War Souvenir
By Francine Prose
Aperture, Fall 2006

If, as Diane Arbus said, a photograph is a mystery about a mystery, Paolo Ventura's haunting and beautiful work makes the mysteries seem to multiply exponentially, like reflections captured in the infinite progression of a hall of mirrors. Looking at these photos creates a moment of suspension, a melancholy hush in which we almost imagine we can hear whispers about the riddles of life and death, time and age, childhood innocence and adult knowledge, art, war, history, and such questions as: What are we seeing? What do we think we are seeing? And what we are concluding about what we think we are seeing?

In order to talk about these pictures at all, it is, I suppose, necessary to address the last and least of these mysteries first: What are these photographs of?

The first time I saw them, and for quite a while afterwards, I assumed that these soldiers and civilians were life-sized mannequins arranged to simulate the aftermath of battle and the ways in which war affects a country in which the privations of war are felt and it struggles are being waged. I imagined that these scarred and burned rooms were "real" dwellings damaged and scorched to recreate the shocked emptiness of a place unlucky enough to have been caught in the sights of the sharpshooter or bomber. Likewise, I believed that these scenarios and street scenes had been staged to recreate the sorts of dramas I recalled from the war films I loved as a child and which, I can't help noticing, are never, or hardly ever, shown any more on TV. And for a while after I learned the truth about what I was seeing, I kept showing the photos to friends, all of whom agreed with my initial impression about the life-sized scale of the models and scenes. It was as if I felt compelled to prove to myself that I wasn't the least observant person I know.

Because my initial impression had been wrong. These soldiers, lovers, prisoners, entertainers, whores, and suicides are not mannequins but dolls, the "action figures"--GI Joes and so forth--that my own children collected and played with during the 1980s and early 90s. And the period pieces, the vintage furniture of these war-torn rooms are the provenance of Barbie and Ken, furnishings plucked from the dolls' glamorous fantasy-life in Malibu or Miami and repainted and refashioned to suggest the decor of an earlier and considerably less pacific era.

And so the solution to one puzzle leads directly to another. The fact that we are looking are dolls and doll furniture forces us to consider the mystery of childhood imagination, and of the simultaneously razor-sharp and murky ways in which the child interprets the painful realities--among them, war--of the world of the adults.

Born in Milan, Paolo Ventura--who, like Arbus, began his career as a fashion photographer--spent part of his childhood with his grandmother, listening to her stories of the two world wars and poring over family photographs of relatives who fought in the battles and of places where they'd lived.

"Looking at these pictures," he writes, "I have the desire to enter into the picture and exit through the door of the photographic studio.I started to experiment with the images by making them appear physically old, as if they were found in an archive in some forgotten basement. The idea is to create another layer of reality on top of the already realistic (but false) photographs."

As we consider these photos, we find ourselves wondering: In which war, exactly, have these soldiers been killed? In what year were these rooms inhabited and then deserted? In which snow-covered city is that melancholy trattoria? The answers matter much less than the evocative mix of vagueness and precision that constitutes the simultaneously skewed and accurate truth of a child's understanding of war and loss and death, an imagined vision (assembled from relics and fragments of family narrative, of half understood films and visual images) of a distant and vanished past.

The sons of a successful children's book illustrator, Ventura and his identical twin brother spent their summers at their country home near the border of Tuscany and Umbria, a place he remembers as a sort of "boot camp" run according to his father's strict rules and where, to pass the long months of isolation and boredom, the boys invented a fantasy world that has reappeared in (or in any case influenced) their art. (Ventura's brother is a painter.) Something of that spirit still pervades these photos, especially once we know how they were made: a note of playfulness and innocence thrums beneath the more somber music of these images that so effectively telegraph grief and destruction. And our knowledge of how they are created--dolls dressed with a fully realized sense of the "lives" they lived, countless all-important and obsessive details of costume and decor lovingly fashioned and then, in some cases, burned with matches--makes them at once moving and delightful; the pleasure is a consequence of that same inventive obsessiveness. It's a world that a child with the esthetic sense and the technical skills of an adult might have constructed in a shoe box.

There is something very Italian, or perhaps more accurately, Latin about the way that tragedy and dark comedy mingle in these images. The fashions of the wounded and the dead evoke the catacombs the Capuchin Fathers in Palermo, where row after row of the dead display the raiments of their worldly existence so that the doctors and lawyers, priests and professors, soldiers and society women still retain their professional and social identities, even if they no longer are in possession of their flesh. It's a terrifying and somehow comical place where the rictus grin of death often seems like a smile, and where in one famous pairing a skeleton man and wife appear to have continued their lifelong conversation, centuries after death.

Which brings us to consider the final and most essential mystery that these photos evoke--which is, of course, that of life and death. Much has been written lately--most notably, Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others--about the moral and esthetic implications of contemplating images of suffering and of the horrors of war. We have all experienced the pornographic fascination and the accompanying unease we feel in the presence of images of victims of some natural or man-made catastrophe. But what are we to make of these photographs of the dead who were never alive in the first place, especially when these fallen corpses have already been reduced to ruins, remains, skeletons, already exiled from the province of life to that of archeology?

And so we come to the mystery of art, which enables us to contemplate these soldiers, these rooms, the street scenes, these souvenirs and relics of destruction. In some ways, the pictures are as much about the representations of war as they are about war itself. The scenes of the lovers embracing on the street, of the hospital for the wounded, of the men lined up against a wall to be searched and perhaps even executed, all of them evoke the films we saw as children: a cinema in which soldiers were always grabbing one last kiss before heading off to battle, in which shaved-headed collaborators were always being exposed and humiliated, in which brave resistance fighters were always being arrested on the street and sent off to uncertain fates. Meanwhile, other photos recall famous documentary shots taken during the last (that is, the most recent) world war. So the suicide sprawled backward on the loveseat reminds us of the shot--taken, oddly enough, by both Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White--of the German mayor dead by his own hand, together with his family, in advance of the Allied invasion. The solitary woman drinking in a cafe makes us think of a desolate wartime version of Brassai.

Looking at these photos reminds us of how those of us who lack direct experience of war must rely on photographs and films to tell us what war is like. And so, to us, they become war, are war, mysteriously powerful in their ability to evoke an era and a tragic historical moment that we ourselves never knew, so powerful that the atmosphere of war rubs off even on the photographs of a cabaret entertainer and a snowy street in which there is little direct evidence to indicate that a war is taking place. Everything becomes suffused with an aura of melancholy, as it is in a time in which natural life spans are being cruelly shortened and ended, so often for no reason. And, at least for their American audience, these photos are not only strong in themselves but important in their ability ro remind us of how dependent we are on such images. What is war, and what can we know about it, when we live in a culture in which the war photographs we are allowed to see are strictly controlled and even forbidden? How will the Paolo Venturas of the future envision the tragic conflicts in which we are currently embroiled?

The ingeniousness with which Ventura has assembled these tableaux and the beauty with which he has lit and arranged them somehow manage to remove all this--battles and bombing, soldiers and survivors--from the realm of politics and partisanship, of history and nationality, and to distill everything to its essence: the losses, the sorrows, the dislocations of war. Looking at these pictures, we feel tenderness and grief without the guilt and shame we would feel if they were photos of actual people. We feel as if the soldiers are our relatives, our grandfathers and fathers and sons, as if these lonely women and lovers were our ancestors, as if these burned-out rooms were the homes in which our families lived, at a time that someone remembers, even if we do not, at yet another dark moment in the history of the war that is always happening to someone, somewhere, if not at this moment to us.

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