Works aiming to re-create and preserve the faces of lives changed by the turbulent state are the most likely, here, to embrace their subjects. The inclusion of these works reveals where the compassion lies in this show – Enwezor is appropriately partial to victims. Placed near each other are large black and white photographs, by Craigie Horsfield and Fazal Sheikh, depicting citizens of Soviet-ruled Krakow and hands holding tiny pictures of Muslim men, respectively. In the first, Magda Mierwa and Leszek Mierwa (1984), the young couple stares at the camera. They’re good-looking, but there is nothing happy about them, and yet this picture of these two off-duty factory workers is among the most purely aesthetically beautiful pieces at the show. The photograph seems to ache, like an overreaching Gap ad, or merely like the portrait that it is – a young man and woman who could have and be much more in other circumstances are sentenced, here, to an era of deprivation and decline. Despite its beauty, a sense of condemnation is most prevalent in this photograph; the Mierwas look like they know what is in store for them and their country. Condemnation in Afghan Images is hidden under others layers – senses of loss and of glory. These tiny archives are the only thing left of the men, besides the family members’ hands that hold the pictures. Each accompanying testament to the subjects (possible terrorists) in these passport pictures indicates their commemoration. This tribute to memory, encapsulated here in lovely photographs, however, is wrapped up with Sheikh’s necessary disregard for judgments passed by the world outside the men’s immediate families.

Fazal Sheikh, "Afghan Images", "Haji Qiamuddin holding a photograph of his brother, Asamuddin, 1998". Via ICP.

Similarly, pieces seemingly unrelated to the depths of the darker sides of the human condition possess a social conscience. Unlike the previous two instances, however, the subject matter is a vehicle for expressing this conscience rather than a subject of its pity. The re-creation of Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs doesn’t take a breath to revel in their beauty; rather, in questioning the renowned photographer’s right to his subjects, the artist reminds you that these sad but bucolic scenes were entirely real. The point made by the artist, Sherrie Levine, is that in shooting them Evans did not create, own, or even necessarily have much of a right to this era. Archive Fever’s skeptical thread is also picked up in a The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eyal Sivan’s film, culled from footage of the Nazi’s trial in Israel. Deconstructed, reconstructed, and unemotional, the film shows us a montage of witnesses swearing to tell the truth, but very nearly obfuscates exactly that in its denial of "archival linearity." Putting the manipulation of an archive at the forefront, right alongside its own contents, is one of the greatest points Enwezor makes.