Alfredo Jaar: Whispers and Cries

The Hasselblad Award honours major achievements in photography within various genres and expressions, offering a nuanced view of the field of photography. Rather than being a photographer in a conventional sense, the fortieth Hasselblad Award winner, Alfredo Jaar, is an architect and artist who explores, and re-stages existing photographs in groundbreaking ways. His research into what he calls “the politics of images” is firmly rooted in photography, problematizing ideas of objective realities and universal truths. He has consistently scrutinised the representation of war, conflict, and human suffering in press photography and mainstream media. Jaar’s poignant works not only focus our attention upon matters of burning concern but also upon how we look at photographs and the conditions framing their meaning.

This exhibition brings together four of Alfredo Jaar’s seminal works. The large-scale installation Shadows from 2014 captures the bodily expressions of anguish and despair in press photos from the Nicaraguan revolution. An interview with photojour-nalist Koen Wessing, whose photographs make up the core of Jaar’s piece, is also included in the exhibition. Untitled (Newsweek) from 1994 investigates the indifference and inaction of the Global North to the genocide in Rwanda that claimed over one million lives. Searching for Africa in LIFE from 1996 addresses the consistent absence of references to the African continent in Life magazine. You Do Not Take a Photograph, You Make It from 2013 summarizes a view that permeates Jaar’s entire oeuvre; that photography does not passively reflect a reality but rather holds the ability to portray subjective realities. In all his work, Alfredo Jaar strives to make sense of a world marked by human struggle—and the reluctance to face that struggle.

The exhibition title is an homage to Ingmar Bergman, a significant influence on Jaar’s practice. The film title Cries and Whispers is reversed in Swedish to ‘whispers and cries’, indicating how the works speak to the viewer.

The book Alfredo Jaar, Hasselblad Award 2020 accompanies the exhibition and presents a selection of more than 30 of Alfredo Jaar’s works from the early 1980s to 2019 that employ, rethink, and challenge the idea of the photograph. His unique app-roach to photography is discussed in a new essay by philosopher Jacques Rancière.

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956 where he studied architecture and filmmaking. He emigrated from Chile in 1982, at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Jaar lives and works in New York.