Death, pain, destruction, injustice… More than 200 years have passed since Francisco de Goya’s paintbrush recorded in his engravings the terrible consequences of an armed conflict.
Since then, weapons and war tactics have evolved, as have international relations, but not the effect they have on their victims, the vast majority of whom are civilians caught in the crossfire. A suffering that for years has been captured by the cameras of the photojournalists Judith Prat and Diego Ibarra and that is the focus of the exhibition in which his work dialogues with that of the genius from Fuendetodos to invite reflection on the disasters that wars, before and now , generate.
“We are not, nor can we be, pain paratroopers. You have to dignify the suffering of the victims and be an uncomfortable window to awaken critical thinking in the viewer”, said Ibarra, a regular signature in international headlines such as The New York Times or Der Spiegel, at the presentation of the exhibition.
Under the title ‘The disasters of wars’, the exhibition includes the complete series of prints by the most universal Aragonese painter, considered by many to be one of the first war chroniclers. They are recordings that have already been seen on numerous occasions, but on this occasion 26 of them are compared with as many images captured by the cameras of these two photographers in different armed conflicts in different parts of the world.
The bridges between Goya’s work and that of these photographers is sometimes palpable, with current images that seem like carbon copies of those that the painter captured in black and white two centuries ago. In others, the relationship is not so evident, and the visitor must get more involved in their search, such as those that refer to the effects of conflicts on the mental health of the victims.
Judith Prat (49 years old) provides images captured over the years in Yemen, Nigeria, Kurdistan, Colombia or South Sudan. Her work, published in numerous Spanish and international media, pays special attention to the role of women in conflicts, in which they are often the object of multiple forms of violence (war, sexual, family or social stigmatization, etc.). Conflicts that often go unnoticed in our societies compared to others that monopolize all the spotlights, as is now the case with Ukraine. “The danger of silencing a war is that it fosters impunity,” she says.
For his part, Diego Ibarra (40 years old) contributes with snapshots taken in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan, where he has often focused on the effects that confrontations have on children’s education. For the show, he opted for raw and explicit images that show the horror of what happens there, without infantilizing the viewer or walking with hot cloths. “We have to tell what they don’t want to be told and be uncomfortable witnesses,” he asserted.
The inauguration of the exhibition, which can be seen in the Patio de la Infanta de Ibercaja in Zaragoza until September 24, also had a space reserved to remember all the Spanish photojournalists who have lost their lives over the years in different conflicts as well as for the Spanish journalist Pablo González, imprisoned for a year and a half in Poland when he was covering the beginning of the war with Ukraine, for whom they demanded a fair trial.
