The Darkest Light
Outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Genocide In Darfur Is Illuminated in a Nightly Photo Exhibit

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 21, 2006

They were pictures from a genocide on a monumental scale: both the images and the horror.

The projected images were 40 feet square. The screen was the exterior of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum facing 15th Street. Last night the photographs flashed one after another like a savage, super-size slide show, beaming over sidewalks and commuter lanes to the Tidal Basin beyond.

The backdrop of the Holocaust Museum reminded passersby of one tragedy. But this was another. This was Darfur: burning villages, shrouded bodies, the rib cages of starving children and donkeys, the cracked lips of the old people, the thousand-yard stares of boys with their casually slung guns.

The images came three at a time on three different sections of wall, lingering a few seconds each. Keening, ethereal Sudanese music accompanied them.

A crowd of a few hundred gathered to inaugurate this new exhibit, called "Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?" After most of the audience went home, it was cold and lonely on the plaza. The images kept flashing in the night. They seemed to pose more questions: Who will see? Who will do something?

Darfur is the fire this time. After the Jews, the Cambodians, the Bosnians, the Rwandans, the people of Darfur are the victims of systematic rape, murder, pillage and displacement.

In a three-year-old war between ethnic African rebels and the Arab-led central government, more than 400,000 people have died. The Holocaust Museum was one of the first institutions in the world to call the Darfur tragedy "genocide." The U.S. government followed suit.

Leaders of the museum, who consider it part of their mission to address contemporary cases of genocide, deliberately picked the week of Thanksgiving to thrust Darfur in Washington's face. The display runs from 5:30 p.m. to midnight through Sunday.

"During Thanksgiving week, a time of reflection and gratitude, we are lending the museum's moral stature to alert the public to the urgency of stopping the human catastrophe in Darfur," said Fred Zeidman, chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Council. The idea was that as commuters and pedestrians hurry by in a fog of preoccupation, they might be jolted to consider other dilemmas beyond free-range or Butterball? Mashed or sweet? Store-bought or baked?

If the pictures "stir some sort of curiosity in the average person as they go by and see it, then the job is done," said Omer Ismail, a refugee from Darfur who was on hand last night. "They will go out and ask, Why?"

This is the museum's participation in a traveling exhibit called "Darfur/Darfur" that will appear in about two dozen cities. In some venues, the photos are shown inside galleries; in others they are being projected outdoors. Several independent photojournalists made the pictures.

The genocide as presented by the Holocaust Museum has been somewhat sanitized. The most gruesome pictures from the traveling exhibit are not being projected. The museum didn't want the representation flashed into the Washington night to be "so, so graphic that it offends people," said John Heffernan, director of the museum's Genocide Prevention Initiative.

An example not on display is "a murdered 3-year-old little boy whose face has been smashed," according to Leslie Thomas, who curated the exhibit.

This, then, is a non-offensive version of genocide. But while graphic horror has been expunged, bigness itself is a quality that might contribute an intensity to the effect. America discovered that a long time ago at the drive-in movie theater: John Wayne bloodlessly dispatching bad guys, the impact shared simultaneously by the occupants of 600 cars.

Here, the communal experience of vast, albeit still, portraits invites a relationship between viewers and subject that is unavailable from just flipping through a magazine or watching a news broadcast.

The portraits, interspersed with wider shots of destruction and guns, are especially moving. The photographers and the curators wanted to convey not just the plight of these people but also their individuality. Dressed in colorful shawls, with weathered faces, they fix you in their huge gaze. You might wish the images didn't flash so quickly, so you could study them.

But like the movies or a slide show, this representation of genocide is ephemeral. It vanishes when the lights go out at midnight, while the real thing goes on.

By the time the images appeared for the first time last night, delayed by speeches inside, it was almost 7:30. The sidewalks were nearly deserted. The audience was primarily folks who came on purpose to confront Darfur. It was hard to predict what effect, if any, this will have on people who stumble on it by accident.

Gaye Whyte met up after work with a friend, Nancy O'Neill, to come down to see the exhibit.

"They're huge images," said O'Neill, director of programs for an association of colleges. "It's hard to glance at it and walk away from it like an image in a magazine."

The photos of boys with guns most touched Whyte, publications production manager for a federal agency. "It shatters you," she said. "These are children who have been robbed of a life. There's no childhood here."

O'Neill said seeing the pictures made her want to go inside for caption information -- which pointed up one trade-off with this monumental outdoor presentation: There was no caption information inside, or outside. (Some is available on the museum Web site, http://www.ushmm.org.)

Several of the big images could have used some words. It was fascinating to stand next to photographer Mark Brecke and have him narrate some of the photos he took: Here, a woman swearing on a Koran that she was a genuine refugee and therefore entitled to food; there, the astonished face of a youth holding a gun after a government attack.

But without words this was a different kind of information: big, vivid, visceral, pictoral, mute.

"The question is," said photographer Ron Haviv, "What does the public do with that information?"