Looking into the bones of terrorism

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Looking into the bones of terrorism

X-ray art project shows exactly how lives are shattered
By Glenn McNatt
Sun Art Critic
http://www.baltimor esun.com/ features/ custom/aetoday/ bal-ae.art22apr2 2,0,5409908. story?coll= bal-aetoday- headlines

Originally published April 22, 2007
Photographer Diane Covert's harrowing X-ray images of the victims of terrorist bombings, on view at Loyola College, transform a collection of mundane medical records that were never intended to be viewed outside a hospital into powerful artworks.

Much as artists of earlier eras gathered bits of fabric, paper and other "found" objects to assemble into artworks, Covert employs the X-ray images taken by hospital personnel to create a documentary record of the terrible toll that terrorist violence takes on its victims.

The images of Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project were collected at two Israeli hospitals in Jerusalem where Jewish, Muslim and Christian wounded are treated. They are extraordinary because they compel us to think about both art and life in new ways; they are war photographs from the ever-shifting front lines of a conflict in which anyone can be a target and no place is safe.

Rather than conventional likenesses that record a subject's outward appearance, Covert's X-rays explore the havoc wreaked inside the body by indiscriminate terrorist attacks.

Instead of smiling faces, Covert's ghostly black-and-white images show the shattered bones and shrapnel-riddled bodies of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of Covert's images shows a 2-inch-long nail, once part of a suicide bomb, that became embedded in the chest of a young victim. Another reveals a heavy metal bolt that was blasted into the leg of a passer-by.

Covert, a Boston-based freelance photographer, was moved to create the X-ray Project by what she was hearing on the radio.

"I had kids and was driving them around a lot listening to the radio, and I was not happy with the way terrorism was portrayed in the media because there was too much focus on the terrorists and almost none on the victims," Covert recalls.

"I felt that people didn't understand what happens if you're the poor person on the train in Madrid or the pizza parlor in Israel and get blown up," she adds.

"People don't know terrorists put nails and screws and stuff in the bombs. So I wanted broader coverage of what happens to individuals, families and communities that are hit with this."

At first, Covert wrote letters to her local newspaper and television stations requesting more coverage. When that didn't work, she began to think about how she could get the message out herself.

"I'm a social worker, so I understand most people can't tolerate looking at horrendous scenes of terrorist attacks," she says. "But they can look at X-rays. X-rays are stripped of race, religion, ethnicity, age and socio-economic status. And color, because people can't look at blood.

"A quarter of my subjects are Muslims, the rest Christians and Jews, but you can't tell which are which in the X-rays," she adds.

"The other advantage of X-rays is that there's no gore, so they don't disgust the viewer. I want people to empathize with the victims, because these really are portraits."

In the gallery, the X-rays are mounted on small, freestanding kiosks that also display short phrases that Covert imagines the victims might have uttered - as if the X-rays were actually speaking to the artist.

"I was riding the bus to campus when he exploded," one young woman recalls. "His watch blasted into my neck. Some of the shrapnel tore through my carotid artery, which carries blood to my brain."

Covert says for the first few months after she got the images she couldn't work with them because they upset her so much.

"I call this a documentary photography project, but instead of using visible light that bounces off the surface, I'm using X-rays to see under the surface," she explains.

"From the social work, or human-being part of myself, it is a way of acknowledging the fact that doctors, nurses and medical technicians are the documentarians of our time. The X-rays and CAT scans in my work were all made to heal people. They all have a medical purpose."

Just as doctors use X-rays to diagnose the injuries of their patients, Covert uses the films to research the widespread social illness of terrorism.

"The X-rays are beautiful, but the other part of it is [that] they are documents of the most important social fact we are dealing with today in the world. I just recognized that and put it in a framework so we can see it as a record of our time."
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