A century of injured men – Bernhard Cella

Bernhard Cella’s extensive pictorial documentary on convalescents presents us with an iconography of a century of medical progress and, likewise, a typology of the staging of future patients returning home. These staged images open a narrative contrary to that of vigorous, unscathed and invulnerable masculinity. They invariably invoke calamitous moments, injuries sustained, the scars of war, and the causes and circumstances preceding a fateful event that no camera was there to capture. Their insistence on calm, deceleration, casual gestures and light-heartedness in the presence of the photographer cannot conceal this fact. Or, as Paul Virilio put it, ‘images are ammunition, cameras are guns’.