Lives behind the Numbers 从此没人和你说话

On January 7, 2015, as the Paris offices of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo were being attacked, Chinese photographer Hé Bo sat at the café in the Louvre, scrolling through social media on his phone. Outside the window the world had been irrevocably shaken, but inside, wholly unaware, people carried on as usual.

Within a few days, Paris held a massive anti-terror march. “But I listened to my family, who told me not to take part,” Hé recalls, “which left me with the same sense of helplessness that I felt during the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008, when I was away from my hometown,” he says. “Maybe this feeling is what led to my obsession with terrorist attacks and other tragedies.

This feeling provided Hé with the direct inspiration for his series Since Then, No One Has Talked with You.

Click here to hear the audio content of Hé Bo’s series Since Then, No One Has Talked with You.

The title of the series is taken from a song by singer Li Zhi, whose music is banned in China. Studying journalism for four years as an undergraduate and covering local news as an intern left Hé with a deep sense of the “powerlessness of the reporter,” as he puts it.

“Mass tragedies turn individuals we’ve never met into numbers we understand even less,” Hé says. “In a lot of natural and manmade tragedies, the dead are just numbers: 15 people have died, say, or tens of thousands of people have died. We don’t get any more information, we don’t hear their stories—or at least it’s hard to do so in traditional media outlets. As individuals become numbers, we stand safely on the sidelines, and it’s hard to put our own emotions and thoughts into an event personally experienced by others. Eventually all we can do is grow numb, or offer perfunctory thoughts and prayers and congratulate ourselves.” That’s why, when looking at a tragedy, Hé always starts by trying to connect with individual people, to communicate with them, even if the conversation is one-sided.

Hé looks at both halves of violence and terrorist attacks: victims and victimizers.

The six images in Since Then, No One Has Talked with You, which all relate to terrorism or violence, are composed along lines suggested by the English scholar Francis Galton: the foundation of each work is a portrait of terrorists or murderers whose identity has been confirmed by the media, which Hé pieces together from countless photographs of or about the event. Arranged in uneven lines across the surface of the portrait are red-tinted close-ups of the victims’ mouths. These lines of cropped images spell out a sentence about the event in Morse code.

Click here to hear the audio content of Bo Hé’s series Since Then, No One Has Talked with You.

What Hé personally finds most moving in the series is the line that appears on the piece Paris Attacks (13 November, 2015). It’s by a French man named Antoine Leiris, whose wife died in the tragedy. “In an open letter to the attackers, he said something that I turned into the Morse code message for the image: ‘Responding to hate with anger means giving in to the same ignorance that made you what you are.'” Leiris later published a book titled You Will Not Have My Hate. For Hé, Leiris’s powerful conviction, built on sorrow and rationalism, makes him “believe more firmly in the complexity and powers of self-healing that people experiencing such tragedies possess. It’s hard to explain clearly in simple words.”

Click here to hear the audio content of Bo Hé’s series Since Then, No One Has Talked with You.

Another piece in the series, titled Beslan School Siege (1 September, 2004 – 3 September, 2004), is about an event in which hundreds of people were held hostage in a sports facility. “What options did they have for transmitting messages to the outside world? My guess is that it could have been the Morse code used in the military,” Hé explains. This code, the biggest obstacle in series, is hiding on the surface of works themselves.

It’s an obstacle Hé has intentionally constructed, and it establishes a division among viewers—just as in everyday life, when we make a decision either to overcome an obstacle or to go around it. “Some viewers glance at the images and then leave. Some choose to stay longer, using the Morse code table to translate the message hidden in the work,” he says. “But even if they make the effort to decode the line, they’ve simply completed a task. For the most part it won’t help them understand the purported truth behind it.”

“Nowadays, a few simple words or incomplete information can often make us jump on a bandwagon,” he adds. “Blindness or barriers always exist. In fact, this is the most intractable conflict the series aims to address.”

Contrasting news reports with art, Hé says that in-depth reporting and photojournalism always try to “reach” specific people, to establish a relationship between them and the reader or spectator. “Yet art trails behind somewhat, appearing as news stories recede. A lot of writers and artists return to events a short time or even many years later, to face them again and rethink them.”

“That’s why I choose art. It can gradually generate possibilities for establishing a new relationship with the past. For contemporary and future viewers, these possibilities mean moments of intersection with history.” Since Then, No One Has Talked with You was a Jurors’ Pick at the 2020 Lens Culture Exposure Awards for “giving voice to those no longer alive.” Ada Takahashi, who selected the work, notes that the images “compel the viewer to look longer and reflect on these acts of terror.”

Perhaps contemplating this series can prompt viewers who see only numbers in catastrophic events to look more closely, and to reflect on what those numbers are really made up of: real people.

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Website: hebo.photography

Contributor: Chen Yuan