Who today recognizes the name "Solferino"? The battle was the decisive engagement in the Second Italian War of Independence, and more than 200,000 French, Austrian, and Sardinian troops fought there. Its most lasting significance, though, had nothing to do with Italian unification or the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rather, the carnage there led to the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, four years later, in 1863.
The Red Cross and photography began roughly at the same time. No less than bandages or foodstuffs, the camera has helped the organization discharge its mission. There are some 110,000 photographs in the ICRC archives, essential - and usually heartbreaking - tools in the Red Cross' documenting of disasters both man-made and natural. "A Memory of Humanity: From Solferino to Guantanamo - 145 Years of Red Cross Photography" is a small but indelible survey of the man-made ones. It runs at Suffolk University's Adams Gallery through March 31.
The Adams Gallery is not a large space, and the 86 photographs are hung only inches apart. The density of display is at first off-putting. Very quickly, though, the viewer realizes how fitting it is. The inhumanity we are being shown is all of a piece, and each photograph effectively serves as a fragment of a single, dire mosaic.
The names of the wars may change - Franco-Prussian, Serbo-Turkish, Boer, Russo-Japanese, the Spanish Civil War, both world wars, Korean, Vietnam, Arab-Israeli, Falklands, Iraq. The sites are sadly various, too: hospitals, POW camps, quarantine stations, war ruins, orphanages, concentration camps, repatriation centers, emergency warehouses, refugee camps, political prisons, hospital ships. It's the pain and suffering endured that are constant.
The vast majority of the images are credited "Photographer unknown." This, too, is fitting, as so many of the victims (as well as the workers seeking to aid them) are also unknown.
Some of the pictures are very good: an anonymous photo of a POW camp in Egypt during World War II, for example, or Benoit Schaeffer's "8:30 a.m.: A woman at her window watching American troops enter the city" (that city being Baghdad, in 2003). But artistic considerations are utterly beside the point, of course. Content, not form, is what matters here.
The captions are often as expressive, and damning, as the images: "People waiting in line for food," "Antipersonnel mine victim" (a child), "Gas Bombing" (from Italy's conquest of Ethiopia). Sometimes, though, the words offer a measure of hope: Francois de Sury's "Uniforms abandoned by Ethiopian prisoners of war for civilian clothing."
A sign at the entrance warns of the disturbing nature of the subject matter in many of the images and says that children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult. It's true that a few of the photographs are gruesome - the image of a Hiroshima burn victim, another of starving children in Nazi-occupied Greece, a third that shows a grieving mother in Saddam City at the bedside of her badly burned daughter - but not to have included them would surely have been misrepresentative, if not dishonest. Most of the photographs, though, could be shown on CNN or the front page of this newspaper - and even that trio of particularly troubling pictures would be less troubling for young persons to see than much of what they can, and do, watch in video games, movies, and on television. If nothing else, they find demonstrated here that violence and evil have consequences rather than entertainment value.
The show, most of which consists of black-and-white images, is hung chronologically. Eighteen of the final 21 images are in color, though, which serves to collapse both the emotional and temporal distance between viewer and subject matter. The political distance collapses, too (several photographs are from Iraq - although, the title notwithstanding, none is from Guantanamo).
One of the earliest pictures is of a pair of ambulances from the Serbo-Turkish War. Their sides bear a red cross, and it's striking how that simple set of dark right angles stand out. In strictly visual terms, has there been a more effective logo in history (other than the original cross, perhaps)? The sight of it there is as noble in appearance as the magnificent dray horses that stand ready to pull the wagon to the next group of dead and wounded.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
