Conflict, Time, Photography (Unabridged‪)‬

The extraordinary exhibition of thousands of photographs ranging from cumbersome, beautifully detailed, sharply acute photographs of the aftermath of the 1860s American Civil War to mundane landscapes taken in 2013, are based on an enlivening, provocative, and even perhaps controversial organizing principle. What is novel is the unusual premise: eschewing more conventional and immediate reportage, or documentary series, the selection moving from gallery to gallery - and section by section in the catalogue - is defined by time. The images are set out from Moments Later to 100 Years.

The theme is set by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a fantasy novel which plays with notions of memory and time, inspired by his extraordinary experience of having been imprisoned in Dresden in, indeed, a slaughterhouse, and emerging the morning after the Dresden bombing to find the destroyed city.