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Beware the Cost of War

 

“To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To the Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything and all images wait to be explained and falsified by their captions”
Susan Sontag

First I must warn you that this exhibition includes some “graphic images”. These are images that were not composed to conceal the results of violence. I urge you not to recoil and ask you to study these images. Try to conjure them up whenever you see a newspaper headline reporting deaths or injuries. Even if it is demoted to the back pages because too small a number of people were affected, or happened too far away.

What has been concealed in this essay are the captions. They are located every dozen or so images. This is to challenge you to face the horrible reality of conflict without immediately consulting the caption to make sure it was the other side that was the perpetrator. Alongside the images appear testimonies gathered from Israeli and Palestinian survivors, which chain the images to the context of loss.

These images are mostly used to illustrate, to make a point. To show “what they did”.
They are presented as extreme and demonic instances of cruelty. Is it possible that the fault lies not just in the unreasonable behaviour of any side but in conflict itself?

The photographers in this exhibition are some of the best in the world.
Uriel Sinai and Amit Shabi have been awarded in the World Press photography competition, Jafar Ishtyeh and Mahmud Hams have won the Prix Bayeux war photography prize and all of the other photographers have received various awards and accolades.

This exhibition would not have been possible without their generosity and their help in suggesting and recruiting the other photographers – even ones from “the other side.”

Yoav Galai

Exhibit Informtion

73 Leonard Street
London
EC2A 4QS

11-7pm October 23rd-29th

Panel discussion chaired by Jon Snow featuring Uriel Sinai, Yoav Galai, Abid Katib and Jafar Ishtayeh on Monday, October 26th, registration at info@bewarethecostofwar.org

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Children of the Black Dust.
©Shehzad Noorani

 

Introduction

 

 

I discovered Bangladeshi photography in an unusual way. Like many people I spend too much time on Facebook, the social networking internet site that everyone seems addicted to. I have collected a large number of Facebook friends, many of them photographers from all over the world. Some I know and some I don’t After a few weeks on Facebook I started to get strange messages at the bottom of the screen popping up as live conversations, from photographers who wanted to talk. Some could barely type a word of English. They were awkward moments. I didn’t know what to say. It turned out that many of these little blips on my Facebook radar were from Bangladesh. This got me curious–there seemed to be quite a few photographers from Bangladesh. Checking the search engine Google for searches using the key words “photo magazine” by geographic location showed that the leading source of the searches were coming from Bangladesh. Amazing.

 

This issue of 100eyes shows a country as seen through the eyes of its own photographers. There is nothing remarkable about that, except in this case the country is one of the poorest nations in the world, known for being a subject for photojournalism rather than as a provider of photojournalists. Photographers flew into Bangadesh from New York, Paris, or London, that is, when they weren’t headed for nearby India. Photographers will still be flying to Bangladesh, including myself hopefully, but we won’t be alone.

 

In 1989 Bangladesh was depicted for Western eyes in a famous essay by photographer Sebastio Salgado that presented the shipbreaking yards at Chittagong. Twenty years later Bangladeshis are now behind the camera, and the results are stunning. One of the featured essays this month is “Breaking Ships, Broken Men,” an essay by Saiful Huq Omi that looks at the same shipbreaking yards that Salgado photographed. Instead of reducing the workers to so many ants on a giant steel ant hill, Huq addresses the horrific conditions that the men work and live under–while retaining the atmospherics that made Salgado’s work so compelling twenty years before. It’s fabulous work.

 

If there is a message in the emergence of “indigenous photographers” it is that these photographers are able to achieve an intimacy with their subjects which enhances their humanity rather than objectifying and reducing the disadvantaged to stereotypical images of suffering. We are all too familiar with the pictures that accompany the campaigns of organizations responsible for feeding those who can not feed themselves. This imagery strips the impoverished of identity and renders the third world in one dimension– poor, and the result is more often than not that the poor stay that way.

 

As economically challenged as Bangladesh may be, there are 200 newspapers in the small country, and many of them are staffed by students from Pathshala, a school founded by Shahidul Alam, the central figure in the emergence of photography in Bangladesh, and the author of the cover image of this issue of 100Eyes. Alam developed into a photographer in Britain in the 1980’s after receiving a Doctorate in chemistry, and in 1989 started the Drik Picture Library and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, the latter taking advantage of a World Press Photo initiative. Most of the photographers showing work in this issue of 100Eyes went to Pathshala or taught there.

 

A traditional sanskrit world for “center of learning,” Pathshala, according to Alam, is
far more than teaching photography. “Pathshala is about using the language of images to bring about social change,” he writes. “It is about nurturing minds and encouraging critical thinking. It is about responsible citizenship. In a land where textual literacy is low, it is about reaching out where words have failed. In a society where sleek advertising images construct our sense of values, studying at Pathshala is about challenging cultures of dominance.”

 

Alam and his fellow teachers, along with the World Press folks including Robert Pledge of Contact Press, have done a fantastic job. The students are exposed to classic photojournalism, poring over old issues of Life and National Geographic. Having spent hours going through the Drik archives I can testify to the training of the photographers– they always look for the single image that tells the whole story. I wondered to myself how there could be so many fortuitously placed buildings in Bangladesh, as the Drik photographers seem able to find a high vantage point for every breaking news story. Abir Abdullah’s coverage of a horrific high-rise fire in Dhaka, is as if he is almost one of the rescuers himself. Tanvir Ahmed is a very gifted photographer who seems able to move from news to features, and from color to black and white effortlessly. What can you say about
Mumen Wasif? At 27 he is already working at the level of a Magnum photographer.

 

I can’t say enough about all these photographers– they deserve attention and employment outside the confines of Bangladesh. Inside Bangladesh the photographs carry the importance that Life Magazine stories had. And in a country where literacy is so low, as Shahidul Alam points out, “what better way than pictures” of gaining understanding?

 

Looking at Bangladesh through the haze of the Internet makes me nostalgic for the time when photojournalism mattered, when people opened their weekly copies of Life or Time Magazine and looked to photographers to show them what was happening in their country and the world. At that time it seemed as though photography could really make a difference– and that time was not that long ago. I was one of those photographers.

 

I get a similar sense when I look at the work of the Pathshala photographers– that their work is not just for the vacuum of the Internet, meant only for other photograhers to admire, or rendered “modern’ and fit only for curation and the gallery wall. Far from it, their work has relevance and a purpose within their own country, which may be underdeveloped in some ways, but seems progressive in others.

 

There are huge problems ahead for Bangladesh. Overpopulation, an enormous burden of poverty in mouths that the country itself can not feed, energy dependence, and the ravages of the monsoons combined with the floodwaters from the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, all these problems are facing a country with limited ability to develop on its own, But one thing is for certain– whatever happens in Bangladesh will be well photographed

 

–Andy Levin/New Orleans. Louisiana

 

 

Q: It sounds as though this was your way of playing together? Was that part of the relationship here? How specific was he about the way in which he wanted to be photographed?

 

A: I wouldn’t use the word play, it sounds too passive. A friend of mine would look at the work and could tell which images were being led by Elijah, it’s hard to get a kid to do anything he doesn’t want to do…like brush his teeth, for instance. The shoots last ten minutes at the most, but its ten minutes of hyper focus on his part. Sometimes I lead, sometimes he leads. And now it seems like we’ve learned what each other would want out of a shot…so its a collective brain a bit. I think he knows that we need to make these images, to like…figure something out. A friend asked me why Eli was doing all of this stuff with me and I didn’t really have an answer beyond him intuitively understanding that there is something serious going on here, we aren’t just goofing around. I think he knows that we need to make these images, to like…figure something out.

 

Q: Is communication an issue? What are Elijah’s verbal skills like?

 

A: No…this is a normal seeming kid who has a grand vocabulary and goes to public school and gets good grades…but he is different.

 

Q: So is the work autobiographical or fantasy, or a combination of both? Are these images about your son, or something else?

 

A: I guess I ask myself that question a lot. I always thought that the project had this element of role playing in it. My wife looks at the images and has always said that it looks like I’m trying to exert some type of control in the photos that I don’t have in real life…so I’m having us act it out for the camera.
For me the work is about a relationship, and I always think of a relationship having three components: him, myself, and then all that is shared…the shared intangible. With the project I always saw the photographs as what we did together, the scans as my voice, looking objectively at the documents, and then the thing we get when we look at all of the stuff together is the channel, the tone that defines the project…the echolilia thing. There are feelings that go along with your relationships with your kids: powerlessness, idealism, and just these moments when those you are raising just seem so alien…so foreign. And moments of transendent beauty as well. In doing a series about a relationship, I didn’t want to short change it, or dumb it down. I wanted it to have the complexity of emotions, the range, and try to touch on the emotions we don’t have the words for yet.

 

Q: The image of Elijah in the plastic tub, how did that happen?

 

A: Around the time I did that shot I had been shooting Eli doing curious things with his body but the locations of the shots were just not thought out…its like I’d shoot him where he happened to be. I showed the work to a photo friend and she essentially said that I’d need to try to find locations that were more…intentional, more able to look metaphorical. It made sense. I had been noticing the light coming thru that window at that time of day and we had an empty large plastic toy container in the room. I think my wife had an appointment that afternoon, cuz I recall I picked up both kids from school, but had my camera and tripod out, hoping to make some photographs. We came home and ate lunch. I asked him if he wanted to make some photographs in the plastic container in the sunshine. He thought it looked interesting and stood in it and then we just tried different things: standing, hiding beneath it, sitting up in it. We then realized that it could contain him lengthwise if he curled up a bit. He got in that pose, clothed. We looked at it and I suggested he take off his clothes so it would look like he was like in an egg, and was about to hatch out. He took off his clothes and got in and started aligning his body in ways that looked like the final shot. ” Move a foot…lift your chin…now close your eyes…ok, this looks real nice. Come out and see what it looks like. ” We’d look at the images on the back of the camera, he’d see what it looked like, and try again. At some point we got it and ended. We didn’t try other ideas then, just moved on to other non photographic things. I think his younger brother was in the room trying to watch a video….so it was chaos, but we got it. And then, the nudity: I really think of these images trying to be archetypal ( archetypes? sp?) , I want the feral child to be there. I don’t want to see a logo, a style, a t shirt with a ninja turtle on it. And then he’s in his school uniform alot, so it helps the idea of this looking like the child in someones brain or memory. Ahh…thats the goal.

 

Q: Over how long a period of time were these images made and where is this project headed?

 

A: We started midway thru his fifth year and now he is seven. The project is still going, we are still shooting, but I am trying to pause at this point and try to assemble the work into a book form with some text. Oh, I guess I should add that I’m pausing on the project to kind of evaluate it, see if the scans and photo idea works together, and try to come up with text that gives him a voice in the project. I’m using the format of a book to give it shape. Its more for the growth of the project than an attempt to get a publishing deal or something.

 

Q: You have a keen knowledge of the history of photography. How do you think your work fits in with that of other photographers who have done work with their family?

 

Emmet Gowin had shot his family in a series of photographs that always had this sense of intimacy that I never could understand or replicate until I had kids myself. It just had this sense of .hauntedness that made it seem like a childhood memory. I can’t replicate that, but there is some quality of memory I’m trying to tap into…like my own childhood memories. Elijah looks like me, so that may be fueling this all as well. Currently, I gotta say I respect the anxiety and sense of anxiousness in the family work of Tierney Gearon. In her work you can see the intimacy, but its wrapped up in this modern day angst, anxiety, mixed emotions that are honest. Its like anti- romantic, and it seems to give the complexities of the role of the parent its due. I mean, that’s what I see in the work, but maybe I’m projecting what I want to see. I want my project to tap into that anxiety, parent/child anxiety…and I think it does…but it needs to be more universal as well. These projects need to try to speak to everyone, not just people with kids.
Gowin and Gearon hit that sweet spot for sure.

 

Thanks Timothy and good luck!

 

Andy Levin April 2009

 

You can see Timothy Archibald’s work by clicking on the photo above or in 100Eyes: The Magazine along with work by Stephen Shames, Rebecca Drobis, Nicolas Axelrod, Yoon S. Byun and others. His website is http://www.timothyarchibald.com