Simon Norfolk

Leaving Photojournalism and Extending the Meaning of “Battlefield”

Simon Norfolk was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and educated in Britain. Early in his career he worked within reportage and documentary photography on the far right, refugees, and war. He gradually came to feel that the structures of conflict had to be addressed across longer periods than the immediate news cycle allows. In his official CV, Norfolk describes more than two decades of work as an effort to probe and stretch the meaning of the word “battlefield” in all its forms^*1. His subjects extend from war zones and refugee crises to supercomputers used in weapons design, nuclear missile tests, border facilities, and communications bases.

This shift took place during the 1990s, when conflicts in the Gulf, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan circulated globally through satellite television and digital communication, increasing the apparent visibility of war. At the same time, military-supplied footage, embedded reporting, and images from remote weapons revealed the vast systems behind visible combat. Norfolk turned toward landscape in order to bring the military institutions and infrastructures that produce human suffering into the photograph. World Press Photo describes him as a landscape photographer who works across war zones and military technologies^*2.

History Painting, Nineteenth-Century War Photography, and the Contemporary Aftermath

Photography of places after battle has a long history. The long exposures and cumbersome equipment used by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War led him to photograph roads, positions, cannonballs, and arranged soldiers more often than combat itself. John Burke, a nineteenth-century colonial photographer, accompanied the Second Anglo-Afghan War and recorded battlefields, cities, people, and ruins on glass plates. Norfolk rereads these precedents as a way of seeing present conflict in historical layers. The official introduction to Burke + Norfolk explains how the 2010 project began from Burke’s photographs and rephotographed contemporary Afghanistan^*3.

Aftermath photography can aestheticize violence when it renders the traces of catastrophe as quiet landscapes. Norfolk deliberately uses the authority and duration of beautiful landscape photography while accepting this risk within the work. In an interview with BLDGBLOG, he acknowledges the attraction of damaged places and military sites as a form of the “military sublime,” arguing that their beauty can contain both awe before power and criticism of it^*4. Securing enough attention for viewers to remain with the image and read its details becomes a condition for thinking about distant wars as long histories.

Afghanistan: Chronotopia — Reading the Land as a “Museum of the Archaeology of War”

Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2002) was photographed after the 2001 U.S.-led attack and brings the Soviet invasion, civil war, Taliban rule, and American bombing into contact with the remains of ancient civilizations and earlier empires. On the project’s official page, Norfolk compares walking the streets of Afghanistan to moving through a “museum of the archaeology of war,” where different periods of destruction have accumulated^*5. “Chronotopia” here names the binding of time and place within one image. A ruined building can retain several histories through cycles of repair, reuse, and renewed destruction.

The resolution of the large-format camera records distant mountains, rubble, bullet marks, roads, signs, and traces of daily life with equal density. The photographs minimize explanatory accounts of “what happened” and ask viewers to read layers. Belfast Exposed presents the series as a landscape in which different moments of war accumulate across the streets of Kabul^*6. Halsey Institute likewise describes Norfolk’s connection of archaeological remains and present devastation as a way of addressing long-term suffering suppressed by mainstream media^*7. For Norfolk, landscape remains a political document after the event has passed.

Large-Format Color and the Tension of “War Photography That Is Too Beautiful”

Norfolk’s photographs use evening skies, precise perspective, saturated color, and classical composition, often making ruins appear sublime. That beauty can seem disproportionate to the devastation of war. His method sustains the ethical tension within the picture. Military power attracts through monumental architecture, light, technology, and speed, and that attraction helps support state authority. Norfolk retains this appeal in the image so that the allure of military spectacle can itself be examined. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation holds his work as a precise color-photographic inquiry into the landscapes of war, empire, and technology^*8.

The danger remains that aesthetic distance may push victims outside the frame. For Most of It I Have No Words (1998) photographs sites of twentieth-century genocide, creating a large gap between apparently ordinary landscapes and their histories. The Hyman Collection connects the series to both the return of massacre sites to everyday use and photography’s inability to show past violence directly^*9. The title names the limit faced by words and images when they represent catastrophe. Norfolk’s beautiful landscapes make the invisibility of violence part of the subject.

Photographing Military Infrastructure — Expanding War from the Front Line to Networks and Borders

Information, surveillance, research, and weapons testing are crucial to Norfolk’s expansion of the battlefield. In Full Spectrum Dominance, he photographs communications facilities, radar, and space and missile technologies that sustain warfare, shifting the battlefield from the front line to a network. The official project page situates the series within a military doctrine that seeks dominance across land, sea, air, and the information sphere^*10. Such facilities organize the geography of violence before remote strikes, explosions, or deaths become visible.

Fantasma en la Ciudad, Nogales, Arizona/Nogales, Sonora, Mexico (2006) pictures the boundary and urban lights separating the paired cities in the United States and Mexico. The Amon Carter Museum publishes the image and collection information, allowing the border landscape to be seen as a contemporary militarized space^*11. By extending war from interstate combat to walls, surveillance systems, communications networks, and resource management that sort migrants, Norfolk reexamines the distinction between wartime and peace.

Burke + Norfolk — Photographing the Same Place and Repeating the Same History

Burke + Norfolk (2011) brought photographs made by John Burke during the Second Anglo-Afghan War back to Afghanistan as Norfolk rephotographed the country in the present. Past and contemporary images enter into dialogue, revealing continuities and differences in military intervention, roads, cities, and representations of people. The official introduction records that production began from Burke’s photographs in 2010 and included a workshop and exhibition with Afghan photographers in Kabul^*3. Including local photographers gave the project a way to address, from within, the colonial problem of a British photographer once again representing Afghanistan.

LensCulture describes the series as a dialogue in which historical photographs frame the present while new images reconsider an imperial gaze from the past^*12. Burke’s wet-plate photographs and Norfolk’s color works differ in technology and period, yet both share large equipment, extended preparation, and an interest in landscape and architecture. Photographing the same places reveals how Afghanistan has repeatedly been pictured by outside powers as a strategic landscape.

How the Photobook Turns Distant Places into a Historical Argument

Norfolk’s work gains force through series and photobooks more than through isolated master images. For Most of It I Have No Words places sites of several genocides in sequence, while Afghanistan: Chronotopia builds historical layers from cities, ruins, military sites, and traces of daily life. His official CV records the books, exhibitions, and awards through which these long-term projects circulated^*1. Turning the pages links geographically distant places and transforms individual landscapes into a sustained argument.

Photofusion’s Afghanistan: Chronotopia exhibition presented the photobook and installation as a structure for reading Afghanistan’s long history of destruction^*13. On the museum wall, large prints occupy the viewer’s field of vision and create bodily time for searching out small traces. In the book, captions and sequence supply historical relations. Norfolk combines images with text, place names, dates, maps, and earlier photographs, establishing the terms for reading landscape as evidence.

Time Taken — Glacial Time and the Long Duration of War and Climate

In Time Taken, Norfolk photographed Afghanistan’s glaciers and mountain ranges over an extended period, connecting the history of war and climate change on the same temporal axis. Michael Hoppen Gallery presents the glacier as an instrument that records time, linking geological duration far longer than human conflict to present environmental change^*14. Here the “battlefield” expands further to include resources, climate, and the vulnerability of states.

The glacier photographs approach diminishing water supplies, agriculture, migration, and conditions for conflict from geological time. Norfolk’s understanding of landscape extends from an archive of past violence to a place where future crisis is taking shape. The official Time Taken page presents the series through photographs, scientific observation, and representations of time^*15.

Moving Beyond the Human-Centered War Photograph—and the Cost of Doing So

War photography has conveyed urgency through the bodies of victims, soldiers, and protesters. Norfolk’s move toward landscapes where people are small or absent carries the risk of abstracting individual suffering. A Teesside University review of a symposium on war photography places him within debate about how contemporary images respond to situations in which “nothing can be seen,” including remote warfare, aftermath, and institutional limits^*16. His photographs take on a different task from testimony by showing the durations and infrastructures that escape images centered on the body.

Human absence becomes an occasion to examine the limits of landscape photography. Burke + Norfolk crosses earlier colonial photographs with the perspectives of local photographers, while the title For Most of It I Have No Words names photography’s insufficiency. Both signal that landscape images contain the photographer’s position and historical gaze. Tate’s Burke + Norfolk exhibition juxtaposed John Burke’s nineteenth-century photographs with Norfolk’s new work, presenting Afghanistan as a land repeatedly imaged by empires^*17.

From Roger Fenton to “Late Photography” — Reading the Absent Battlefield as a System

Fenton’s The Valley of the Shadow of Death shows a road scattered with cannonballs and signals war through the absence of bodies and combat. Since the late twentieth century, “late photography” has developed as an approach that records material traces after an event with quiet, high-resolution images, and a number of photographers have addressed military sites and post-conflict landscapes. An essay in Open Arts Journal discusses Norfolk alongside Angus Boulton, Gilad Ophir, and Roi Kuper within this history of late photography concerned with military landscape and memory^*19.

Norfolk’s importance therefore lies in connecting the history of the unpeopled battlefield to contemporary military systems, not in inventing it. He links the quiet of aftermath photography to ancient ruins, colonial photographs, computers, satellites, border control, and climate change, editing apparently separate places into one military system. Works in SFMOMA’s collection range from training by the Afghan police to a BBC relay station on Ascension Island, placing bodies at the front and the communications networks of remote war within the same expanded battlefield^*18. The evidentiary claim of photography shifts from being present at the decisive moment toward making visible the conditions that allow war to occur.

Place in Photographic History — Connecting Aftermath, Imperial Photography, and Military Infrastructure

A broad current of “late photography” was already addressing conflict through devastated land, military sites, and surveillance space. Within it, Norfolk moved from traces on the surface of the land toward links among present landscapes, nineteenth-century imperial photographs, military research, communications networks, borders, and future environmental crisis. His distinction lies in turning landscape from a container of memory into evidence of mechanisms through which war is designed, repeated, and deferred.

The beauty of large-format color draws sustained attention to ruins and military sites while retaining the danger of transforming violence into sublime scenery. Norfolk holds this contradiction in place and uses captions, historical materials, rephotography, and collaboration with local photographers to ask whose history a beautiful landscape has been made to tell. His contribution to photographic history is less the invention of a new subject called the “battlefield” than a method for integrating aftermath photography, historical images, military infrastructure, and environmental photography into one long argument. War photography could thereby examine the period before violence becomes visible and the duration after its end is declared, alongside its established role in recording explosions and injured bodies.