The Evil of Banality: Christopher Sims

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BACKLIT BY A gorgeous, pinkish sunset, a diving platform beckons you into rippling waters in one of Christopher Sims' new photographs on display at Civilian Art Projects. The photo's affecting tranquility is diminished, however, by the image's locale: the U.S. naval base and joint detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sims' latest exhibition takes us to a place that most think of as an iron purgatory lined with gun towers and barbed wire, said to play host to unspeakable horrors.

But Sims, who was allowed access to the prison complex after years of wrangling with military authorities, keeps captor and captive out of the picture — partially out of necessity (handlers insisted most subjects and areas were off-limits), but mostly because other things caught his eye that he didn't expect.

"I wasn't interested in being a photojournalist ... making images that are expected," says Sims, noting that he maximized his time off the official base tour. Sims says the resulting images "raise the question that maybe we don't know what the whole picture is. It's not just this abstract place ... it's a place where people go to work each day."

In training his lens on the base's bar, swimming hole and mess hall, Sims attempts to gain new insight into the facility in a way that further challenges our feelings about it. "I don't feel like there's a hidden meaning to photographs, but there's more to them than just the superficial image," he says.

Indeed, squaring one's knowledge of the prison's purpose with some of the photographs' details, it's hard not to detect that something is awry.

Sims, a North Carolina-based artist and documentary studies teacher, spent the three years prior to November 2001 working as a photo archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He says that while there he discovered that, despite the museum's massive 70,000-image database, he couldn't always find everything patrons requested.

"There is a root in the current show with my time at the museum," Sims says, adding that after 9/11 he embraced the notion that "photography can take you to places and fill in these gaps."

» Civilian Art Projects, 406 7th St. NW; through March 14; 202-347-0022. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)

Written by Express contributor Johnathan Rickman
Photo courtesy Christopher Sims/Civilian Art Projects