Into the dead zone

Victory: Images Of The Aftermath

There's an easy way and a hard way to photograph a war zone. The easy way is a quick trigger finger and a good zoom lens.

The hard way takes paperwork, access, a translator and lots of talking until you're hoarse to parents explaining why they should let you walk their son to the pretty wall over there to capture him with his sling and his open sores. Or why a Hoxton audience needs to see Ali's 80 per cent burns, as he lies prone on a hospital trolley.

It'd be easier to point, shoot and scarper. But Kate Holt's a talker not a bolter and, in return, she gets consenting images. She deals in dialogues, not hand-wringing monologues.

Children are her strong suit; the sick, the dirty and the ill. She goes in tight on their expressions - of grit, stoicism, curiosity - and fades backgrounds out to a blur of wailing burkhas. She doesn't overwhelm - setting the stage with a few post cluster-bomb vistas and using light boxes to create the dim halogen flicker of makeshift operating rooms. But our touchstones - what we come back to - are Iraq's child casualties.

After soldiers, the first Westerners children meet are often photographers. They can snap their targets from a distance and it'll vacuum-seal preconceptions. Or they can enter the frame, sympathise and apologise. That's the measure of real diplomacy. And the difference between a picture and a portrait.

Today until Aug 10, Spitz Gallery, 109 Commercial Street E1, daily midday to 5pm, free.

Tel: 020 7392 9032. Tube: Liverpool Street