In Bleed, Simon Norfolk turns his camera on the landscapes that the Bosnian war of the 1990s left behind — ice, water, snow, and open ground — and finds in them a kind of terrible stillness. The photographs, twenty-four colour plates in all, read at first as near-abstractions. Only gradually does their subject become legible: the ground where victims were reburied in secondary graves by killers who assumed the evidence could be hidden. Norfolk’s wager is that a landscape holds what its inhabitants try to erase, and that over time the truth escapes.
The book’s physical form is inseparable from its argument. Dewi Lewis Publishing issued it in 2005 as a slipcased hardback at 400 by 320 millimetres, with 64 pages printed on extra-weight 200gsm paper and finished with both matt and gloss varnishes. Rendered at that scale, the varnishes let water, frost, and earth hold light in ways a smaller reproduction would lose. The sequence asks the viewer to move slowly through an image field that resists narrative tidiness, and the format enforces that pace.
Norfolk’s standing in the field is documented and substantial: the European Publishers’ Award for Photography in 2002, the Olivier Rebbot Award from the Foreign Press Association of America in 2003, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award and the Royal Photographic Society’s Terence Donovan Award in 2004, and in 2005 the Association of Photographers’ Bursary Award alongside a nomination for the Arles Outreach Award. Bleed belongs to a period when his attention to the aftermath of conflict — and to the political uses of the documentary image — was taking definitive shape.
For a collector, the case rests on the convergence of subject, scale, and design. This is a signed single-artist publication in which the printing decisions are part of the work, not decoration around it. Its subject sits at a point in European history that has not stopped being argued over, and the book treats photography as evidence at a remove — not the atrocity itself, but the terrain that was meant to keep it quiet.
