Categories: uncategorized
Date: 12 January 2006 14:24:18
“In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.”
For the time I have been home, lines from a poem have kept running through my brain. Invading my thoughts, my dreams. Half forgotten lines keep summing up my feelings, as I remember sitting in a classroom several years and a million miles away, flicking through a GCSE text book and reading “War Photographer” by Carol Ann Duffy. For as long as I can remember I have yearned to travel to the broken places, to see people and to tell their stories. From an early age I would see images of a warzone on television and want to go there. For me, the poem War Photographer summed up those desires.
I was not really photographing a war, none of my photos are shocking images of suffering, but images of resiliance, of life despite the unofficial war happening around them. And I look at those images, at the children who asked me to take their photo, and remember the conversations, the words of welcome from strangers, in English and in Arabic. And I remember the pain I felt as I saw them living their lives, whist all this hate was going on around them.
“Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel”
And I am home again, and everything I thought was important has shifted somewhat, it is still important, but somehow telling the stories that run through my mind is more important. But it is also a near impossible task. There are so many memories, so many people I met, so many images I carry in my minds eye that I cannot express them all, and as such find it hard to tell any.
“Something is happening. A stranger's features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost.”
Most of the pictures I took in Palestine were of the people, mostly of soldiers and children, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian children. And behind each picture is a story, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes a thousand words is needed to show the truth behind a picture
“From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns a living and they do not care.”
From the aeroplane I looked down across the darkening sky and saw the world from a new hight, I couldn't see the borders, the tanks, the bombs, the wars. But they were there, I could remember them. And I wanted people to care. And I'd like to tell my stories, but only if you'd like to listen.