“Apart from some Goya pictures, there isn't a painting about war, before the invention of photography, that doesn't glorify it” (Verissimo, 2008).
What photography did is change the perception of war, it brought the dirt and the rotten corpses into the equation: it gave colour, proportion and horror to the notion of war but, conflictive as it is, coded within the bourgeoisie aesthetics. It was from that ironic element, the mix of horrors and misery of a Nazi concentration camp with a bourgeoisie aesthetic, that Rodger changed his conception of his photographic practice.
“It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen – 4,000 dead and starving lying around – and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and it had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp – it didn't mean a thing” (Hill and Cooper, 2005: 53).
Rodger photographed the people that used to run the camp while they were waiting for trial for war crimes. Arguably, the most interesting images are a series of portraits of the camp supervisors: it consists of six pictures, each one of them with a different young woman between 20 and 25 years old. They are removed from the background, which is out of focus. This was a very intriguing choice made by Rodger: by detaching those women from any context the subject is isolated from any meaning outside their bodies. That highlights the focus on the analysis of the social mask and causes the viewer’s gaze to be initially seduced by a young dynamic-looking woman. This whole process makes this picture much more horrific: because Rodger doesn’t give any clues in the image about the narrative of events, the reading of the picture becomes more shocking and surprising when the viewer reads the caption with the real context of these women.
Rodger, George (1945), Camp Superintendent, Annalese Kholmann, Belsen
It could be argued that an analogy with the photographic process could be made from the series of pictures that Rodger took of the camp supervisors. On those pictures the “face of evil” is surprising not for being the stereotypical rude, cruel, dirty, sadistic men with some kind of disorder but quite the opposite. The camp supervisors were composed of young girls in their late twenties, and if it were not for the caption explaining their previous status in the concentration camps, it would be hard to guess that they participated in one of the biggest mass genocides of modern history. The girls are apparently untroubled and untouched by the acts they had perpetrated during their work in the camp as if they were not guilty for what happened there. They were machines, obeying orders, only an engine to be commanded by someone else. However, even alleging they were just following command, they were witnesses of that process.
The detached approach from which Rodger decided to deal with these subjects is metalinguistic with the notion of obeying orders: the subjects are outside their context and the focus is on the body and the social mask of the individual. Their personality is presented in the manner of their normal social context (young, dynamic, naïve). It detaches the individual from their action: the most important feature is not a narrative of events but rather a narrative of the body. In these portraits, these women are obeying a function inside a social environment. It is a metaphor for the whole basis for the defence against allegations of war crimes: they were only complying with demands from their superiors (they were detached from any decisions or context that could make them guilty).
There are two contradictory elements in this notion of not being guilty because they were following orders: the rules of engagement from the command chain of the army and the personality of the individual. They are impartial because they have to follow orders but at the same time they are individuals who witness their own realities. Photography acts in the same way, it is objective and impartial because it traces the reality via a machine but at the same time there is a point of view from the person operating the camera. Arguably Rodger felt like those women, he was part of a machine as a witness to the reality just there to take a picture, to convey a function.
Clearly Rodger encountered a problem engaging with this type of subject. As Susan Sontag explains in her book “On Photography”, in that period European photography was guided by notions of the picturesque, the important and the beautiful, always praising or aiming at neutrality. Photography was not an argument, but a fact witnessed by the eye, a memento traced by light onto the film. Influenced by those notions, Rodger encountered a moral dilemma at Bergen-Belsen, because photography not only is the objective recording but a personal testimony as well. However, by the same premise, he shifted his photographic gaze to a picturesque society, a foreign culture in which he could work impartially and where he could explore photography under a basic social engagement; he went to Africa. Rodger made a conscious decision to change his gaze and body of work to a purer society as a reaction to the dilemma of the Bergen-Belsen experience. That is the premise of Rodger's shift. He found on the Nubas a subject worth being admired for, but he would approach it in the same way he did at the concentration camp: detached, distanced and impartial. His subjects changed, but did the complex contradictory elements that he found during his experiences of war photography change with them?
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