If every picture tells a story, what do they say to each other?





What do they mean, all these pictures? The French landing in Beirut in 1860 in the first civil war, Jim's oil painting of the ruined house from the latest civil war – the same Jim whose ship was sunk five years before Robert Correns was shot; the Archduke, 21 years before Wolfgang Correns painted his idyllic German countryside and Farrouk painted Lebanon, pompously saluting with his white gloved hand as the world was about to be destroyed? I rather suspect that paintings and photographs build up their own hidden relationships as they hang on our walls, that perhaps this is why we collect them – on a whimsy, perhaps, which acquires meaning the longer they are there. I ask myself what they are trying to convey as they hang there at night, the ocean roaring outside my windows. Pictures, I suspect, speak to each other. I try to read their message.



Extract from a Robert Fisk article for The Independent



Robert Fisk’s World: If every picture tells a story, what do they say to each other?



Saturday, 9 May 2009