For photographer Diane Covert, getting inside the mind of a terrorist proved nearly impossible. Instead, she focused on getting inside the bodies of terrorist victims.
Covert’s “Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project” is a disturbing art exhibit consisting of dozens of X-ray films. At first glance, most seem typically blurry and indistinct.
Then, one cannot help noticing the nuts, bolts and nails embedded in the soft tissue of victims.
The images were previously on display at Stanford University Medical Center’s Fairchild Auditorium, and will be shown in Stanford’s Tressider Hall in late October before moving to San Jose State.
Every image comes from the medical files at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek and Hadassah Hospitals. Each depicts a real-life victim of terror — suicide bombs, mostly — their identities and religions unknown.
“They’re human beings,” says Covert from her Boston home. “Nobody deserves to experience what they experienced. [The X-rays] are not disgusting, in terms of being grisly or bloody, but as you look at them, it slowly dawns on you what you’re looking at.”
In one image a wristwatch, hurled at horrible velocity, lodges in the neck of a female victim. In another, one can make out the victim’s elbows and forearms. But where are the hands?
Though Jewish, Covert wanted to create art that spoke to a universal revulsion over terror, no matter who the victims might be. She cites the examples of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photography or Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” as seminal anti-war art that inspired her as she developed the X-ray project.
“Terrorism is the most important issue of our day,” says the artist. “[The X-rays] give us a metaphor of looking inside terrorism. I consider them portraits and figure studies.”
Covert opened the exhibit in Boston two years ago, and so far she says she’s received overwhelmingly positive response. Though Jews quickly comprehended what she was doing with the X-ray project, Covert says non-Jewish audiences seem to have been impacted the most.
“People did not know this was going on,” she notes. “They didn’t understand what survivors live with, that these bombs are packed with shrapnel. When terrorism is just a word in a news article it didn’t mean anything.”
“Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project” will be shown from Oct. 28-Nov. 3. at Tressider Hall on the Stanford campus. It will then be on display from Nov. 5-16 in the Martin Luther King Jr. Library at San Jose State University. Information: (415) 957-1551.