Photography Without Borders

Pride by Josh Jones

For the first time, an online collection of the best of my photojournalism in Palestine has been created. The series focuses on human rights issues for Bedouin people, farmers, and other locals living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

The photo-stories have already been exhibited in Brighton and at the University of Sussex, and some were featured in Palestine Monitor. However, this is the first full, open, online version of the collection. The gallery makes sharing and commenting easy.

I invite you to visit, share with your friends, and comment upon these photos and thoughts. Josh

6th Mar, 2009: A new law has been passed which allows UK police to arrest individuals for photographing police officers, and confiscate their equipment. Section 76, introduced this year, makes it illegal for anyone to take or distribute photographs of Police or armed forces ‘which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.

This comes as alarming news in the context of the UK police force’s abuse of anti-terror laws every year since 2001. In Brighton, Sussex police enacted a widespread suppression of a peaceful protest, using anti-terrorism laws to make arrests.

The laws also allow police to further suppress democratic journalism. Last year, Somerset & Avon police had to apologise for the the violent arrest of a plumber who photographed a police van going the wrong way up a one way street. Now, such an apology would not be necessary, and the onus would be on the plumber to prove that he was not going to use the image for terrorist purposes.

Visit the map

Weeks of intensive research have culminated in the launch of an online, interactive multimedia map. It documents events surrounding the Smash EDO demonstration in Brighton on October 15th. Clicking on markers brings up raw evidence, such as photography, eyewitness reports, and video footage.

The map makes for harrowing reading. It shows how police invoked anti-terror laws against suspected protesters. It also describes how one disabled observer was arrested and denied access to a doctor, and how peaceful protesters were attacked by police dogs.

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.

See more photos and text from Palestine Monitor: Photojournalism From Inside

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.

See more photos and text from Profile: Lange Captures America’s Unwanted

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 survival 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.

Dmitri Baltermants