Binh Danh Exhibit

Many say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of Binh Danh's photos of the Viet Nam War, they definitely are. Each picture tells an untold story, and each one is different than the next. The stories told by the pictures that list some American soldiers who passed away in the war are completely different than the stories told by the images of Viet Namese men, women, and children whose faces are on the leaves.
To display these photos, Binh Danh uses a unique method. By printing them onto leaves, he intensifies the images and gives them a greater testimony to the war. When he was in Viet Nam he noticed a field area covered in documents, many of which were imprinted into the landscape. By looking at this he realized that war is a part of this landscape, just as the words of the documents became part of the landscape, and just as the people who died in the war became part of the landscape. He shows that in the way he displays the photos. The people are printed onto leaves, showing the mark that they left on the landscape of Viet Nam during the war.
Rememberance is also another way the images serve as a testimony to the war. Before Binh Danh spoke, there was a man who was in the Viet Nam war who gave a short speech. When he saw the exhibit, it brought back feelings he had from the war. To him, the faces on the leaves seemed real, and they reminded him of friends that he had lost. Binh Danh later spoke about rememberance and its ties to the theme of his exhibit. The theme of One Weeks Dead was justice. A quote he used was "Our struggle is the struggle of memory against forgetting", and it tied into his exhibit well. He viewed the memorial as a form of justice for the victims, so they would be remembered throughout time.
Binh Danh addressed how these images and his findings can serve as a reflection of current times. Currently we are involved in a war, much like the Viet Nam War. He showed a few images of the Iraq war and they bore similarities to the ones from the Viet Nam war. The photographs from the Iraq war are of people who each have their own story to tell of how the Iraq war affected their lives, just like the photos of the Viet Nam War. At one point, Binh Danh showed an image of Life Magazine and its issue where it showed photos of soldiers who died in Viet Nam as a way to honor them. He then said how the NY Times published a roster of the dead of the Iraq War. These were two different wars, but those who died in them had a similar way of being honored and remembered.

In "The Image World", Sontag writes "...a photograph is not only an image,...an interpretation of the real;it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." This quote perfectly describes Binh Danh's photographs. They are not just an image or an interpretation, but they are a mark of what was left behind. Essentially, these photographs are "footprints" of the people whose lives were affected by the Viet Nam War. They are what was left behind. She later writes "Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history." Binh Danh's images are evidence of the people and landscape that were affected by the war. These photographs, along with many others, help to create a collection of evidence of a part of history, so it will never be forgotten. In her concluding paragraph, Sontag also states "But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them...". The photos from One Weeks Dead are images of the reality that was the Viet Nam War. These powerful images contain more information than one could imagine. They can tell about the person, the landscape, what the war meant to them, what their life was like during that time, or how they died. The images are remnants of what was left behind, and what will never be forgotten.