Photography Without Borders

Palestine Monitor [Editor]

Palestine Monitor is a news site that reports on the life of ordinary people living in occupied Palestine. Its pictorial output is often fascinating, and the latest photo-story is no exception.

Jenin Camp: Then and Now documents the terror of occupation for the inhabitants of a small refugee camp in the West Bank. The text makes for bitter reading, as with most tales from the West Bank.

The pictures, meanwhile, take a quietly contemplative stance, showing both the pride and strength of the people who survive these troubles, and the darker memories of terror that loom in the background. In one picture, confident children face the camera undaunted, while the wall behind them sports a childishly painted assault rifle.

Elsewhere, a fantastic scrap statue looks like it could adorn the front of a corporate headquarters, but its source gives a different mood altogether: the large metal horse was constructed out of car debris left after a vicious attack.

Palestine Monitor [Editor]
Statue of a large horse on the edge of the camp made out of scraps of cars destroyed in the attack
July 2008

Dorothea Lange made her reputation photographing the victims of the Great Depression in the US, and the exploitation of US farmers that followed. Her most famous photograph, Migrant Mother, shows the strength and torment of a migrant worker, surrounded by her three children.

I am reminded of the raw devotion to family and humanity that is expressed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. When times are hard, it seems, the best side of people can emerge; their stoicism, their determination to stick to their values against all the odds. Such times also expose the darkest side of capitalism, that two-headed beast that feeds us when times are good, and consumes us when they are bad.

Until the late 20th century, Lange’s most controvestial work went largely unrecongnised, owing in no small part to its censorship by the US government. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, president Franklin Roosevelt authorised the forced relocation of over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into concentration camps. Assigned to report on this process, Lange could not help but capture the inhumanity of the government’s policies. Some of her most powerful photos, such as pictured below, show American schoolchildren swearing alligence to the stars and stripes before being transported to concentration camps.

___

References: Women Come to the Front, City of San Francisco Museum, Wikipedia.

Felice Beato is credited as being one of the founders of photojournalism, yet his approaches are as much a warning as an inspiration. He travelled much of Asia from his late twenties until near his death, and although he left Europe far behind, he took many imperialistic ideals with him.

While reporting on the Second Opium War, he took care to only photograph the Chinese war dead, and not British or French casualties. Meanwhile, in his photographs of the so-called Indian Mutiny, the desolation of the surroundings and still-present skeletons empasise the might of the British forces.

Dmitri Baltermants was a Polish man who taught himself photography while working part-time. His reportage of WWII was largely censored by his Soviet employers – presumably because his photography presented the side of war that leaders would rather their people did not know about. Rather than portray the supposed glory of war, he sought to represent the suffering of battle – the soldiers’ ignoble end, the suffering of survivial and widowhood. His most famous image, Grief, shows women of the village of Kerch searching for the bodies of their loved ones after a massacre.