'Killer Shots: A Photographic Response to War' and 'Moving Targets: The Art of Resistance'
Through March 20, S.F. Camerawork

ONE OF THE most important aspects of Sam Green's Oscar-nominated documentary, The Weather Underground, is the way it reaffirms the power images had during the Vietnam War, a time when the carnage of battle managed to burst through less sophisticated media controls and make it onto living-room TV screens across the country. The film reminds us how those broadcasts ignited activism, and conversely, how the sanitized coverage of our current war keeps passions at bay. Despite the pun of its title, "Killer Shots: A Photographic Response to War" engages in a similar process of reminding. Arranged in a loose chronology, a selection of war photographs from the Vietnam War to today are less responses to than documents of war's physical and psychic effects. The show, organized by Chicago's Catherine Edelman Gallery, includes such iconic photographs as Eddie Adams's image of a gun pointed at the head of a Viet Cong prisoner and Nick Ut's indelible shot of a naked eight-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack; Jean Gaumy's stark picture of veiled Iranian women at gun practice, circa 1986; and various lesser-known documents of insurrection in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and 9/11 New York City. Others – depicting war-fueled famine, bodies left to rot on hillsides, and recent pictures of slain Iraqi soldiers – restore a visceral horror to the cool, enumerative information we're fed. Such a sobering exhibition may seem medicinal, yet in this day and age we need cultural therapy. "Moving Targets: The Art of Resistance," an accompanying show, includes six artists who interpret George W. Bush's current war with more artistic flourishes. Yet the proximity to the actual article has the effect of pointing out a sense of distance and futility that we experience here at home. Claudia Léger's two videos that use footage of S.F. antiwar demonstrations and TV coverage seem reduced to self-righteous activism, while Kenneth Hung's kaleidoscopic screen-grabs from his faux propagandizing Web site point more to an aesthetic distance the Internet wedges between us than to our nation's military actions. What emerges more memorably from this grouping are Ed Kashi's recent photographs of burned, war-ravaged Baghdad buildings, which show something we're not usually allowed to see. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m., 1246 Folsom, S.F. (415) 863-1001. (Glen Helfand)