Breadlines

 YUGOSLAVIA. Kosovo. 1999. MACEDONIA. Blace. Refugees from Kosovo scramble for bread distributed by the Macedonian Red Cross. 1999
Taken by Alex Majoli

    One of the most familiar images in our culture in relation to wars and economic depression is the bread line. We can all recall images from the Great Depression in America to Soviet Russia of men and women waiting in line to feed their families; this bread line motif can also bring to mind Marie Antoinette or Jean Valjean. A photograph of a bread line contains so many connotations for the viewer, past a group of people waiting in line for bread; based on cultural memory, it conveys feelings of loss and struggle, of a parents’ will to provide for a family. As Kratochvil says in his article about documentary photography, “[l]ife isn’t a moment. It isn’t a single situation” (Kratochvil 1); any image of a bread line, with no other context, is already contextualized in our minds.

    Alex Majoli’s photograph of a crowd of Kosovo refugees struggling to reach for a few loaves of bread is simple and poignant. It is a stunning photograph, black and white, shot from above, allowing the viewer to feel part of the Red Cross team handing out the bread. We do not have to know where these people came from or why; we know immediately that they are hungry and suffering because of our greater social context.

    When viewing this and other photographs of bread lines, it is easy to forget actual context and focus on the simple motif because of our familiarity with the image. As Sontag states in her “Looking at War“ essay, “[p]hotographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate.” (2). One can argue that this is the reason for taking such photographs; they simplify a unique conflict into a universal idea that we can all digest and identify with.

    However, this generalization can create too narrow of a viewpoint. As much as Majoli may want this image to stand for something universal, the viewer must also recognize the individual story in the photograph, the importance of evidentiary value. These are Albanian refugees fleeing the invading Serbian army; this is not happening in 18^th century France, but, for newspaper readers in 1998, in present-day Europe. Photographers and readers alike must be careful to not over-generalize an image, or the impact is lost. This is related to Sontag’s claim in “Looking at War” that it is different to look at a painting of a dragon eating a man’s head than it is to see a photograph of a man’s face blown off (7); one seems more real than the other. Is the image we have seen many times, that of hungry men and women clamoring for food, made less realistic, less impact, than something new and shocking?