Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire,

1856

As a backdrop to human drama, the damaged wall is as variable in meaning as it is potent in eff ect. It can instill a reflective mood, strike a note of unease, or supply a symbolic disguise for physical violence too terrible to illustrate directly.<br>At the heart of Philip Henry Delamotte’s study of Fountains Abbey is a seated figure absorbing the Romantic spirit of the place. An eighteenth-century commentator on garden follies declared that Gothic ruins embody “the triumph of time over<br>strength”—“a melancholy but not discouraging thought” much preferable to “the triumph of barbarism over taste” that is signified by classical ruins.<br>Frederick Sommer’s portrait of his Arizona neighbor and friend, surrealist painter Max Ernst, results from the chance alignment of two 8 x 10-inch negatives Sommer held up to the light together. Ernst, commingling with an image of a stained cement wall, becomes a spectral presence, as compelling and uncanny as a figure in a dream. <br>Between Japanese bombardments of Hankow (Wuhan), China, in October 1938, Robert Capa recorded a scene that sums up the city’s physical and moral devastation: surrounded by malarial standing water, a woman with bound<br>feet crouches in tears before the shell of a splintered house.