viewer's own body as he 
or she moved about the installation, 
thereby implicating the viewer in the crisis 
and its reconstruction as a photographic 
narrative. 
The ethnic violence between the 
Hutu and Tutsi, and the world's 
unwillingness to take serious action to 
help end the genocide in Rwanda, 
provided the rationale for Jaar's return to 
Africa in the summer of 1994. On that 
trip, Jaar visited towns and refugee camps 
in Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire, collecting 
words and images related to the slaughter 
of hundreds of thousands of, mostly Tutsi, 
people. Yet the project which resulted 
from that investigation would not follow 
Jaar's usual conception strategy. There 
were no glossy transparencies of dead 
bodies, no reflected images of displaced 
people. Jaar noted doubts about 
photography's ability to communicate the 
enormity of the tragedy and, conversely, 
its potential to simply contribute to the 
specialisation of violence. It is a 
predicament stemming from what Paul 
Virilio has called a 'crisis of references 
(ethical, aesthetic), an incapacity to take 
stock of events in an environment where 
appearances are against us.' In the end, 
Jaar did choose to use the photographs of 
the Rwanda genocide, but not show them. 
Jaar incorporated some of the 
photographs in on installation, titled 'Real 
Pictures', in which the image remained 
hidden in archival storage boxes. Each 
box was silkscreened with a short 
description of the single photograph inside 
it. The boxes were stacked and arranged 
in various configurations, acting as 
funerary markers for what Jaar called 'a 
cemetery of images ' Without access to 
the photographs, viewers were left to 
picture each image through language. 
At first consideration, Jaar's reliance 
on words in the absence of photographs 
might seem to rest on a naive notion that 
language is somehow closer to the truth, 
or less susceptible to ideological 
manipulation, that images. Yet Jaar 
rescued Real Pictures from nostalgia by
using words in such a way as to undermine 
any claim they might have to an absolute 
correspondence with reality. While the 
texts offered descriptions of the basic 
elements of each hidden image, some also 
included less necessary, or newsworthy, 
observations. Jaar's attention to rather 
curious aesthetic details, like the geometric 
pattern on the shawl of a woman who 
walked 300 kilometres to a refuges camp, 
and his embellished prose style, offered 
evidence of a highly personal testimony. 
With his current work, Jaar again 
turns his critical attention to Nigeria. The 
execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in November 
provides the impetus of Shelter (Please 
Close Your Eyes), a project made up of a 
series of six lightboxes in an outdoor bus 
shelter in Seattle. Like Real Pictures, Shelter 
continues Jaar's exploration of narrative 
description in the place of photographic 
documentation. 
Shelter is concerned with the 
absence of significant Third World figures 
from the popular imagination and political 
consciousness of the U.S. public. The work 
addresses this condition of invisibility with 
references to three Nigerians. Ken Saro- 
Wiwa, China Achebe and Fela Anikulapo 
Kuti. There are clearly marked spaces for 
an image of each man on separate 
transparencies, even photo credits for Jaar, 
yet Shelter provides no pictures. Instead, 
captions accompany missing photographs. 
In the first caption we read that 
Saro-Wiwa is pictured speaking at a rally 
in Ogoniland. The text goes on to note 
Saro-Wiwa's environmental and human 
rights work and the circumstances of his 
execution. An accompanying transparency 
presents an exerpt from his prison writings, 
in which Saro-Wiwa declares, 'The most 
important thing for me is that I have used 
my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni 
people to confront their tormentors.' 
The second caption accompanies a 
missing portrait of Achehe and provides 
information regarding Achebe's success 
as a writer and his work as representative 
for Biafra. Achebe's profile, like the others, 
serves to underscore the political efficacy 
of words, both written and spoken. With 
Shelter, Jaar reasserts thecontinuing power 
of words in cultures (and publics) overcome 
by images. 
The last caption describes Fela 
performing at a nightclub in Lagos. We 
are told that Fela uses his songs to attack 
the corruption and human rights abuses of 
Nigeria's military regime. The final 
transparency of Shelter offers a translation 
of Fela's adopted name, noting that Kuti 
means 'Death cannot be caused by human 
entity.' With that phrase, Jaar brings our 
attention back to Saro-Wiwa and his 
execution. The sentiment expressed, 
though' may seem a bit trite given the 
events of the morning of November 10th, 
Saro-Wiwa is dead, his execution 
orchestrated by Sani Abacha and carried 
out by the general's troops. Yet by 
An installation on the Koko dump site, from the exhibition 'Geography^War'. 
Double-spread picture is that of a Rwandan refugee camp. • 
smuggling his writings out of prison shortly 
before his death, Saro-Wiwa himself 
insured that his words would have a 
political life beyond his death. 
As with the silkscreened texts in 
Real Pictures, the captions for Jaar's ghost 
images in Shelter also serve to deny 
journalistic detachment. Jaar moves from 
briefly describing the missing photographs 
and providing some basic biological 
information to making statements about 
these men that reflect his own biases and 
investments. Jaar states (as fact) that 
Achebe is 'one of the most provocative 
and original voices in contemporary 
literature' and that Kuti is 'one of the 
world's greatest artists.' While these 
opinions may very well be accurate, they 
are opinions nevertheless, offering a clear 
opposition to the dry disembodied 
objectivity. 
Shelter demonstrated two 
concurrent, yet potentially contradictory, 
impulses in Jaar's practice. While Jaar 
understands the political significance of 
representing the struggle of developing 
nations as a question of the unequal power 
distribution between First and Third 
Worlds, he is at the same time wary of 
reinscribingfetishistic economies of image 
display and consumption with his 
photographs. Jaar's continuing 
negotiation of these, concerns seems to 
have left him increasingly pessimistic about 
the efficacy of critical images in a media 
economy largely structured by overdetermined 
technologies and oversaturated 
markets. It is a practical 
pessimism, though one grounded in a 
recognition of the capacity of a 
spectacular culture to serve up even the 
most sophisticated critique as an image 
for consumption. Yet I suspect Jaar's move 
away from photography is only a 
temporary retreat, a way to buy time and 
clear a space for self-reflection and new 
strategizing. GR 
Afria m Quarterly 
on tht Arts 
Vol.11 NO)