Photography Without Borders

They scare me, and so they should.

Monument to the Victims of a Totalitarian Regime, Prague, Czech Republic. This man stoops and stares at you from a desperately sloping staircase, identical forms of him slowly eroding as they recede into the distance – until the last few steps are empty.

It is so easily to go to bustling tourist-filled city like Prague and just think of key spots like Wenceslas Square as ugly, tacky tourist traps, filled with MacDonalds and avoidable at all costs. But once you’ve been to the Communist Museum, or done a little research yourself, your image of the city is changed irrevocably. To see not thousands but hundreds of thousands of people, not shopping but running across Wenceslas Square as a huge black-and-yellow mass of policeman hound them and beat them to the ground – to see this and a hundred other moments, caught on film from apartment windows or sneaked away by daring journalists – is to completely destroy your image of an apparently crass and commercial metropolis.

Eastern Europe is used by British and other tourists as a drinking hole, and even a sex hole, and often considered dirty and uncivilised by those who have not been there. But this is a land of people who have not only endured the suffering of a brutal communist regime, but have actually fought out against it and risked their lives in the process – by keeping faiths and traditions deemed illegal, by escaping with their family into the free world, and by showing their will in mass demonstrations, decade upon decade.

It is not fancy ideals or clever politics that kept the Communists in power all this time, but brute military slaughter and constant police intimidation. You can see this from film footage and learn it in history lessons, but the best way is to ask people. Just sit and talk to someone about their life and you will realise there is another world, a world dead but still remembered, that they have been free from for barely fifteen years now.

I spoke to a lady whose pension we stayed in up in the Mala Fatra mountains. She’d lived in Slovakia all her life, and her strong family had shielded her from most of the Communist indoctrination. But in the eighties, when her little boy started going to school and coming back with fears and terrors she felt no child should have to feel, she decided to flee with her children to the West. Knowledge of her plans could have got anyone else into trouble with the Police, so she told her parents and friends that the family were going on holiday.

So our hostess and her children had to pack their bags as if for a holiday, and got a vista to visit Yugoslavia. With the help of the UN they fled from there to the West, with nothing but what they could fit in a suitcase, their savings now worthless. They could not communicate with friends or family in Slovakia, for fear of their safety, until the fall of the USSR.

She’s strong, and happy now, having made a safe world for herself and her family in the US, and they returned to Slovakia last Winter and set up the beautiful pension where we stayed. If you’re ever in Slovakia let me give you their email, they are wonderful people.

This is a very powerful monument, and I hope I’ve captured a little of the horror it represents. But most of all I implore you to go to visit Eastern Europe if you have not done so already, and find out for yourself how grateful people are to be free from totalitarian rule.

Shot on Ilford XP2 with Canon EOS 5. Photo and text © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2006.

Like much of the rest of Mostar, the Stari Most (Old Bridge) has been rebuilt with UNESCO support using local stone and skills. But until quite recently, the whole town, including this bridge, was more rubble than building.

On the evening train to Mostar my girlfriend and I talked with a local man who shared our compartment. As we plunged in and out of increasingly long, unlit tunnels, our conversation turned to the war of 1992-95, and the damage it has caused the country and its people.

‘The ruined houses we see now and then from our window’, he said, ‘were once everywhere. The war touched everyone, there was no escaping it. Now, you can visit Sarajevo or Mostar and they look great . . . but not so long ago they were mostly still ruins.’

This photograph cuts off the Stari Most roughly where it was reduced to a stump after Serbian shelling.

June ‘08.

Photo and text © Josh Jones / Photography Without Borders 2008.

Bedouin children in the West Bank of occupied Palestine.

The children of this valley are put at constant risk by the live-fire exercises that Israeli military conduct in the area. Their mother told me how soldiers would set off explosives of all sorts, from gas bombs to sound grenades, on the hill pictured behind. The ground is then left dangerous, as many explosives remain undetonated.

These children remain strong, and the older brother insisted I try riding his horse – which I did, bareback, for the first time in my life.

Thanks for dropping by – all comments are appreciated.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

While visiting the home of some Bedouin farmers in occupied Palestine, I was invited to try milking a sheep.

I was rubbish. Honestly, it’s harder than it looks. And it really feels funny, like a warm furry water balloon.

Later that evening, the farmers treated us to gallons of hot, sweetened goat’s milk. We left after nightfall, disturbed by their stories and humbled by their generosity.

A popular photo of mine depicts this boy and his little sibling, and can be found here.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

A Bedouin farmer in the Tubas region of the West Bank, occupied Palestine.

She told us the plight of her children. The family farm is often surrounded by Israeli military exercises.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

Kalim, local councillor, shows me the positions in which he and other inmates of the prison were forced to stand for days on end.

This building was built by the British during the Mandate control of Palestine, and was later used by the Israeli military as a prison. In the late 90’s, the Israeli military pulled out, and most of the buildings have since been renovated. The building is now a community centre for local groups, arts and theatre.

Some of the cells and torture chambers, such as this one, lie hidden behind locked doors. They have been left to fall into disrepair, but significantly not demolished. Graffiti on the wall mimics the ‘agony position’, a sort of half-crouch, which the prisoners – almost all of them incarcerated for political reasons – were forced to endure. Kalim spent seven years, from the mid eighties to the early nineties, mostly in this jail.

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Twenty-four hours before, I was eating ice-cream in a water park. The smell of water is intoxicating in the Jordan valley – so many rivers have run dry because of climate change and Israeli water diversion, that to catch the moist scent of humid air always brings out smiles and gasps of pleasure. The owners of the park, five brothers, had given us the warm greetings we had become accustomed to in Palestine, and within minutes we were stuffing ourselves with shockingly sweet bubble-gum ice cream.

On the table we spread out a souvenir from Jerusalem: a map of Palestine and Israel, showing the Israeli ’security wall’ that surrounds and divides much of the West Bank. Pink splotches represented Israeli settlements, and checkered pink showed the settlements of Gaza that were abandoned in 2006. Dotted, intangible lines marked the theoretical boundaries between Israel and Palestine, which now lie well neglected.

Somewhat dizzy from ice-cream, I sat admiring place-names. One of our group, with a air of sadness and of hope, indicated with a sweeping hand from East to West, from occupied Palestine to the coast of the Meditteranian, ‘One day. All this.’ His suggestion was that Palestinians might regain the land that was given away by the British to form the state of Israel. Kalim shook his head. ‘Not even that’, he said, ‘Let them keep their land.’ We fell silent. He was calm and spoke as though from a great depth. He said: ‘Just for us to be left alone.’

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I thought I knew what strength was before I came to Palestine. Really. I thought that if you could take a blow and not flinch, you were strong; that if you could risk your life in order to save what you loved the most, you were strong. That strength is about fighting for what you believe in.

I have met strong people, and by example they have shown me I was wrong. They do not fight; they do not take up the knife or gun, they do not preach violence or hatred. They have endured immeasurable suffering.

They are strong because in spite of their experience, in spite of every low feeling telling them to tear apart their oppressors, they have kept their humanity. They are still kind. They are, I can say for sure, the most peaceful people I have ever met. I see now that any old fool can pick up a gun and fight. It takes real strength to preserve your humanity.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

Khalim is sitting in the courtyard where he and other Palestinian political prisoners were kept chained and hooded. He explained how he was commonly kept awake there for a number of days; soldiers would pour freezing water over anyone who appeared to fall asleep. The courtyard was abandoned by the Israeli military, and has since been left untouched.

This courtyard is a part of a large prison, most of which has been renovated and turned into a community centre. This photo is the second of two, and the first is accompanied by some of my thoughts. You can read it here.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

A man of Al-Aqaba, a village in the Tubas region of Palestine, shows us the demolition orders for the school, nursery, clinic and mosque that he helped to found.

If the orders are not challenged in court, which is a lengthy and expensive process, then all the buildings in the village will be razed by Israeli military bulldozers.

I should add something personal here to help the reader digest this, but honestly, I don’t know what to say.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

A man of the village of Frush Beit Dajan stands before the mud brick structure that he and his family were forced to live in after their home was demolished. Having destroyed their home, the Israeli civil service have prohibited the family from making any repairs to the delalpilated farm buildings they now have to inhabit.

He told me how one of his sons, aged five, was recently bitten by a poisonous snake while he slept. The snake had entered through one of the many holes in the building. The father rang the hospital but on hearing his location, the person on the end of the phone said, ‘Sorry, no Arabs.’

The father attempted to drive his son to the nearest emergency hospital, at Nablus, but was blocked at an Israeli military checkpoint and forced to return home. His son died later that night.

I cannot imagine how someone can retain their sense of humanity after such an incident. As we sat over sweet Palestinian tea, the father told me he did not want retribution. ‘All I want is the right to build, and access to water and electricity’, he said.

Out there it seemed to make sense, but having returned to Britain I am more and more bemused by the stoic humanity of the people I met in Palestine.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

In Frush Beit Dajan, a small rural village in the West Bank of occupied Palestine.

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008.

Woman and her grandchild, in a small Bedouin tent in occupied Palestine.

The soldiers from the nearby Israeli settlement use the crop fields around these tents for live-fire exercises. I spoke to a woman in the next tent who had been shot in the head by a rifle bullet while picking herbs in the middle of the day. She had survived with fifteen stitches.

I asked the woman pictured if she or her family had had a similar experience. ‘The bullets fly over our heads’, she said, ‘but so far, God has been kind.’

Image and text © Josh Jones 2008