Arundhati Roy On The Meaning And Idea Of Resistance

It has become fashionable to simply accept, to acquiese to power, to be obsequieous, to kiss-ass, to bend over to be taken from behind, to be grateful that your mortage can still be paid, to look for hand outs, to simply repeat the rhetoric and language of the powerful…to simply exlain the status quo and consider it insight.

Arundhati Roy continues, quietly and incisely, to remind us that dissent, all dissent, is the fundamental platform of democracy and of liberty.

One of my favorite commentators, Mark Slouka, recently penned a piece called Democracy & Deference where he ask, first the Americans, but then the world in general:

Turn on the TV to almost any program with an office in it, and you’ll find a depressingly accurate representation of the “boss culture,” a culture based on an a priori notion of—a devout belief in—inequality. The boss will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.

This is the paradigm—the relational model that shapes so much of our public life. Its primary components are intimidation and fear. It is essentially authoritarian. If not principally about the abuse of power, it rests, nonetheless, on a generally accepted notion of power’s privileges. Of its inherent rights. The Rights of Man? Please. The average man has the right to get rich so that he too can sit behind a desk wearing an absurd haircut, yelling, “You’re fired!” or refuse to take any more questions; so that he too—when the great day comes—can pour boiling oil on the plebes at the base of the castle wall, each and every one of whom accepts his right to do so, and aspires to the honor.

And then leads us to the crucial question on which our democracy may hinge:

What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses.

A culture, I would add, of intellectual and moral cowardice, fueled as it is by a desire for more and more money to spend and display. If we are weak, if we are subservient, if we are scared and if we are cowed it is because we have subsumed ourselves to our material and financial desires. In a culture where all human value, worth and status emerges from his/her cash/wealth worth, it can’t be any other way.

Whats Happening In Pakistan? Its Not What The New York Times Will Tell You

A couple of insightful pieces appeared recently. Both, in different ways, challenge the mainstream narrative being bandied about in Washington D.C. and being stenographed by individuals pretending to be reporters but in fact are really acting as government/official stenographers out of Pakistan and the USA.

The first piece is by Mohammad Ahmad Idress, founder of Pulse Media, and appeared in the recent issue of Le Monde Diplomatique. Title Pakistan Creates Its Own Enemies, if offers us some valuable background and some excellent insights. I will quote a few here, but I recommend that you read the entire piece to help cut past what can only be described as willful lies and obfuscations (these editors and journalists are not stupid, just cowards or ‘professionals’, which these days means the same thing really!) being sold to us by our press here in the USA.

Helping us understand how we got ourselves into this mess, Idress reminds us (and we do need to be reminded that):

This war began in 2002 under intense US pressure, with piecemeal military action in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a semi-autonomous region of seven agencies along Pakistan’s north-western border. The Afghan Taliban were using the region to regroup after their earlier rout: veteran anti-Soviet commander Jalaluddin Haqqani headquartered his network in North Waziristan; Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami had a presence in Bajaur. However, the military, reluctant to take on pro-Pakistan Afghans, whom the government sees as assets against growing Indian influence in Afghanistan, instead marched into South Waziristan to apprehend “foreigners” (mainly Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs). Following the regional code of honour, the tribes refused to surrender the guests and were subjected to collective punishment that soon united them against the government.

This was a situation that I had been able to document during my work in Waziristan in 2004. See (Mother Jones Magazine: Frontier Justice, October 2004). I recommend that you read the entire piece.

Another piece that caught my eye was by Manan Ahmad called Start A War where he too reminds us of some ground realities:

The 3.5 million or more inhabitants of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, of which Waziristan is a component, only received the adult franchise in 1997 – 50 years after the creation of Pakistan. This area, with the highest poverty and lowest literacy rates in Pakistan, is still governed according to the brutal British colonial legal code: a family or even a village can be punished for the crime of a single individual, there is no protection from multiple sentences for the same offence, and most damnably, the state has no obligation to show cause for imprisonment. Most damaging is the utter lack of a judicial system that can adjudicate civil disputes – one reason for the persistent calls to impose Sharia within the region. The Pakistani state has yet to resolve these issues and, in the meantime, segments of the discontented population have resorted to armed aggression against the centre – which has taken both secular and religious forms. Decades of frustration allowed the Taliban a foothold in Swat, and the same conditions exist in Baluchistan.

and as if to shake us out of our intellectual stupor, he ends with this warning:

The true crisis facing Pakistan is not the Taliban: it is the rupture between the federal state and its constituent parts, and Islamabad’s refusal to accede to the legitimate needs and demands of its citizens in places like Swat and Baluchistan. It is a rupture, indeed, that is written into the very fabric of the state, and the reason why Bangladesh seceded from West Pakistan in 1971, after it was denied political legitimacy by the military regime and then brutalised by an oppressive army operation aimed at quashing any opposition.
But the Pakistan Army learnt exactly the wrong lesson from Bangladesh: since 1971 it has been determined to move as rapidly and violently as possible against any sub-nationalist movement elsewhere in Pakistan. The spectre of Taliban conquering Islamabad and the state’s American-backed resolve to press on in a series of wars against its own people have effectively ended any chance for political consideration of the Baluchistan issue. Instead Baluchistan will be, once again, merely an empty badland where Taliban are hiding, waiting, plotting. It awaits yet another military operation. And we await another declaration of success.

For those of you interested in Ahmed Rashid, Tariq Ali has recently penned a strong criticism of Mr. Rashid’s fear-mongering, in a piece called Ahmed Rashid’s War , pointing out that:

The main people who consult Rashid, apart from Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books, are US policy-makers in favor of a continuous occupation of Afghanistan. Rashid provides them with many a spurious argument to send more troops and wipe out the Pashtuns opposing the occupation. Within Afghanistan, Rashid’s principal backer and friend is Hamid Karzai who has now managed to antagonize even the tamest US liberals such as Peter Galbraith, recently sacked as a UN honcho in Kabul because he suggested that Karzai had rigged the elections. Rashid the journalist has no time for people who suggest that Karzai is a corrupt rogue, whose family is now the richest in the country, or that he manipulates US public opinion with the aid of PR companies, friends in Washington and, of course, Ahmed Rashid himself.

As more and more Pakistani’s are killed to appease American domestic policy needs, and the insatiable greed of the venal individuals who have grabbed hold of Pakistan’s government, we would do well to at least understand how this situation has emerged. Perhaps we care not for some poor Pushtun and his pointless family being cut to pieces by tax-payer funded, but oh-so-sexy pilot-less drones, but maybe we can speak honestly about it and go to bed at night without fear or guilt. After all, international human rights laws, the Geneva Conventions, and even Pakistan’s own constitutional laws to protect the lives and rights of its citizens, were not really written for a bunch of baggy pant barbarians living in barren hills? Or were they, in fact, actually written for precisely such dehumanized, ignored, and invisibly erased people?

Photo Projects I Like: Joseph Rodriguez’s Reentry In Los Angeles

 

Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So

Talking To Each Other And Alongside Each Other: Anna Baltzer & Mustafa Barghouti On The Daily Show

Mustafa Barghouti is (Mustafa Kamil Mustafa Barghuthi) is a physician and a political activist; advocate for the development of Palestinian civil society and grassroots democracy; international spokesman for the Palestinian NGO sector, and organizer of international solidarity presence in the OPT.  Writes extensively for a local and international audience on civil society, democracy issues and the political situation in Palestine, and on health development policy for Palestinians living under occupation.

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish-American Columbia graduate,former- Fulbright scholar, the granddaughter of Holocaust refugees, and an award-winning lecturer, author, and activist for Palestinian rights. She is the author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories. In 2009, Baltzer received the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s prestigious Annual Rachel Corrie Peace &Justice Award, and is a contributor to three upcoming books on the subject. Baltzer serves on the Middle East committee of the Women’s InternationalLeague for Peace & Freedom and on the Board of Directors of TheResearch Journalism Institute, GrassrootsJerusalem, and The Council forthe National Interest. You can find more about Anna Baltzer on her website A Witness In Palestine and/or from her blog site Anna In Palestine.

The State As The Incarnation Of Collective Interests, Purposes And Goods: Tony Judt on Social Democracy, Its Meaning, Intent and Consequences

Tony Judt directs the Remarque Institute at NYU and is the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. His latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, was recently reissued in paperback. (September 2009).

He recently gave a lecture at New York University on the meaning and implications of democracy and in particular social democracy which is worth listening to. There are few, if any, in the USA who can make the arguments that he made, and this despite the desperate need to make them.

Click on the link here: Tony Judt’s 2009 Remarque Lecture

Tony Judt has never minced words. A searing critique of the American Left called Bush’s Useful Idiots in the London Review of Books lamented:

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

An essay that raised hackles across the spectrum, it nevertheless raised some crucial questions that few were prepared to confront in particular that the difference between a liberal left and a radical right were pretty much imaginary, if not altogether absent.

America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better known and more avowedly ‘liberal’ intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars – she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, a pre-emptive defence of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (‘War Fair’, New Republic, 31 July). In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

He has also penned a number of pieces for the New York Review of Books, and one in particular that I remember was called Israel: The Alternative – an essay that cost Judt a number of friends and broad opprobrium. In it he asked and suggested the unthinkable:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

And asking us to think what to date has been unthinkable, or at least unmentionable:

The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution—the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map”—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon’s cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.

Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews—is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

There is an extensive interview with him, with extensive biographical information, in The Guardian: Uncomfortable Truths which is worth reading as well.

This Land Called Gaza – A Love and A Curse

“And what projects are you working on at the moment?”

“An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Palestinians.”

There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said “Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!”

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr describes a conversation with a friend.(1)

Palestine is a thankless cause, one in which if you truly serve you get nothing back but opprobrium, abuse, and ostracism…Palestine is the cruelest, most difficult cause to uphold, not because it is unjust, but because it is just and yet dangerous to speak about as honestly and as concretely as [he] did.

Edward Said on intellectual/activist Eqbal Ahmed. (2)

Jabaliya, Gaza February 2009 Copyright Asim Rafiqui

Most independent photographers arriving in Palestine carry with them the awareness that much if not all of their work will go largely unpublished. This is not only because Gaza and the West Bank are amongst the world’s most thoroughly photographed human tragedies, but also because speaking of the Palestinian’s as a real people with real suffering remains near impossible. Their story has been effectively reduced to that of ‘terrorism’, ‘extremism’ and one of ‘instigators of violence’. Their rights and demands for justice drowned out by the shrill insistence on Israel’s infinite innocence and need for restitution for historical wrongs. And on presumptions of their mendacity and single-minded determination to destroy ‘the Zionist entity’. Even President Barack Obama, in a recent speech in Cairo, placed the principal responsibility of regional violence on their weak, unarmed and repeatedly defeated shoulders. Photographers and journalists who try to reveal a different reality or raise questions about the myth of Israeli innocence or question the assumption of Palestinian mendacity, find themselves ignored, marginalized and unpublished. Independent photographers who come to Palestine do so armed not with major assignments but with convictions that are personal and individual. And they usually come alone.

I arrived at Rafah, Egypt – the only crossing into Rafah, Gaza, during the last days of Israeli’s Operation Cast Lead. This time I was luckier than most for I had the support of a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant and the encouragement of Ted Genoways, the creative and poetic editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine. By the time I argued my way into Gaza, a way repeatedly blocked first by the Israelis and then by the Egyptians, I found myself in what had by then become only one of the most important prime time news events of the year.

The Israeli assault on Gaza began on the last day of Hanukkah on December 27th 2009 and eventually left nearly 1400 dead, thousands injured and tens of thousands displaced. It was covered by every major international TV news channel, daily newspaper and weekly magazine. Their cameramen, on-screen personalities, photographers, directors, fixers and coordinators stormed the walls of Gaza in a rush to film, edit, transmit and broadcast the events as they unfolded. On any given day, at any given hour, dozens of videographers and photojournalists could be seen in the hallways of Gaza’s famous Al-Diera Hotel speaking anxiously into their mobile phones, or sitting at tables in the restaurants, hunched over their laptops, cursing the slow internet connections and desperately transmitting their latest images. And when they were not scoffing down a quick meal, they were furtively discussing plans with their local minders, or rushing towards their waiting cars to get to a ‘hot’ location. Amidst this mob of media I, with my little film cameras and a small grant that gave me the freedom to work at my own pace, found myself apart, confused and more alone than ever before. How would what I came to say be heard over this noise?

My first time in Gaza was in the summer of 2003. I was a novice photographer who went because Edward Said wrote a small response to an email I sent him and encouraged me to go. I then returned and continued to document the situation in Gaza, particularly in southern Gaza city of Rafah where I worked for nearly 2 years. The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along the Rafah’s border with Egypt. The American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli armored bulldozer, was still there; alive, determined, passionate and beautiful. Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah-Egypt border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for the steel wall. Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents. As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses. Between 2003 and 2006 I made several trips to this surrounded territory, continuing to document the slowly shrinking social, political, economic and cultural space of its inhabitants.

And then I stopped coming. Dozens of courageous Palestinian photographers were doggedly documenting the bitter and crushing existence of the Gazans, and the incessant economic and military violence against them. The international photojournalists too kept coming to photograph the ‘militants’ and the ‘fanatics’, as if to provide the ‘facts’ that would maintain what Saree Makdisi has recently called a language that prevents us from recognizing what’s really going on in the Middle East.3 I felt that after three years of consistent work I had nothing new to add to this dialogue, nothing new to show. In retrospect I realize that it was an act of surrender by a young photographer frustrated by his inability to effectively capture in pictures the sufferings of those around him..

But now I was back again, and walking through the devastation left the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead I was struck by how familiar it all looked. The scale was larger than anything that I could remember, and its consequences very familiar; the bombed homes, the displaced families, the tank-track torn olive and citrus groves, the stunned relatives of the dead, the funeral dirges, the Hamas marches, the victory songs, the numbing buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead, the children scavenging amongst ruins, the sirens of the ambulances, the men on donkey carts carrying debris to nowhere, and that constant, distant human wail of a life torn apart or a hope torn asunder. Here I was again, but I had been here before and seen it before. The scenes I witnessed were remarkably similar to those I had seen during my time in Gaza between 2003 and 2006. As some of the world’s best photojournalists scrambled all around me to capture the devastation for the world’s audience, I found that I still had nothing new to say and by the second day I put away my cameras and stopped taking pictures.

And then I met Ismail Ibrahim Abu Eida.

He was walking alone near the rubble of his family home lost in thought. When he noticed me standing close by he merely nodded and said nothing. I stood there looking at him stumble and trip across the pile of rubble that had once been his home. A lone figure amongst thousands of lonely figures all over Gaza who were at that very moment quietly, resignedly stumbling and tripping across the rubble of their own lives. I wanted to talk to him about what was going through his mind, but he seemed reluctant, even a little embarrassed. “What will I tell you that others have not?”, he said quietly. And he was right.

Abu Eida’s pain – the loss of his life’s work, the displacement of his family, and the ruination of his livelihood, was an oft repeated occurrence in this land. Tens of thousands had already suffered it, and it was certain, given the entrenched ideas and ideals that perpetuate this conflict, that tens of thousands more are destined to do so in the future. In this land of pain, where everyone has experienced the gravest of loss, it has become difficult to express individual suffering or ask for compassion. In a life that must accept as normal the sudden and violent erasure of all that one holds dear, a life in which you console your neighbor knowing full well that someday they will be consoling you, you no longer speak about your own sorrows. You no longer share your burden because others are so crushed under their own. In a life of collective punishment your scars and sufferings are starkly your own to confront and tolerate.

Abu Eida was fortunate. No one had died. His family had been displaced to a UN refugee center, and he was sleeping on a mattress in a cargo container on the family property. With a voice that was severely controlled, he explained to me how tanks and bulldozers had forced him to flee and leveled everything he had built over the course of his life, including his family’s orange groves. Then he invited me for tea. He had only one cup. Ten minutes of digging in the rubble produced a second—broken but usable. He had no place for me to sit but a shout to a friend down the road produced a three-legged plastic chair. I protested this kindness, but he wouldn’t hear of it, reminding me that I was his guest. “It is our way, Mr. Rafiqui,” he insisted, as he made himself comfortable in the dirt, “to honor our guests— and to remind ourselves of the things within us which cannot be destroyed by tanks and missiles.”

As the day grew hotter, the mist that shrouded the citrus groves lifted, revealing what had once been the Jabaliya industrial zone. Ismail pointed toward Israel. I could see a wire fence and the silhouettes of soldiers walking along it. Israeli farmers had begun returning to their fields that morning as jeeps carrying soldiers raced back and forth along the border areas. Snipers kept an eye on the few Palestinians who dared to return to their lands. Despite the cease-fire, Gazan farmers were being shot and killed at random. “I used to work in Israel,” Ismail said. “But that was a different time, a different world.”

This world, the one whose remains surrounded us that morning, now lay in a shroud of dust raised by the hundreds of hands salvaging valuables from the remains of their homes, factories, stores, and farmlands. As I looked up from my cup of tea and out towards the scarred landscape I could see people sifting through rubble, searching for bodies, salvaging remains of machinery, consoling their children, or just sitting amongst the ruins of their homes. It struck me that indeed how fortunate were the dead who had at least, as Plato said, seen the end of war. The living however go on and suffer its horrors, carry it’s burdens, tolerate its indignities, appease its sorrows, and accept its cruelest gift – the death of loved ones.

Later that morning I finally made my first photograph – a family searching for the remains of a patriarch. The bulldozer roared and clawed mercilessly against the pile of ruins, churning up metal, concrete, electrical wiring, toys, clothing and whatever else its massive jaws caught in their broad sweeps. Around it sat many family members and friends, patiently watching the bulldozer work, prepared for the moment the body is discovered. “How do you know if someone is still trapped in there?” I asked. “You can smell it!”, came a slightly exasperated reply. There were no camera crews at the site, no photojournalists waiting to capture the moment. It was just one body, one individual, being searched for. The ‘hot’ news stories were elsewhere that morning and will be elsewhere the day after.

But these searches, these sorrows, and the days without those who were once so close, so needed, will go on. As I stood on a small hill and watch the bulldozer tear away at the collapsed walls of the house I was struck with the realization that even when the world’s attention falls on them, the Gazans are most distant, misunderstood and isolated from us. The world comes to them asking them to be either the hate-filled militant out to destroy Israel or the innocent victims of Israel’s fanaticism. And in the process it denudes them of their ordinariness, frailty and flawed humanity. In its attentions the world ghettoizes them, refusing them their history, politics, memories and agendas. Gone are their love affairs, their family feuds, their fears and hopes for their children’s futures, their infidelities, their ambitions, their material desires, their days on the beach, their care for their elderly, their gentleness towards strangers, their love of food, their eye for the perfect coffee bean, their undying and near familial love of the olive tree and their sense of connectedness with the land.

This land called Gaza – a love and a curse.

Photographer’s Note: This essay was submitted to a Swedish magazine that eventually considered it too uninteresting for publication. It was also the essay I submitted recently to a grant committee to continue my work in Gaza. I did not receive the grant. I share it here despite its seemingly sorry record, as perhaps nothing more than a way to allow the thoughts I put down here to escape from the confinement of my hopes and disappointments.

1: Said, E & Mohr, J (1999) After The Last Sky Columbia University Press, New York, New York

2: Barsamian, D, (2000) Eqbal Ahmed: Confronting Empire South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

3: Makdisi, S (19/6/2009) A Language That Absolves Israel, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, USA.

Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression

An exhibition called ‘Beware The Cost Of War’ recently opened in London.

Reading about it in the New York Times ‘Lens’ blog left me deeply disappointed and concerned.

Let me explain.

(Aside: Yoav Galai, the curator, is someone I have called a friend for some time now and I hope that he will forgive me for this very critical review of what is something he clearly put a lot of work in to. It is not personal, but merely a reflection on this propensity in our world to fear speaking, to raise a voice, to add details and specifics where generalizations only confuse, perpetuate injustices and acquit the guilty. I am sorry Yoav. I must say my piece.)

∞

In their book Another Way of Telling photographer Jean Mohr and writer/intellectual John Berger present an experiment where a series of Mohr’s photographs, each with their captions removed, are shown to a number of ordinary strangers and each is asked to explain what they see in the photograph. As Jean Mohr himself explains:

Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too; a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a springboard. (page 42)

The result was that each individual described the photograph differently, thereby rending each photograph meaningless, and completely erasing it of history, context, intent and meaning and replacing them with what were little more than randomly created ideas based on fantasies, prejudices, and ignorances. The photos gave nothing to the viewer, the viewer merely imposed their ‘knowledge’ – factual and otherwise, onto the image. The images became springboards indeed, but they also became empty vessels into which the viewer could put anything and make them what s/he wanted. The images offered nothing, taught nothing, revealed nothing and as a result added nothing.

∞

Jean Mohr also collaborated with the writer/intellectual Edward Said to produce what I consider to be one of the finest, most important, book of photojournalism ever – After The Last Sky. This book, about which I have written elsewhere, is a masterful collaboration between a photographer and a writer. It is one of those rare photography books that has managed to lift itself from the fashionable but frivolous shelves of photography books and into the more relevant Middle East History section of a bookstore.

The book grew out of an unusual context; in 1983 Edward Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP) and he suggested that some of Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva, Switzerland. The official response to this suggestion, as Said himself describes it in the book, was unusual; they would allow the photographs to be hung, but no words could accompany them, and no explanations.

It was then that Said and Mohr came up with the idea of writing about the Palestinians – about adding the words to the photographs. As Said explains:

Let us use photographs and text, we said to each other, to say something that hasn’t been said about Palestinians. (page 4)

But they were aware that the problems they faced was not a lack of text on this matter, but perhaps too much of it. But it was also clear that:

…for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms. (page 5)

Confronting this challenge about how to convey the Palestinian experience to a reluctant audience was not going to be easy, and yet it was crucial and clear that text was going to be a fundamental act of resistance, and that its place for a people oppressed was fundamentally important because:

Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we [Palestinians] are frequently unable either to speak the ‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. (page 6)

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War” is an exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographs now being shown in London. In a review written on the New York Times blog ‘Lens’, a review titled Stirring Images, No Names the writers explain that:

“Beware the Cost of War,” a show opening Friday at the Blackall Studios in London, will be conspicuous for many reasons — one of them being what it lacks: captions and credits next to the images, which were taken both by Israeli and Palestinian photographers.

The notion is that, without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.

In a slide show of some of the images we are shown scenes of grieving Palestinian and Lebanese families and of Israeli families. The curator, Yoav Galai, we are told:

…hoped viewers would discard customary ideological and political preconceptions as they looked at the images, many of which are deeply disturbing…

He is later quoted as saying:

“I realized it’s hard to show what’s really happening,” Mr. Galai said. “Once a photograph is out there, people ascribe whatever they want to it. So I thought, why not take all the pictures and tear them away from their narrative?”

∞

Yoav Galai is a young photographer. An Israeli who has documented the destruction of the Palestinian social, cultural and physical space in occupied East Jerusalem, he and I have frequently communicated via email and I respect his individual voice and determination.

But sadly I find myself in deep conflict and disagreement with this entire exhibition, and the silencing of the experience, history, and narrative of the Palestinian people already suffering from decades of silencing, marginalization, and erasure. The entire impression of ‘balance’ here is specious, and frankly misrepresents the situation which is simply one of a powerful military occupier systematically repressing and controlling an otherwise unarmed and desperate Palestinian population.

Tearing away the narrative, the history, the context of a photograph is the best way to further enable people to ascribe whatever meaning people want to images, and hence, only confirm and not question their prejudices, hates, ignorances and fears.

That Israeli historians, intellectuals, writers and journalists can clearly speak of this, admitting to the injustices their government has been executing against the Palestinians, only reminds us of the vast gap in intellectual and physical courage that imbues our societies when it comes to the question of the rights of an Arab people.

This exhibition in its current format ends up committing a number of sins against the history of the situation it claims to speak about, and even about the lives of the people involved.

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied. It pretends to suggest that everyone is a victim, when in fact that is not true. Israel is an occupying force, its citizens repeatedly voting into power civilians leaders, most all with deep military track records and connections, based on their ability to ‘handle the Palestinians’. The Palestinians are an unarmed people now trapped in quite possibly the most extensive, professionally administered, rationally planned, efficiently executed occupation regime in history.

• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year e.g. the brutal and unnecessary massacre of nearly 2000 Palestinians of Gaza in early 2009 prompted by Israeli domestic political needs and condemned in the recent UN Goldstone Report vs. the aftermath of a suicide bomb that occurred many years ago and the likes of which have not been repeated in years.

• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents i.e. acts of legitimate violence in order to resist and overthrow and illegal occupation vs. acts of repressive violence meant to occupy, steal, and control.

• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts; the dehumanizing and degrading check points, the summary arrests, the illegal (and yes, please, they are illegal) settlements, the military patrols that enable them, the hideous barbarism of the fundamentalist, fanatical and humanly deviant Jewish settlers, the summary executions, the entire infrastructure – administrative, military, political, under-cover of the occupation regime, the displacements, the senseless closures, and the constant threat of violence that hangs in the air and frequently manifests itself into reality.

The exhibition in fact become a tool of oppression, creating ‘balance’ where there is none, offering the easy consumption of ‘violence’ while ensuring that nothing provokes us to realize the truths that create the violence, the injustices that continue to be perpetrated, and the powers that have to held accountable for what is a clear and simple crime against humanity and massive violation of international law.

As writer Peter Lagerquist comments after hearing and reading about this exhibit:

It’s not only offensive but brutalizing, because it perpetrates another violence on those pictures, and their subjects. They are robbed of meaning, the viewer is robbed of their ability to think critically about violence, rather than merely wringing their hands over it…All that we are left with here is diffuse pathos, the knowledge that violence is bad.  And this simply is not enough; we need to understand something else.

We don’t have to love the Palestinians, but why must we insist on shutting them up? Why must we be so dismissive of values and laws that we with such fanfare created and offered at Nuremburg and enshrined in so many UN charters and Geneva Conventions? Why, when it comes to the ‘lesser’ people, do our voices suddenly find no air, our minds no thoughts, our courage no will and our photographs no captions?

∞

An oppressor wants to erase the voice of the oppressed. ‘Balance’ serves the interests of those exercising disproportionate violence and control over a weaker people and society. A people displaced, dispossessed, ignored, dehumanized, and incarcerated, in flagrant violation of our most valued principles of international law, justice and rights, do not need us to ‘remove’ their context, history and experiences of their suffering. On the contrary, it is precisely words, text, and voice that need to be used to unveil their experience. It is crucial to our responsibilities as reporters, journalists and photojournalists, to speak with courage and clarity and add our voice to those of the weak to counter, and challenge the easily heard and broader disseminated voice of the powerful.

Michael Massing took on the issue of specious ‘balance’ that today’s media organizations strive for and identified it as one of the major problems with journalism today. In a piece called The Press; The Enemy Within he quoted the writer Ken Silverstein (I am a big fan of Ken’s work!) who was then working on a piece about voting fraud in St. Louis and who found clear evidence of Republic Party manipulation of votes but was not allowed to say it as such and encouraged to ‘balance’ it with comments about similar actions, though far less systematic, by the Democrats:

I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. “Balanced” is not fair, it’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.

Any easy was to shirk our responsibility to inform readers, and I would add, help them understand the perspectives and principles that are in fact consistently and necessarily defensible. And we are being cowards to not admit that there are principles of law, justice and national behavior and they are enshrined in documents that we love to quote e.g. Sudan, Kosovo, or Kuwait when it suits our needs.

I quote Edward Said from his work Representations of the Intellectual when he points out that:

Universality means taking risks in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided to us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behavior when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (page xiv)

My point would be that for the contemporary intellectual [or individual] living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it unacceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely “I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?”

To speak consistently is upholding standards of international behavior and the support of human rights is not to look inwards for a guiding light supplied to one by inspiration or prophetic intuition. Most…countries in the world are signatories to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed in 1948, reaffirmed by every new member state of the UN. There are equally solemn conventions on the rules of war, on treatment of prisoners, on the rights of workers, women, children, immigrants and refugees. None of these documents says anything about ‘disqualified’ or less equal races or peoples. All are entitled to the same freedoms. (page 97)

This exhibition, sadly participated in by Palestinians photographers themselves, further oppresses the Palestinian experience, because it reduces everything to merely violence and sensationalism. This is the legacy of wire photography, and of mainstream photojournalism that chases blood, celebrates murder, and titillates through the tragic.

At a time when more than ever we need to speak with courage and clarity at the systematic dispossession of what little has been left to this blighted people, we have photojournalists and curators participating in a project of silence and obfuscation.

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War’ unfortunately attempts to balance what is so terribly imbalanced. And in that process it misleads. There is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands at the hideousness of blood and flesh torn by bombs. There is nothing to be understood by images of mothers crying. There is no value in the sight of another babies still body. To produce something that can really only provoke pity – a debilitating and cowardly emotion, is to produce nothing at all. (I am reminded of Nietzsche’s argument that… the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his ’stupidity’.)

As photographers we must demand that the text be returned to us who made the works. Our eye and our text is our intent, our ideas, our values and our risks. We must insist that our images not be exploited or left open to the random violence and fantasies of an indifferent and/or confused viewer. Context matters, history matters, and memory matters. We must insist that our words are not dismissed, that the intents with which we produced our images is not marginalized, and that our images do not become merely ‘illustrations’ but are clear statements of our work and our beliefs.

Our words anchor the image, and give it something that itself does not contain; meaning and intent. The caption is crucial because it is also the photographer’s insistence on controlling the use the image is put to, and to what extent it can be manipulated. In a world overrun with meaningless illustrations, the caption takes on even greater value. Context becomes a powerful weapon against propaganda and obfuscation. And a means towards clarity and understanding. We should not surrender or relinquish this right easily. In a conflict mired in millions of words of propaganda, from both sides of course but certainly largely from the mouths of the powerful who have an unbalanced access to mainstream print, internet, and tv media, the words of those who have witnessed first hand are paramount.

Epilogue: A few days ago a Swedish magazine invited me to publish my portraiture from Gaza in its pages. A highly respected publication, it offered me the choice to submit as many images as I liked, with just one condition – they would not use the words that accompanied the work. They only wanted the pictures. You can see this work, images with words, as it appeared in a recent issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. I refused to let them publish the work, arguing that erasing the words reduced them to meaningless aesthetics, and silenced the voices of the individuals who sacrificed their time and patience in the most horrifying of conditions so that I may carry to the world their sufferings. As photographers we either forget, or prevented from being complete individuals; thinking, creative individuals with opinions, ideas and realizations. We must defend this completeness, and the sanctity of our individual experiences, understandings and conclusions.

Update: The No Captions Needed site, authored by two professors, one from Indiana University and the other from Northwestern University and described by them as ‘…a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.” also discussed the ‘no caption’ approach at this exhibit which you can read here: Visual Ironies

Personal Note: This post was edited to ensure that it is understood that it does not claim that the curator(s) intended to oppress the voices or remove context, but simply that the current format inadvertently ends up doing that. This is a criticism of the format, not of the individuals involved, all of whom I am more than sure have the most determined and committed intentions to raise awareness of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Pakistan In A Nutshell Or Examples in Failures Of The Imagination

Pakistan Receives First of 18 Lockheed F-18C Fighter/Bombers for which it paid nearly $2,000,000,000.00

October 13, 2009 Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman of the Pakistan Air Force shows off the country's new toy

Woman & her 3 daughters commit suicide – cause: unbearable poverty

The article points out that “According to sources, Muhammad Sharif was a poor man and leading hand to mouth life with his spouse Zahida Bibi and three minor daughters while the couple would scuffle on an on due to poverty. Yesterday, Zahida Bibi together with her three minor girls committed suicide over being emotional by dint of poor living conditions, sources said.”

∞

The relevance of a nation, the legitimacy of its government, the professionalism of its military and the allegiances of its elite are judged by the welfare of its weakest citizens. As this mother dies, her children with her, I question the relevance of the government, these deadly toys, the professionalism of the military and the allegiances of the elite.

Most post-colonial nations (and I mean most, not all) have chosen a path of purchased modernity - a propensity to believe that simply buying new toys, clothes, college degrees and properties in foreign lands would bestow upon us a European modernity. We are desperate to display it, mimic it, consume it and be equated as being modern. The mimicry of the material is balanced by a determined erasure of the human and the just. I believe that Europe herself has failed her own intellectual and philosophical legacy – as Frantz Fanon argued in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth:

Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.

… but nevertheless, it is this legacy that is completely ignored by us. We want the toys, not the thoughts. I accept that we don’t know our own legacies of humanism, tolerance, justice, equality and service. After all, our education systems, particularly those provided to the elite, are principally Euro-centric, teaching us mostly European literature, arts, history, and else.

To be modern, as understood by our leaders, elites and the military, is to be materially rich in the products, behaviors, and tasts that mirror the European/West. Even our politics simply mirrors their priorities.

We are nations of small ambitions. As our citizens die death not worthy of dogs, as we ‘best’ and most educated, gloat about the opening of a new BMW dealership in Karachi, but remain silent in the face of real scandals that are occasionally printed on the back pages of local newspapers.

∞

I wish for a day when a Pakistani government would collapse not because it was less willing to fleece its people or pander to imperialist interests, but because a mother and her 3 children were forced to kill themselves because of the negligence and indifference of a government that was supposed to protect them and their welfare.

The Wars On Our Frontiers Or Haven’t We Been Here Before?

From Mother Jones magazine, October 2004, written by Malcolm Garcia

Kalooshah, South Waziristan, April 2004: Mir Abbas Khan sits outside the remains of his family home, destroyed by pakistan army bulldozers. The army has destroyed dozens of homes in this area of people it claims were harboring Al Qaeda fighters and collaborators. Many innocent civilians have been displaced and others have lost their homes, belongings and means of livelihood as a consequence. 2004 Copyright Asim Rafiqui Do Not Reproduce

Mir Abbas Khan stares into the camera. Behind him the ruins of his home lay strewn across the dry, hard ground. Since March, when Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Pakistan and promised President General Pervez Musharraf billions of dollars in aid, the Pakistani army has been scouring the semiautonomous tribal regions of South Waziristan for Al Qaeda fighters—bombing, burning, and bulldozing the homes and belongings of those deemed collaborators, or merely uncooperative.

Over the centuries, no one has exercised much authority over South Waziristan, a stark, mountainous area of southwestern Pakistan that borders Afghanistan. But in the wake of two assassination attempts, and in pursuit of continued U.S. largesse, Musharraf seems determined to try. At the start of the campaign, he announced that a senior Al Qaeda leader was surrounded, and hinted it might be Osama bin Laden. Days later, after the army met surprisingly stiff resistance, the top Al Qaeda operative was down-graded to a Chechen commander, and then to a local criminal. Eventually, senior government officials admitted they never had proof that a key terrorist was in the area. Though it boasts of killing hundreds of militants—claims that cannot be substantiated—the government is tight-lipped about casualties among innocent villagers.

Journalists and human rights workers are effectively barred from entering the region. But in April, photographer Asim Rafiqui managed to sneak in by posing as a local businessman. With no base of support in the area, the Pakistani army (mostly ethnically distinct from the Pashtuns of Waziristan) has been attempting to enlist the support of local tribes and battling those who don’t cooperate. Tribal jirgas, or councils, that comply with the army are rewarded with development aid and spared from bombardment. Other tribal leaders see the conflict as a means to turn the wrath of the army on rival tribes. In any case, lashkars—tribal posses—have ransacked scores of villages, vowing to capture or kill those suspected of cooperating with Al Qaeda. Tradition, however, forbids a host to turn over a guest to an enemy without a fight. And Waziris are even being asked to betray blood relations, although family ties extend far deeper than national loyalty.

In pitting his army against his people, Musharraf risks losing his tenuous hold on power by energizing the very Islamic fundamentalists he seeks to crush. Muslims consider soldiers killed in combat to be martyrs. But many of the tribesmen battling the army are former mujahideen, who, in the 1980s, were actively recruited by Pakistan and the United States to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and support the Taliban. They came from all over Central Asia and settled in the tribal regions. They married, had children, and became woven into the local culture. To many Pakistanis, who don’t understand the about-face of the Musharraf government, it is not the soldiers who are martyrs, but the Waziris fighting them. “America is a wolf at our door,” said retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, a fundamentalist Muslim. “Pakistan throws it crumbs so it does not attack our house. South Waziristan is a crumb. But the people know defenders of the tribal areas are defending their country. Are they terrorists, and the attackers good boys? No. The people don’t believe this.”

Pakistanis are all too cognizant that it is at America’s bidding that Musharraf, his army, and the lashkars of Waziristan carry out this campaign. Any resentment it causes will inevitably flow back up that chain. Consider again Mir Abbas Khan, in the photo on the opposite page. Look at his eyes, his ruined home, and back to his eyes—full of fear and hurt, but mostly rage.

Accuser, Judge and Jury. We now are seeing the beginnings of such scenes

And there will be more, and far worse. Our parrots in the military and the political administration are not only repeating the language and obfuscations of the Americans, but the equally stupid and ‘blow-back-ready’ tactics as well. By the way, you would never know it, that there has been a sustained military occupation/presence and war against the people of the region of FATA since 2002. Our drone attacks in 2009 alone are interesting to observe, rising to levels of indiscriminate slaughter based on the statements of ‘officials’, all of whom seem to have direct telephone lines to the international media hungry for easy quotes and thought-closing statements.

The Pakistanis look on and wonder why bombs are going off in their cities. They rarely if ever wondered why bombs were falling indiscriminately on our citizens in FATA, how many were dying, who was being killed, and why. Our silences as they screamed are now being answered by our screams. These days of dishonor, these moments of dark horror, will yield only more pain, only more confusion, and only more suffering. And if they are not convinced, maybe what Asif Ali Zardari said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph:

“My position is that I have always asked for possession of the drone; I want the Pakistani flag on it.”

How much cash was needed to agree to slaughter civilians and Pakistani citizens for that bravado? I suppose there is no point in reminding him that they are citizens with rights, and that he is the representative of his citizens. Oh well, such niceties sound so naive.

The paymaster celebrate our ‘actions‘, the military leader grins and gloats as he receives American toys for the holiday season days before this latest ‘war’, and the nation’s sovereignty is offered up for a pocket full of change most of which will of course end up in the hands of the crooks now apparently sitting as ‘democrats’.

It has been our strategy to always replace a mess with an even larger one. President Obama, choosing only the finest and most intelligent people in his administration, is proceeding to repeat the same mistake. In a wonderfully amusing, but insightful, piece called Wall Street Smarts in the New York Times the poet Calvin Trillin argued that:

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

In Errol Morris’ fear-inducing film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara he reminds us that the men who orchestrated, managed, administered and planned the Vietnam fiasco where the ’smartest guys in the room’.  Robert S. McNamara “… graduated in 1937 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Arts in economics with minors in mathematics and philosophy. He was a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity,^[10] was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his sophomore year and earned a varsity letter in crew. He was also a member of the UC Berkeley Golden Bear Battalion, Army ROTC. He then earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. After earning his MBA McNamara worked a year for the accounting firm Price Waterhouse in San Francisco. In August 1940 he returned to Harvard to teach in the Business School and became the highest paid and youngest Assistant Professor at that time.” (from Wikipedia)

In an earlier argument, Chris Hedges pointed out in an essay called The Best And The Brightest Led American Off The Cliff that:

The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.

And President Obama now sits, like a god-king, asking his ‘best and the brightest’ to oversee an unfolding fiasco that is going to be Afghanistan and Pakistan. Enough with the intelligent, lets try the moronic. Could they do worse? I doubt it.

Paris Photo 2009:Be There For If You Are Not There…Er…You Are Not There!

Rio, Sans titre, 2008 © Mohamed Bourouissa, Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire Paris/Bruxelles

Paris Photo, possibly one of the more important photography art fairs of the year, begins in Paris at the Carrousel du Louvre on November 18th 2009. This year’s focus is on what they claim to be ‘Arab‘ and ‘Iranian‘ photography. As always, I place such classifications in brackets because they, in our modern world of forced and chosen exiles, say little or nothing about the artists and their work.

Lens Culture magazine has an extensive slide show of some of the works featured.

America’s First Black President Wasn’t Barack Hussein Obama

On Magic, Miracles And Photography Or Uncertainty And Creativity, Another Look

A small post some weeks ago provoked a series of diatribes and a healthy round of insults directed at me across the internet. Titled Why I Shoot Film And Why You Should Give A Damn it reflected the results of a very personal examination of my preference for shooting with film cameras, though I admitted that as a professional I must and do frequently use digital cameras for client work.

Paolo Roversi is a fashion photographer. His images lovingly tactile and in some cases surprisingly human.

I found him echoing some similar sentiments about the connection between uncertainty and creativity to what I had spoken about in my post, though he is far more eloquent and more stylish in his presence and delivery.

You can listen to it here, thanks to A Photo Editor

Guantanamo Detainee Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah’s Petition for Habeus Corpus Is Granted!

In a remarkable, courageous and honest ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, found that the government could not credibly support its allegation that Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah was part of the Taliban or al-Qaida, and that the evidence against him wasn’t sufficient to justify his continued detention. She ordered the government to release Al Rabiah “forthwith [1].” The actual statement read as follows:

Because the Government has not met its burden by a preponderance of evidence, the Court shall GRANT Al Rabiah’s petition for habeas corpus. The Court shall issue an Order requiring the Government to take all necessary and appropriate steps to facilitate Al Rabiah’s release forthwith. Dated: September 17, 2009

That there are institutions, procedures and individuals that still respect the rule of law, and the necessity of upholding our most cherished legal, judicial and moral precepts particularly in moments of crisis and fear should give us hope for our increasingly decimated republic.

But whereas we can argue for the rights of illegal detainees held in the USA few if any for that matter have raised a voice in outrage at the wholesale slaughter of imagined ‘terrorists’, ‘Taliban’ and ‘Al Qaeda’ operatives in the tribal areas of Pakistan. I say imagined because they are labeled ‘Taliban’ and/or ‘Al Qaeda’ to ensure that we never ask for evidence or proof and that we can kill them at will.

There the Pushtuns, a people dehumanized so completely that we do not even register their deaths, are being killed and maimed with impunity, thanks to the venal machinations of the Pakistani elite and toy-hungry military in bed with an American imperialist juggernaut that knows nothing other than the inspirations of its own greed and power.

The people of Pakistan’s tribal areas deserve their day in court if they are being accused of specific crimes and misdemeanors. Though I do not know what these would be other than that dastardly crime of not bending to the will of specious power and elite greed. I have argued in an earlier piece called Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman Or Scaring Children As An Imperialist Habit for the necessity of protecting the lives, and access to procedures of law and justice for all citizens of Pakistan particularly the criminalized Pushtun tribes of the frontier.

The Pakistan Army, and its establishment civilian leaders, have carried out an unjust, illegal, immoral and inhumane war against its own people. The bombs that capture our attention are a consequence of a belief that disproportionate force can erase memory and sorrow. The United States of America has provided the funds and the armaments and the quiet pat on the back. The war on the frontier serves political interests both in the USA and in Pakistan, ensuring that fear of this bogeyman never leaves us, that we believe that our manicured front lawns are in fact under direct threat of crazed, wide-eyed, bearded men in loose pants with designs to subjugate all that we love and cherish (Wall Mart? 24-cable TV? Unlimited internet porn?) and control the world.

Illegal detainees are being given a chance to argue their case, to defend themselves, and a Government that illegally tortured and incarcerated them is being taken to task. Here in the USA. But in Pakistan, where our surrogates are happy to dance to any tune we play, the deaths continue, the horror unfolds. There are few voices in opposition. So I suppose they will only come in the form of bomb blasts and more ‘terror’ attacks. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

Where The Head Spun: Tuesday, October 13th 2009

Ali Eteraz has been featured on this blog site before. His insightful piece Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s cynical and politically motivated ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan’s constitution and its long term consequences that are today manifesting themselves in the pathologies in Swat and the rest of the country. His new books is called Children of the Dust – a personal memoir of growing up Muslim and American. I have not read the book as yet and will write a short review/impression of it once I do.

But here is Ali speaking about the work and the motivations that went in to it:

∞

Outlook India posted some fascinating videos of Delhi in the 1930s. The narration alone is worth listening too as it captures well the arrogance and ignorance of a colonial voice. But it shows some amazing scenes of the city and particularly its Mughal monuments.

There is more on the BFI National Archives, like this rare footage of life in Hunza Valley, now in Pakistan

You can see more videos on the BFI National Archive Search Page.

∞

I came across a rather hilarious piece by Chris Lehmann at The Awl blog on the suffering’s of Harvard University’s spoilt student body. Inspired by an insipid piece in The New York Times by their reporter Abby Goodnough called Leaner Times At Harvard: No Cookies about the hardships hitting this over-branded, over-rated and pompous institution (we must have our Oxfords & Cambridges you could hear some one say, complete with the inbred idiocy that marks them!) and how its student have to ‘learn to live with less’. But as Lehmann points out:

One shudders to think of how these euphoria-deprived pashas of the nation’s bogus meritocracy will forge onward in their post-Harvard professional lives. Will they bypass leather banquette tables at Le Cirque for furtive shame-filled footlong binges at Subway? Will they shun the siren calls of Marc Jacobs or Barney’s for the fall savings spectaculars at Loehmann’s or—shudder—Filene’s Basement? Will their would-be summer Hamptons rentals molder in favor of low-budget rustic resort accommodations in the Catskills or on the Jersey Shore?

But more seriously, Lehmann points out how the article fails to examine how Harvard University got itself into the financial mess that it does find itself, and that is forcing it to cut back on the caviar with egg breakfasts. I quote him:

But the curious thing about Harvard’s investment plight is that it antedates the onset of international financial sclerosis last fall. Harvard Management Co., the school’s investment arm, had long carved out a profile as a high-flying trader in hedge fund portfolios, derivatives—i.e., second-order market bets on stock performance that rarely involve any underlying assets—and other exotic financial instruments that greased its toboggan skids toward the market trough. On June 30, 2008, Forbes reports, Harvard Co. fund managers “had, thanks to… fancy derivatives, a 105 % long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy stocks.”

So as ever, the New York Times in-bed-with-power-and-celebrity pieces fail to examine the root causes, fail to ask the hard questions, and fail to reflect a journalistic approach that is not enamored by the wealth, glamor, power and influence of the institutions and individuals they are expected to cover. Yawn!

∞

Finally, the brave, clear minded, provocative and ever insightful Arundhati Roy gave an interview at DNA magazine that once again confronts us to ask ourselves whether we have the courage to see through the lies and deceptions that mark our modernity and are eviscerating out societies. A short quote from this interview:

Today, the idea of progress has come to mean just the western idea of progress and development, and a totally industrialised society. Of course, now with climate change, we have no choice but to imagine a different kind of progress, where perhaps everybody has less but your footprint on the earth is lighter. We have to go back to a totally different way of looking at consumption. Right now, the situation is that, unless you consume, the economy will collapse; but if you consume, the ecology will collapse — if you consume at the current rate. So in a way this is a good time for radical thought, but one doesn’t know if human beings are capable of it as a race, because we have historically seen societies collapse doing things that they know will cause them to collapse.

Speaking of modernity meaning only that which can be associated with the abstraction called ‘the West’, I recommend Dipesh Chakravarty’s wonderful book Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought & Historical Difference that examines what ‘modernity’ has come to mean, how it has enhanced and limited our ability to confront social and cultural realities, the dangers of ‘historicism’ – hey, anyone remember the great Karl Popper!

∞

Richard Silvetstein, author of the wonderful blog site Tikun Olam, wrote an interesting piece about his struggles to encourage a dialogue and exchange between his synagogue and local mosques. Title When Muslim-Jewish Dialogue Fails, and Other Tales of Jewish Alienation.

Anyone know of a similar voice, a critical but humane voice, emerging from the American-Muslim community? If so please let me know. Richard offers a very intelligent and humanist criticism of Israel, America and other imperialist adverturers while remaining true to his heritage, a proud one at that, as a Jew. I continue to seek such informed, engaged, humanist voices from some of the other self-defined ‘defenders of the true faith’.

Photo Projects I Like: Jörg Brüggemann’s “Same Same But Different”

Backpackers are mildly delusional. I mean that in the most serious way. They travel to some of the most travelled regions of the globe, along paths so well worn that they have been eroded to their skeleton of touts and shysters, but carry within them the idea that they are somehow traveling ‘off the beaten path’ or engaged in some sort of unique journey of self-discovery. They arrive with fantasies of exotic lands, and the belief that their journey will be unique, experiential and enlightening. They insist on remaining oblivious to every sign around them that reminds them that they are in fact indulging in what is no more than another ‘packaged tour’. Facilitated by the Lonely Planet guide, the ‘individual travelers’ bible, and quite possibly the most significant inducer of the delusion that the world is just waiting for the individual travel to explore it and explore him/herself, they simply follow the instructions on the pages, right down the sequence of the experience.

That these travelers, with their illusions of discovery and self-exploration, arrive and live amongst tens of thousands of others doing the same thing, does not deter them from their fantasy. Neither do the many touts, hospitality businesses, tour guides, and others constantly waiting outside their doors to whisk them off to some ‘exotic’ locale or sell them some faux-exotic trinket. Perhaps the best sign of their self-sustained fantasy is their annoyance and aloofness towards other such travelers – they avoid looking at each other. Another backpacker reminds them that in fact they are not indulging in anything unique, but in merely the easy and conveniently packaged. It reminds them that they are not in fact unique, nor on an adventure, not exploring anything, and not ‘off the beaten path’.

Jörg Brüggemann has been working on a wonderful photo project that captures much of this ‘alternative’ but mass tourism travel industry. I wanted to post it here because I loved how these images really reflect the world of the backpacker and how they capture the contradictions that define their experience. The images are intelligent and express his intent and ideas well.

Copy Right Jorge Bruggemann

So what do these travelers tell each other, and their friends once these travels are over? What world have they really seen and experienced? As the entire ‘backpacker’ experience remains largely packaged and delivered with convenience and ease, it remains travel with little or no experiences. The entire path as laid out in books like the Lonely Planet guide or any number of other ones found in bookstores everywhere, is lined by ‘professional’ locals – people who are there to sell and nothing more. Ironically, a backpacker can no longer expect to meet any real experience, individual or situation since all of it is fronted by professional ‘locals’, ready to deliver a ready-made experience, sell ready-made souvenirs and provide ready-made stories for the ‘intrepid’ to take back home and attempt to impress their friends with. This is of course a generalization, but like most such generalizations, also largely true.

Can we ever travel again without the travel guide? I wonder.

The Hindus Live In Small And Dark Homes Or Educating Our Child Soldiers

The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this evil; in the name of brotherhood and in the arrogance of sectarian pride they have created misunderstanding. They make this permanent in their textbooks, and poison the minds of children.

Rabindranath Tagore “To Teachers”,

from Chakravarty, A (ed) The Tagore Reader (Page 216)

Jamaat-e-Daawa/Lashkar-e-Taiba Graffitti Near The Town of Gujranwala, Pakistan Reads "THE LIBERATION OF KASHMIR WILL NOT BE ACHIEVED THROUGH NEGOTIATIONS BUT THROUGH THE DEATH & DESTRUCTION OF THE HINDU"

Our wars, our massacres, our suspicions and fears, our prejudices and hatred, begin in the pages our of children’s textbooks.

No where is this more apparent than on the pages of Pakistan’s Social Studies and Pakistan Studies textbooks, most of which were being taught in her schools up till at least 2002 if not later. In a study commissioned by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, titled The Subtle Subversion:The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, the authors identified a long list of what can only be called hate material taught to high school children in Pakistan.

It makes for sobering reading that I share with you here.

• Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter the temple at a time. In our mosques, on the other hand, all Muslims can say their prayers together. - Muasherati Ulum for Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1996, p 109

• This division of men [among Aryans] into different castes is the worst example of tyranny in the history of the world. In course of time the Aryans began to be called the Hindus. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 59

• The Hindus lived in small and dark houses. Child marriage was common in those days. Women were assigned a low position in society. In case the husband of a woman died, she was burnt alive with his dead body. This was called ‘sati’. … The killing of shudras was not punished, but the murder of a Brahman was a serious crime. … However, the people of low caste were not allowed to learn this language. The caste system had made their life miserable.” - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 67

• Muslim children of India wear shalwar kameez or shirt and pajama and Hindu children wear Dhoti also. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 79

• Hindus thought that there was no country other than India, nor any people other than the Indians, nor did anyone else possess any knowledge. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82.

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• Nehru report exposed the Hindu mentality. - Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 102

• The Quaid saw through the machinations of the Hindus. - Social Studies Class-VII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, ?, p 51

• The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women. - Muasherati Ulum for Class IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1995, p 81

• The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilisation. Hindi-Urdu controversy, shudhi and sanghtan movements are the most glaring examples of the ignoble Hindu mentality. - M. Ikram Rabbani and Monawar Ali Sayyid, An Introduction to Pakistan studies, The Caravan Book House, Lahore, 1995, p 12

• Hindu pundits were jealous of Al Beruni. Since they could not compete against Al Beruni in knowledge, they started calling him a magician. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82

• The Sultans of Delhi were tolerant in religious matters. They never forced the non-Muslims to convert to Islam. The Hindus embraced Islam due to the kind treatment of the Muslims. The caste system of the Hindus had made the life of the common people miserable. They were treated like animals. Nobody could claim equality with Brahmins. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 109

• The Hindus who have always been opportunists cooperated with the English. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 141

• The Hindus praised the British rule and its blessings in their speeches. The Hindus had the upper hand in the Congress and they established good relations with the British. This party tried its best to safeguard the interests of the Hindus. Gradually it became purely a Hindu organization. Most of the Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent. They demanded that the Muslims should either embrace Hinduism or leave the country. The party was so close to the Government that it would not let the Government do any work as would be of benefit to the Muslims. The partition of Bengal can be quoted as an example. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 143

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. – Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• The British confiscated all lands [from the Muslims] and gave them to Hindus. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 91 [This is stated despite the fact that all the large feudal lords in the part that later formed Pakistan were Muslims]

• Therefore in order to appease the Hindus and the Congress, the British announced political reforms. Muslims were not eligible to vote. Hindus voter never voted for a Muslim, therefore, … - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 94-95

• Hindus declared the Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104

• At the behest of the government [during the Congress rule], Hindu “goondas” started killing Muslims and burning their property. – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104-105

• The British, with the assistance of the Hindus, adopted a cruel policy of mass exodus against the Muslims to erase them as a nation. The British adopted a policy of large scale massacre (mass extermination) against the Muslims The Muslim population of the Muslim minority provinces faced atrocities of the Hindu majority. [The Muslims] were not allowed to profess their religion freely. Hindu nationalism was being imposed upon Muslims and their culture. All India Congress turned into a pure Hindu organisation. The Congress was striving very hard to project the image of united India, which was actually aimed at the extermination of the Muslims from the Indian society. The two Hindu organisations [Congress and Mahasabha] were determined to destroy the national character of the Muslims to dominate and subjugate them perpetually. - National Curriculum English (Compulsory) for Class XI-XII, March 2002, pp 6, 13, 31, 45, 7, 25, 8, 46, 48, 50

• While the Muslims provided all type of help to those wishing to leave Pakistan, the people of India committed cruelties against the Muslims (refugees). They would attack the buses, trucks, and trains carrying the Muslim refugees and they were murdered and looted. – National Early Childhood Education Curriculum (NECEC), Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, March 2002, p 85

• The Hindus in Pakistan were treated very nicely when they were migrating as opposed to the inhuman treatment meted out to the Muslim migrants from India. - Social Studies Class- IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p. 85

• After 1965 war India conspired with the Hindus of Bengal and succeeded in spreading hate among the Bengalis about West Pakistan and finally attacked on East Pakistan in December 71, thus causing the breakup of East and West Pakistan. - Social Studies (in Urdu) Class- V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 112

• Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam - Urdu Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 108

The dismaying simplicities and inanities are too many to list here. Suffice it to say that since the 1970s the children of Pakistan have been subjected to a systemic and comprehensive ‘poisoning’ of their minds when it comes to matters Indian, Hindu and the country’s Islamic heritage. The same report outlines in great detail the encouragement of religious violence, the denigration of women, the foisting of an Islamic ideology of Pakistan and other ahistorical perspectives with which the country’s children have been scared.

Professor Pervaiz Hoodbhoy has been documenting the deterioration in the educational culture of the country, in particular, the celebration of religious violence and the projection of a homogenous Islamic heritage of Pakistan, the latter at times going to levels of stupidity that defy commonsense. For example, history textbooks in Pakistan actually attempt to directly associate the ‘idea of Pakistan’ and the ‘creation of Pakistan’ to the earliest presence and arrival of Arab forces on the shores of Sindh! This inane association, in fact violent castration of the history of the region, to all that is perceived to by only ‘Islamic‘ is perhaps the underlying pathology that has scared education in the country for decades. (Please email me directly if you wish to see a copy of this report.)

The quest for peace and reconciliation often begins in the gilded corridors of diplomacy, or the cynical bed chambers of the politicians. It would seem that we would do well to instead begin in the moldy, dank, dark classrooms of the nation’s ignored and underfunded education institutions where the foundations of suspicion, fear, loathing and anger are laid.

In her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that:

The ability to accept difference – difference of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality – requires, first, the ability to accept something about oneself; that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life., that others outside oneself have a reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one’s own power or threats to that power.

Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within, (Page 336)

Pakistani society, from its citizens to its military, is imbued with a suspicion and fear of ‘the other’ defined as ‘the Hindu‘, the nation of whom is India. It is cultivated in their minds at an age when they are hardly able to think, and more susceptible to the perspectives and dogmatism of their adults.

It is a dogmatism, bigotry and hate that is of course mirrored across the border in India, particularly during the hideous eight years the Indian democracy was under the guidance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In a series of terse and critical essays, India’s Outlook magazine featured a series of articles by writers taking to task the BJP government’s attempts to re-write Indian history with a distinctly communal/sectarian bent.See for example the piece Communalisation of Education by Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, or a piece by the eminent historian Irfan Habib called The Rewriting of History…

I found this last essay particularly interesting because of its focus on the treatment of the heritage and presence of Islam and Muslims in India in the National Curriculum Framework of School Education (NCERT) text books. NCERT is a technically a private body, but has close links to the Ministry of Education (MoE), with NCERT’s head being chosen by the MoE. The Supreme Court has in fact defined the NCERT back into the government and given broad authority.

I quote Habib himself:

Given its view of Muslims as utter barbarians, the Sangh Parivar is naturally uncomfortable with Muslim scientific thinkers. Alberuni, whose description of Indian sciences in the earlier part of the eleventh century was described by K.M. Panikkar as “a moment in history”, attracts the ire of the Sangh propagandists who hasten to picture him as anti-Indian, because of his remarks about Bahmagupta’s mythological explanation of the eclipses and about the Indian tendency not to accept external discoveries. As for Akbar the Mughal emperor, who occupies a particularly high place in Indian history, for his policy of tolerance, humanism and patronage of the arts, he is totally unacceptable not only as a “foreigner,” but also as the grandson of Babur, made notorious owing to the Babari Masjid. When the Indian Council of Historical Research, during its pre-RSS past, decided to observe the 450th birth anniversary of Akbar in 1992, the BJP MPs raised the matter in Parliament, one of them even describing Akbar as a “Pakistani” having been born in Umarkot (Sind).(They naturally forgot the birthplaces of L.K. Advani and the like).

Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed examination of the assault on India’s textbooks that took place under the ‘wise’ guidance of the BJP’s historians. A large number of Indian organizations and individuals challenged the distortions, bigotry and outright lies that tainted the new textbooks being made available to Indian students once the BJP had come to power. The attempts to ’saffronize’ education in India i.e. to infuse it with the ideology of Hindutva, became a fundamental goal, with education minister Murli Manoha Joshi, a BJP politician with known links to the RSS and VHP, given the leadership of this effort.

And with an indictment that could not cut more deeply, Irfan Habib warns the Indians that:

If the BJP is to have its way, we would soon be competing with Pakistan in framing the utmost possible parochial view of the past.

And indeed, given the state of books in Pakistan today, a situation that many in its civil society are fighting to reform, there could be no worse insult or fear. Pakistan and India eye each other with fear, loathing and suspicion. The idea of the other as the singular enemy, distorted in its hatred of ‘us’ and determined to do anything in its power to destroy ‘us’ is ingrained into our minds from an early age. At ages when children are still grasping to understand the fundamentals of Newtonian physics, they are subjected to historical, sectarian, and political indoctrination that they can neither comprehend nor question. In fact, they are encouraged not to question at all. And perhaps that is why this indoctrination must take place at so early an age – an age where critical thought could develop but instead unquestioning obedience and obeisance is encouraged.

Our child soldiers are being prepared as we speak. They, with their distortions and prejudices, will eventually man the corridors of diplomacy, politics, military and the citizenry. They will, except for a handful few able to break the pattern, carry within them the lessons of their youth, the unexamined prejudices and hatred of their adolescence. To imagine that their distorted world views, developed under the authority of a state and its adult voices, will not color their engagement with ‘the other’ is to be naive at best, irresponsible at worse. It is a world view apparent in the language of our military and our politicians today – bent as they are on working with caricatures and generalizations that convince them that only barbarians and killers live on the other side of the borders.

Its time to read new books.

The New India? Or How It Became Just Like Everyone Else!

I came across this piece in the recent issue of Granta and it made for depressing reading.

Capital Gains by Rana Dasgupta

I was not quite sure what about it really cut to the quick. I am still not sure.

Perhaps it is some sort of romanticism about a world in the past that cared for something more than just material wealth, brand awareness, consumer choice and flash. But I have read Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities and know well that such a world never existed. There is a surprising continuity in man’s perpetual search for the banal, the bombastic and the brilliantine!

Perhaps it was that it reminded me so much of the Karachi that i grew up in – vapid, empty, all show and no go, where men were hot air and women simply decorative pieces to be shown and then discarded to their domestic nothingness. Pakistan succumbed to the seductions of the ‘free market’ i.e. open to foreign products and killing all its own, far earlier than India did. And all throughout my early years I would envy India’s independence, her ability to stand on her own feet, achieve engineering and national achievements through her own efforts. While Pakistan was for sale to the highest bidder. Probably another romantic delusion, but certainly with some truth to it. Pakistan became a ‘client’ state back in the 1960s, whereas India was always the independent, confident, self sufficient and not cowed by power structures from without.

But Dasgupta’s piece bought back memories of that earlier Karachi I disliked and feared so much. Today it is a hollow city, its inhabitants without culture, their eyes turned towards ‘the West’, desperate to make their children the equivalent of modern day Janissaries, as the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid once called my generation. A generation raised in Pakistan to be sold to the highest bidders (academic, corporate) in the Western world. If you don’t know, the Janissaries were a force made from abducted sons from conquered countries, and then sent back to those countries to act as soldiers and administrators.

Is India becoming a Pakistan i.e creating an entire class of people who have effectively seceded, as Arundhati Roy once argued from the rest of the nation?

Tarun, the editor of the amazing Tehelka magazine is quoted in this piece as saying:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

The conflicts in Pakistan are not seen as class wars, but they are. I recently wrote a post called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War about how foreign journalists/reporters are confused when it comes to reporting about Pakistan. Few realize that the rise of insurgencies and voices of sectarian political allegiances are veils that hide large scale class conflicts that have not be resolved in the country.  India’s conflicts in the West (Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Chattisgarh etc.) are class conflicts as well, as reporter Jason Motlagh has recently written in Conflicts Within.

In Pakistan the deprived (and they are not necessarily the poor, simply the cheated, fooled and ignored) are asking for their share, and using religion (in Swat for example) and nationalism (in Baluchistan for example) to fight for their share of the pie that is otherwise in the hands of a minority, venal, wealthy class that just does not care!

I will say that while reading this piece I was irritated by the suggestion that this mindless affinity for wealth and its display, the indifference towards the environment or broader societal welfare needs (education, health care etc.) is some sort of Hindu problem. Such suggestions are simply racist – there is just no other term for it. They are reductive, simplistic, and label hundreds of millions of people from varied class, culture, ethnicity etc. with a broad brush. Many object to such language when it comes to Africans, or Muslims, or Arabs. I can’t accept it here and we should not either.

The greed of man, the banality of man, does not need a religion or a universal spiritual outlook. I mean, has anyone been to Dubai recently? Money and consumerism have reduced that nation to a catatonic bonhomie that I believe would easily diagnosed by a professional as ‘diseased’! It continues to surprise me  the ease with which we speak to the general but rarely ever acknowledge the shared; human greed and frivolity is universal and has nothing to do with religious outlooks or philosophies. If anything, the religions are easily (too easily!) woven into our human preferences and values most of the time anyways – its called cultural adaptation and adjustments!

What is happening in Delhi is real of course. But its not just Delhi – it will happen in every city of India if its not already that way. I would argue that anyone who knows the history of India, particularly the show and pomp of its most recent collection of rulers; the British, The Mughals, the Hyderabadi dynasty etc. will know what pomp and bombast are. Are we truly in a moment of unique crassness and indifference? I am not so sure. And Its not unique to India either. Its China. Its Islamabad. Its Doha. Its Milan. Pankaj Mishra wore eloquently about this India in a piece in The Guardian some months ago.  I remember this paragraph:

In India…the pursuit of economic growth at all costs has created a gaudy elite but also widened already alarming social and economic disparities. Facilities for health care and primary education have deteriorated. Economic growth, confined to urban centres, is largely jobless. Up to a third of Indians live with extreme poverty and deprivation. And militant communist movements have erupted in the poorest, most populous states.

When we arrive in India in a few weeks (aside: this essay was originally written for workshop students accompanying me to India in August 2009) we have to remember that we are entering a dynamic and modern India, but that the stories we will cover are the ones that are being lost in the hysteria of celebration and consumerism. There are many who are richer, but some argue, many more who have been left in the wake of this pursuit of wealth.

As journalists it is our responsibility to add the weight of our voices to that of the weak, to help balance the equation, and facilitate their access to rights, justice, and basic human needs. I think that Pankaj Mishra said it best, in a tribute he wrote for the late Babara Epstein (editor The New York Review of Books), when he said that:

…literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; … it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; … it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.

I don’t believe that any nation that ignores the welfare of all its citizens can succeed in the long run. I know this from my experiences in Pakistan – a very wealthy nation with levels of deprivation and poverty that leaves one reeling. Certainly in Sweden, where I have now lived for nearly 9 years, I can see possibilities I had previously not imagined; the achievements of a state that invests in the broad welfare of all its citizens is quite a sight to behold.

You can’t build a sky scrapper over weak foundations.

Staying Faithful To The Totality Of Experience Or New Frontiers In Photography

It is something that those of you reading my posts will by now recognize I hold very dear; the absolute and crucial need for a new generation of story tellers to reach past the conventions, cliches and crass generalizations about ‘the other’ that have so informed and influenced a whole generation of photographers, photojournalists, writers and editors.

Some of these are so familiar, so obvious, that they have become truths in and of themselves and no longer require questioning or examination; The hijab as oppression, the refugee as victim, the Muslim maulvi as fundamentalist, the Jewish settler as fanatic, the drug addict as lost, the African as violent and so on and so forth. Our challenge remains to cut past the obvious and to allow ourselves to explore spaces, lives and circumstances with humility and a genuine recognition of the humanity, history and individual agency of our subjects.

I am reminded of a wonderful essay by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainain that appeared some years ago in the British literary magazine Granta. Title How To Write About Africa., it was an acerbic, at times tongue-in-cheek, poke at the conventions that shackled ‘Western’* writing about Africa. I quote a small piece:

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

I highly recommend reading the entire piece. As an exercise, try doing it without laughing.

James Gibbons, in a recent review of books from Africa and about Africa, points out that:

Wainaina’s essay is more than an acerbic takedown of lazy and half-informed Western perceptions. Embedded within it is a manifesto of sorts. If we turn inside out the sardonic rules and prohibitions, a vision of African literature emerges that departs from the dark-continent fantasies still entertained even by sophisticates in Europe and North America…In one sense, this is a call to normalize African writing, to make its human scale comparable to that of literature set elsewhere…The dilemma for imaginative writers lies in staying faithful to the totality of their experiences while shunning images that simply confirm … biases. The sporadic media coverage of Africa runs a familiar gamut, broadcasting a continent in perpetual—and, it is implied, essential—peril. The challenge of African writing is to provide some new news.

I love that phrase staying faithful to the totality of their experience and what it implies for the new possibilities opened up to a new generation of photographers and journalists. It was very much what Edward Said challenged us to do with it came to things Islamic and Muslim in his work Covering Islam: How The Media and the Experts Determine How We See The Rest Of The World. And for that matter, even Amartya Sen in a work already on our recommended reading list The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity where he takes typical ‘Western’ assumptions and generalizations about India, her heritage and her people to task.

At the 2008 World Press Photo awards Stephen Mayes, managing editor at the VII photo agency and a WPP judge, pointed out that too many photographers were chasing the same too few stories. That too much of the world’s experiences were being ignored as photographers attempted to find formulas for success and recognition that increasingly seemed to hinge around shooting the same stuff as that which may have already been published or recognized.

This seems even more egregious if not outright irresponsible when the formulas for producing new and interesting stories has already been offered to us. We just need to consider it, absorb it and act on it.

* ‘Western’ here does not refer to a physical land, area or people, but more a metaphor of a certain world view and presumptions about the conditions of man, the relationships between nations, and the role of the ‘haves’ towards the ‘have nots’ etc.

I Am Not A Journalist But I Play One At The New York Times

In an earlier post called The Most Dangerous Nation I had criticized The New York Times for its reliance of ‘official’ sources to report complex stories in a exasperatingly one-sided way. The Times reporter David Sanger had penned a rather shoddy piece of reporting, titled Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nightmare, on Pakistan that made it to the front pages of the magazine section. My specific complaints centered on ….

The American journalist’s love of rubbing up to power, to be known as someone with access to the ‘inner’ corridors of power, is perhaps its greatest failing at the moment.  Mr. Sanger is spending all his time in the offices of ‘officials’ and eating too much of the fine cuisine available at fine restaurants that I am sure he is dined at.  In Pakistan he is traveling through the living and dining rooms of the small elite – unable to speak the country’s language, ignorant of her history and her cultural diversity, uninterested in confronting it as a complex entity, Mr. Sanger has produced the classical American piece on Pakistan; sensationalist, fear mongering, officially sanctioned, and fed.

This propensity to rely, lazily, on ‘official’ sources continues, despite the scandals (remember Judith Miller on Iraq anyone?) as we proceed to build a decade long case for war against Iran. The old troupes are being trotted out and of course, New York Times journalists, complete with their fine degrees and corporate-sponsored Pulitzer prizes are there to provide the dynamite.

Michael Massing analyzed a recent piece written by Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti called Cryptic Note Ignited An Iran Nuclear Strategy Debate where he points out the following sources used to complete the piece:

1. a senior administration official
2. a second senior administration official
3. administration officials
4. senior intelligence officials
5. the officials
6. the official
7. White House officials
8. American officials
9. a senior administration official
10. the officials
11. a senior official
12. American officials
13. the officials
14. a senior administration official
15. the administration official
16. a senior administration official
17. administration officials
18. one administration official
19. senior administration official

You can see his piece here, called Eyes Wide Shut On Iran

We are back in time, back to the routine, back to same mindless, and frankly irresponsible ‘professional’ journalism that seems to be carried out by trained technocrats as desperate to climb their journalism career ladders as they are to rub shoulders with ‘power’. The fiasco of American journalism that was the build up and execution of the illegal, immoral, unnecessary and frankly hideous war against Iraq seems to have faded into distant memory, and the newspapers back at their old games. Yesterday it was Judith Miller,  clawing her way to fame and celebrity, today it could be Helene Cooper or any number of dozens of New York Times, The Washington Post and other ‘career professionals’ unable to see past their own skull sized kingdoms (to borrow a phrase) and letting all integrity, rigor, ethics and even journalist practice go to hell!

Arundhati Roy has penned perhaps one of the harshest and most vivid autopsies about pathologies of modern democracy that I have ever read. Titled Democray’s Failing Light it exposes the underlying dysfunctions, deceptions and deceits that mark the theater of ‘modern democracies’. In America, newspapers and journalists at the New York Times are clowns in the show that is America’s version of the game called ‘democracy’.

2000 Women Whipped, Babies Dropped From Towers, Red Cows For The Messiah’s Holocaust Or Other Wisdoms Our Elders Taught Us

Click Image To Go To Video

And least some Islamic triumphalist become too content, perhaps s/he would like to examine this ritual being performed under the banner of the faith

But then again, there is no limit to the idiocies that can be sanctioned under the banner of ‘absolute faith’, a form of collective delusion fueled by a deadly combination righteousness, arrogance, i,nsecurity, infantilism and obstinate blindness – oh, by the way, the red heifer is desperately bred, probably genetically modified and not a natural or ‘miracle’ birth which I suspect was the intention of the prophesies, but of course, they edit that detail out in the video. Why wait for ‘god’ to do it when we can do it ourselves and claim victory!

In a piece in the National Review, we are informed that:

In 1996, thanks in part to a cattle-breeding program set up in Israel with the help of Texas ranchers who are fundamentalist Christians, a red heifer was born. There was immense excitement among messianists of the Israeli religious Right, and their American Christian counterparts… (but)…As it turned out, during the three years of waiting for the heifer to reach the ritually mandated age of sacrifice, white hairs popped out on the tip of her tail. This bovine was, alas, not divine. But now there’s a successor, and rabbis who have examined her have declared her ritually acceptable (though she will not be ready for sacrifice for three years).

As humanity, as society, we have to ask ourselves this simple question; what is our definition of a mental illness and if a condition known as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’, something obvious based on nothing but a will to believe, creates situations of human suffering and in other cases large scale oppression and bloodshed, should not that condition be labeled an illness and treated?

I believe this question can simply be answered by determining the human cost – in terms of war, bloodshed, suffering, cruelty, inhumanity, injustice that a belief creates. If murder is an evil, then why not the minds and manufactured beliefs that justify it?

There are many who wish the ‘humanist’ project dead – the idea that we have a capacity for recognising moral values, we perceive our own self and its relation to other selves, and we should try to work toward a notion of goodness that can be accepted by all, and that protects all from cruelty, inhumanity, suffering, torture and injustice. I still believe in this model and remain convinced that despite the cynicism (read: intellectual and moral cowardice) of our age, there are universal principle of justice and humanity that are worthy of defending and fought for. Traditions have their place, but not unquestioningly. For many, ‘faith’ is simply a tradition handed down and then mindlessly followed and transformed by an act of will into ‘truth’. We fear questioning this ‘truth’ – and the consequences of the belief in those ‘truths’. Even if it kills us!

For a quick update on the humanist project, I do recommend Todorov’s The Imperfect Garden – yes, its Euro-centric offering only examples of European philosophers and thinkers, but it is brilliant and necessary. For those trying to read beyond and perhaps explore these ideas in another part of the world, Ifran Habib’s Akbar & His India makes for interesting reading. Or even Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, or something by R. Tagore like Sadhana or The Religion of Man or Edward Said’s Humanism & Democratic Criticism or Representations of the Intellectual.

“Beware the man of one book.”

- St. Thomas Aquinas (the irony is killing!)

Read, something, other than just that one ‘book’!

So, What Do You Think About Our Washington Press Corp? Oh, Sorry I Asked!

Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for MBC, a satellite TV network in Dubai, what do you really think about the American Washington Press Corp? No, really..and in case you missed it, here is a transcript of her comments

more about “Arab media White House correspondent …“, posted with vodpod

Our Songs Carry Our Soul: Khwaja Ghulam Farid’s Husn e Haqiqi

more about “Our Songs Carry Our Soul: Husn e Haqi…“, posted with vodpod

Khawaja Ghulam Farid was a Sufi poet, and this is the Pakistani singer Areib Azhar singing one of his poems Husn-e-Haqiqi (The Beauty of Truth). This performance is nothing short of stunning, one of the more beautiful renditions of this poem I have ever heard. And Azhar’s voice is simply magnificent – controlled and guided to provoke the heart and emotions in a way that only South Asia’s Sufi folk music can.

Below is a translation, by Areib Azhar himself, of this beautiful poem:

O’ Beauty of Truth, the Eternal Light!

Do I call you necessity and possibility,

Do I call you the ancient divinity,

The One, creation and the world,

Do I call you free and pure Being,

Or the apparent lord of all,

Do I call you the souls, the egos and the intellects,

The imbued manifest, and the imbued hidden,

The actual reality, the substance,

The word, the attribute and dignity,

Do I call you the variety, and the circumstance,

The demeanor, and the measure,

Do I call you the throne and the firmament,

And the demurring delights of Paradise,

Do I call you mineral and vegetable,

Animal and human,

Do I call you the mosque, the temple, the monastery,

The scriptures, the Quran,

The rosary, the girdle,

Godlessness, and faith,

Do I call you the clouds, the flash, the thunder,

Lightning and the downpour,

Water and earth,

The gust and the inferno,

Do I call you Lakshmi, and Ram and lovely Sita,

Baldev, Shiv, Nand, and Krishna,

Brahma, Vishnu and Ganesh,

Mahadev and Bhagvaan,

Do I call you the Gita, the Granth, and the Ved,

Knowledge and the unknowable,

Do I call you Abraham, Eve and Seth,

Noah and the deluge,

Abraham the friend, and Moses son of Amran,

And Ahmad the glorious, darling of every heart,

Do I call you the witness, the Lord, or Hejaz,

The awakener, existence, or the point,

Do I call you admiration or prognosis,

Nymph, fairy, and the young lad,

The tip and the nip,

And the redness of betel leaves,

The Tabla and Tanpura,

The drum, the notes and the improvisation,

Do I call you beauty and the fragrant flower,

Coyness and that amorous glance,

Do I call you Love and knowledge,

Superstition, belief, and conjecture,

The beauty of power, and conception,

Aptitude and ecstasy,

Do I call you intoxication and the drunk,

Amazement and the amazed,

Submission and the connection,

Compliance and Gnosticism,

Do I call you the Hyacinth, the Lilly, and the Cypress,

And the rebellious Narcissus,

The bereaved Tulip, the Rose garden, and the orchard,

Do I call you the dagger, the lance, and the rifle,

The hail, the bullet, the spear,

The arrows made of white poplar, and the bow,

The arrow-notch, and the arrowhead,

Do I call you colorless, and unparalleled,

Formless in every instant,

Glory and holiness,

Most glorious and most compassionate,

Repent now Farid forever!

For whatever I may say is less,

Do I call you the pure and the humane,

The Truth without trace or name.

(Translation by Areib Azhar)

You may also want to check out some of the other performances on the Coke Studio website.  This performance by the masterful Saeen Zahoor of Bulleh Shah’s, another Sufi folk poet, is truly stunning.

The entire Coke Studio sessions can be seen and heard here: Coke Studio. It is a remarkable collection of music and talent, a truly beautiful reflection of Pakistan and her deep connections to her Indian heritage. This is not just Pakistani music – this is the voice of South Asia, tracing its heritage and traditions to hundreds of years of development and evolution. These songs, these poems, their voices and their passion transcend boundaries, and reflect the continuities of traditions and cultures that Edward Said was so determined to remind us of.

Student Work: Brittany Sloan / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

The story was just not coming together. It had sounded very strong when we had been researching it – an examination of the economic and social communities that emerged around an important Sufi shrine, and what this meant for the creation of a tolerant and pluralistic culture. But the pictures that Brittany was bringing back in the first week were too literal, too obvious and lacked a connecting theme. They were a literal documentation of the economic and spiritual world that existed around the dargah of Gharib Nawaz Moinuddin Chisti. And we knew that we were looking for, hoping for, something more than the literal. But it has to be admitted that both Sara and I were initially unable to articulate what this ’something more’ would be. I at least had hoped that Brittany would just discover it once she was out working. But for at least the first week it did not seem to offer itself and the frustration and concern on Brittany’s face only grew.

She kept going out to make pictures, and kept cornering us to look at what she had found. Brittany was perhaps the most determined to find this ’something more’ we had been talking about. She spent hours pouring over her day’s take, discussing and arguing and challenging. We would look at each individual image and try to understand what was working and what was not. We talked for hours. And it was in one of these determined sessions that she would initiate that we had our breakthrough.

Brittany had become interested in the flower vendors that surrounded the dargah and realized that they would be an important element of her story. She made friends with local vendors and spent a lot of time around their warehouses and storefronts. She was determined that they were the relevant ‘economic’ element of her story. It was while discussing this with Sara Terry that they hit on the idea that the flower was in fact the story! It was that binding element that tied the whole story together, and that offered a unique way to speak about Ajmer, the culture of tolerance and pluralism around the shrine, and the economic realities that helped tie it all together! They both turned to me and said what I thought. I think I said “Hallelujah!”

Here are a few samples from Brittany’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story called The Rose of Ajmer:

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

For Edward Said: Remembering 25th September 2003

Edward Said passed away on 25th September 2003. I am re-reading his Representations of the Intellectual, a book that has had a major influence on my own way of negotiating the world, in his memory this week. Though I never met him when I was at Columbia he was a powerful intellectual force at the campus, and even us on the far edges of his universe could not help but be pulled towards his ideas and views. And we continue to be, with his works Reflections on Exile, After The Last Sky, Humanism & Democratic Criticism, The Politics of Dispossession, On Late Style, Musical Elaborations and Culture & Imperialism repeatedly being taken down from the bookshelf as references or as reminders of ways of thinking

His death was widely mourned, and widely spoken about. Here are links to some obituaries that you may have missed:

• The Guardian: Edward Said
• Asad Raza remembers Edward Said
• Akeel Bilgrami remembers Edward Said
• Al-Ahram: Mourid Barghouti on Edward Said
• Salon: Christopher Hitchens on Edward Said
• London Review of Books: Michael Wood on Edward Said
• New Left Review: Tariq Ali on Edward Said
• The Nation: Tony Judt on Edward Said
• Time Magazine: Daniel Barenboim on Edward Said
• The Village Voice: Moustafa Bayoumi on Edward Said
• The Independent: Gabriel Piterberg on Edward Said

In a small tribute to the man, Democracy Now! has an archive page of Edward Said’s appearances which you can see here

• Democracy Now!: Edward Said

Spreading Democracy Around The World…By Seducing One Brutal, Egomaniacal Dictator At A Time

Speaking of a history of ugliness, that lovely man shaking the hands of our Secretary of State is Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the President of the nation of Turkmenistan. This photo was taken on September 21, 2009. At the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. Quite the address.

This gentleman, all decked in what appears to be the uniform of the civilized, modern, accommodating, liberal, peace loving dictators we so love, heads a country that has one of the most heinous record when it comes to human rights and justice. Just a search on the Amnesty International website or the Human Rights Watch website yields just too many reports to actually read! But even a cursory search on the HRW website report reveals the following:

Turkmenistan remains one of the most repressive and authoritarian countries in the world because the government has not altered the institutions of repression that characterized Niazov’s rule. Hundreds of people, perhaps more, languish in Turkmen prisons following unfair trials on what would appear to be politically motivated charges. Draconian restrictions on freedom of expression, association, movement, and religion remain in place. Teaching of the Ruhnama, Niazov’s “book of the soul,” has been cut back, but is still part of the state education curriculum.

Oddly, our Assistant Secretary of State Robert O’ Blake was quick to point out that

…human rights is not as big an issue in Turkmenistan as it is in some of the other Central Asian countries.

Really?

I wonder if it had something to do with this earlier comment he made in the same meeting:

U.S. [oil] companies are already doing a lot of business in Turkmenistan, particularly offshore, and are interested, I think, in doing more work to develop some of the onshore hydrocarbon resources there. And so the Secretary conveyed that interest. The Turkmen president said that he’s going to be meeting – in fact, next – tomorrow – with a lot of the U.S. oil companies to, again, explore what more they can do in Turkmenistan. So that’s certainly a welcome development.

So remind me again, what was it that we had hoped would change with this new administration?

I really can’t remember!

On The History of Ugliness

more about “On The History of Ugliness“, posted with vodpod

Student Work: Jessica Bidgood / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

Her’s was a very personal walk. Each day Jessica would take a rickshaw to Ajmer’s Delhi gate, negotiate her way through the narrow alleys around the Gharib Nawaz dargah – clogged each day with tens of thousands of pilgrims anxious to enter what is quite possibly the most important pilgrimage center in South Asia for people of all faiths, and begin the slow near two kilometer trudge uphill to the shanties on the hills where the community of illegal Bangladeshis lived.

Each day she would enter a neighborhood that, though initially welcoming, had become increasingly concerned about her presence there. Harassed by the police, pursued by exploitative journalists and wary of ‘welfare’ workers out to make a quick buck, the community of Bangladeshis had learned to live with suspicion and doubt. A foreign woman photographer arriving at their doorsteps each day was a source of unwanted attention. They wanted her to complete her work quickly and leave. Like all the other photographers from the local newspapers did. But Jessica was there to tell a different story, and to produce a different work. So she kept coming back, kept negotiating her way in.

Her research had revealed that the issue of illegal immigrants was a hot political topic, but few had really bothered to investigate the actual lived lives of the people and the struggles and aspirations that kept them together as a community and their dignity as human beings. So Jessica kept going back to the shanties, and kept exploring. And each day she kept coming back with some remarkably personal and gentle images of a people long denigrated and dehumanized in India’s charged political climate. What amazed me was that her process was genuinely exploratory; a look at her digital files revealed a photographer relentlessly working a situation, missing her marks, but staying the course and then capturing a wonderfully evocative and intelligent frame. A real photographer’s process.

Here are a few samples from Jessica’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Why I Shoot Film And Why You Should Give A Damn!

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” – Erich Fromm

Do you prefer to shoot digital or film? – Many have tried to answer this question, and yet I find that I remain unconvinced by most all the answers. Repeatedly, a number of well known photographers shooting on film seem to struggle to offer a simple, clear answer to this question. Most just give up.

A couple of years ago it was a ‘you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ type of question – the answer could be one or the other, and intelligence, consideration, insight and commonsense had no place in the dialogue. Today, with digital more mature and brilliant as ever, it actually becomes a harder question to answer. Again and again I see studies and research articles reminding me that digital resolution, detail, etc. are far superior to anything film can offer. Having lost all the technological arguments, many resort to rather weak arguments that revolve around rather inane and desperate statements like ‘I like holding film’, or ‘I like to have something tangible in front of me’ or other such nonsense. A losing battle really with none really being able to defend this ‘dying’ space.

I am predominantly a film shooter. The entire project on India, The Idea of India, is being shot on Kodak Portra 160NC and 400NC color negative film. Prior to this I have shot magazine assignments on film. I turn to digital only in specific situations where the client’s turnaround time does not allow time for processing, scanning and fixing of film images. But whenever and wherever given the choice I always return to film. I have shot both slide and color negatives, and of course, a lot of b&w. I don’t have the definitive answer, but I do have an answer. I am dismayed that it has not, as far as I know, been articulated before. If I am wrong please do email me a link. I would be happy to have any further backers of my thoughts, trust me!

I prefer to shoot film because it is a more human process, complete with all the frailties, mistakes, fears, worries, concerns, and doubts that define me as a human being. Yes, of course, digital has all the utilitarian advantages (cheaper, faster, quick turn around sharper etc.), but film retains all the creative advantages.

Gandakosa Village, Northern Iraq, The Funeal of Isaac Sheba Slewa. A result of a timing mistake, this image is the only one of the nearly 72 exposures I have ever used. Looking at the contact sheets nearly 2 months after the image was made, my 'correct' exposures failed to impress and this image, made after relentlessly working the situation because I was just never sure if I got what I wanted, became the favorite. Copyright Asim Rafiqui 2005

Film photography remains a slower process, requiring greater concentration and awareness since mistakes cannot be corrected by the time the results are seen. It is also a process filled with doubt, fear and uncertainty. It requires us to confront fear and work to make it something that drives us. The results are unknown, our memory of what has been captured uncertain, and we keep coming back, keep looking, keep exploring and shooting. The doubts drive, define, and push. The fear maintains the issues and subjects on our mind. We lose sleep thinking about the subject, convinced that we shot the roll on the wrong ASA, or other such amateurish mistake. There is no consolation, as Raymond Depardon argued, for the photographer. Nor should there be.

Creativity is a flawed and uncertain process. It requires mistakes, corrections, adjustments. It is driven by the pursuit of an ideal that you don’t even know exists or even matters. But something drives you, as a blind man searching for his sight but not knowing when and where he will find it. Writers, poets and fine artists embrace these uncertainties, channels these fears, thrive on the mistakes and persevere past the failures. I have always wondered why photographers are so afraid of precisely these human instincts and failings, constantly looking for the predictable, the certain, and the promised. Why are we so afraid of what we are?

I shoot film because it gives me more of a chance to be a who I am, complete with all my flaws and doubts. I shoot film because I today embrace my weaknesses and propensities rather than attempt to overcome them with toys. I shoot film because I must reach further into myself, my soul, psyche and sensibility and aspire to that place where someday I too may find something to say and show – something unique, something beautifully flawed and hence in its unique way, something beautifully human.

UPDATE: By coincidence Umberto Eco has penned  a mild lament at the death of hand writing. In his piece The Lost Art of Hand Writing he suggests that “..writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think. Many writers, though accustomed to writing on the computer, would sometimes prefer even to impress letters on a clay tablet, just so they could think with greater calm.”

I agree with his point that it may force us to think before committing words to paper but I am not sure I accept the entire argument. Tempting as it may be to find a parallel with my justification for the love of shooting film, I will resist. Writing is less a craft defined by the tools that enable it as photography is. I do agree that we may write different on a computer than on paper, but there are many social, cultural, economic and political reasons for why we may be writing differently today than say 50 years ago. Not the least of which would be the electronic text editor. Photography however is a mechanical craft, and the choice of the tool is not irrelevant to the work the photographer wishes to do, or is limited to do. That is, photography requires us to make a choice of equipment depending on either our goals, vision and/or preferences, or it forces us to limit ourselves to the method most suitable to the device we work with. A photographer and her camera are a relationship, at times economic, at times creative and at times habitual and each influences, limits and defines the kind of work that is produce.

Make Mine Bigger Or Maps And What They May Say About History And Us

A friend recently pointed to a poster on her wall and explained that it a Peter’s Map. An area accurate projection of the world, its first publication in 1974 provoked a minor firestorm. Perhaps because it revealed how the world’s powers were in fact geographically tiny nations – as if size and land mass may have had something to do with cultural, intellectual, military and social superiority. China was finally seen to be nearly 4 times the size of Greenland. Africa was 14 times the size of Greenland. Its just not cricket!

I recently came across a fabulously interesting and informative website called Strange Maps. Containing gems like Heineken’ (founder of the beer company) idea of a United States of Europe:

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Or a map of the Mahatma Gandhi as India

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Or a mapping of what aliens monitoring our TV signals will see (American TV only – we presume that is all an alien life form would want to watch, particularly given its plethora of incomprehensible and socially eviscerating reality tv shows!)

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Student Work: Saloni Bhojwani / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

Hers was perhaps the subtlest way of working, one that allowed her to quietly, unobtrusively blend into a space and be forgotten. Rarely have I seen a first time shooter with such a knack for becoming inconspicuous so easily and so precisely. While working on a story about the social and cultural divisions created through sectarian education programs that divide societies through its children, Saloni would keep coming back with images that surprised me with their intimacy. And they revealed a real photographer’s sensitivity and eye. And this from a student who had never shot before attending the workshop! Her first contact with an SLR was on the 3rd day of the workshop itself!

She was also perhaps one of the quietest students attending the workshop, rarely saying anything, but always observing. You could see that in the way she scanned a room when she walked in – a quality and skill that obviously served her well on what was a very difficult story to put together. With social tensions running high in the region, and her subjects sensitive to the intrusions of an outsider with a camera, Saloni had to negotiate a careful line while working with the religious schools and the community caught in the middle.

Here are a few samples from Saloni’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Sabra & Shatlia Or Histories That Do Not Make It To Prime Time

September 16th.

September 17th.

September 18th.

1982.

Least we forget.

Never.

Fazel Muhamad, 48, holding pictures of family members who were killed in the attack. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

“I couldn’t find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son. I told my wife we had him, but I didn’t let his children or anyone see. We buried the flesh as it if was my son.” Jan Mohamad.

This and more.

They sowed the wind and reap the whirlwind;They plowed evil and reap injustice.

(Hosea 8:7; 10:13)

Our feigned innocence is leaking blood. Vividly our future is being written today as it was once in the past. But then too, as today, we will look and ask ourselves, in numbed confusion inspired by discardable memory, whence our enemies came from. Can you hear it – the answer to our question?

Student Work: Elizabeth Herman / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

It took only a few hours after her arrival in Ajmer for Elizabeth to realize that the story she had hoped to do did not exist. At least not within a reasonable distance from the city itself. Nearly 3 days of telephone calls to local journalists and discussions with other contacts in the city failed to provide a solution. I was concerned. Sara was concerned. I remember even some of the other students were concerned. Interestingly, Elizabeth was unfazed, and I found that rather troubling. She seemed very calm and composed through it all, and was in fact pursuing a quiet strategy – that of accompanying some of the other students to their meetings with local NGO and other institutions and keeping her eyes and ears open to something new. It was on the third day that I ran into an excited Elizabeth who approached me and said I have a story. My doubts were probably written all over my face, but Elizabeth was persistent and described what in fact was an intelligent, complex and fascinating story.

A small village on the outskirts of the city of Ajmer had had a new railway track constructed right through the middle of it. This had not only divided the village from its agricultural lands, but had also created fissures in its social and cultural fabric. The railroad meant that India’s modernity, with its conveniences and deprivations, had arrived right at its doorstep, imposing new values and new dreams amongst a younger generation of villagers more interested in careers, conveniences and the city life. As the elderly looked on, they traditional agricultural way of life now irrelevant, they could see that their village had become a smaller version of the broader changes taking place in today’s India.

Elizabeth had indeed found her story.

Here are a few samples from Elizabeth’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Student Work: Radhika Saraf / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

Her nervousness was palpable; sitting in the corridor late at night I watched her and her fear. For the last three days she had been exploring the lives of the Cheeta-Mewati community in the Beawar region of Rajasthan. A unique community that practiced a syncretic version of Hindu/Islamic spirituality, her project required her to examine the pressures the community had come under from the orthodox – both Hindu and Muslim, organizations that were fighting for their ’spiritual’ souls and attempting to seduce them towards a more purified spiritual place. Radhika Saraf is a first time photographer – a few days earlier I had been teaching her how to handle autofocus, and precisely why the camera meter behaves as it does.

Now, hours away from her first foray into this community, she was scared and I completely understood why. It was a fear that I had felt many times, and still do; the moment when the research, the planning, the imagination, and the ideas, are all set aside and the first step taken to actually enter a space and begin to explore a story. As Radhika, on that night, stood on that threshold of this moment and looked out across a world complex and unpredictable, she began to understand the difficulties of this craft that today is so easily dismissed as ‘dead’, and the tremendous creative and personal courage and clarity needed to begin, and create something out of what initially appears to be merely chaos and randomness.

A few samples from the Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop follow:

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

Speaking Of The Obvious Or Profiling Photographers And The Selling Of War

A fascinating little piece of reporting from The Stars & Stripes that simply reminds us what this entire US military embedd fiasco is all about. In a piece called Files prove Pentagon is profiling reporters we learn that the US military and the Pentagon profile reporters before allowing them to embed with the military forces. Basically, if you are in, then you have been taken. There are some still running around pretending that their embedded reporting was done with a wide degree of ‘liberty’ and ‘latitude’ and without any specific constraints imposed on them.

Even a recent World Press Photo competition winner has been repeatedly espousing in public forums, rather vehemently and defensively I would argue, the nonsense that he was ‘never told what to shoot’, revealing once and for all the delusions such photographers impose on themselves when they refuse to acknowledge the walls of the prison, while celebrating their ability to move about freely within it.

I have repeatedly spoken out against the US military embed program, much to the dislike of many, some of whom of course have happily participated in this journalistic charade and even gone on to decorate their chests with trinkets received in competitions and such. I wrote about the embed programs recently in a piece called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War, and in another piece called How We Refused To Embed With Brittany Spears, and in a more acerbic piece called Creating Tempests In A Teapot Or What Else Is A Photoeditor To Do.

I am sure I have written more about it, particularly in my lengthy tirade against modern day photojournalism also available on this blog site. I will spare you the link.

UPDATE: The same newspaper, Stars & Stripes, recently reported that the military has cancelled its contract with the private contracter who was responsible for creating these media profiling and analysis report. In a piece called Military Terminates Rendon Contract writer Kevin Baron quotes a military spokesman Col. Wayne Sharks as saying “The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the Media Analyst contract.”. Later a Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith is quoted as stating that ““The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission.”

Oddly, the quotes only claim to cancel the contracts as they relate to Afghanistan. There is no claim in fact that the US military has canceled its engagement of this firm, Rendon, to carry out its controversial media analysis work. In fact, the article goes on to reveal that Rendon will continue to produce these profiles, and in fact that these reports have been regularly used by the Defense Department and the CIA to provide “…a range of media analysis services beyond just the profiles and was just the latest contract for services it had provided the military for years.  The company has a long history of contracting with the Defense Department and the CIA on controversial media projects.”

So what appears to be a ‘change in policy’ is eventually revealed to in fact not really be that. Or certainly nothing more than a juggling around of ‘responsibility’. The article was confusing and obfuscating and does not attempt to separate between the US Defense Department, various departments of the military forces, the ground operations in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. It does not make clear what this ‘cancellation’ means, the scope of its impact, the implications for future policy on the handling of embedded journalists. In fact, it just ends by pointing out that this contractor has been working for the Defense Department and will continue to do so!

Did I miss something?

A Quick Update For The Restless Or What The Hell Has He Been Up To?

Once again I find it near impossible to blog while traveling.  Despite my best efforts I have been unable to update this blog with anything substantial.

Much time was taken conducting the Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop in Ajmer that Sara Terry and I were teaching. I will be posting all of the student work on this site in a few weeks time, so please be patient. Suffice it to say, they produce some remarkable stories and took fabulous photographs.

So much so that at least two of them have been invited to contribute to the ‘The Idea of India’ project website. Britt Sloan and Radhika Saraf, both new photographers, produced some beautiful work that captured India’s remarkable syncretic and pluralist culture in Ajmer.  and I have invited them to submit their images and essays for inclusion on the project website.

They then formally open up the ‘The Idea of India’ project stie to other photographers – I will annouce this more formally when I return to Stockholm in a couple of weeks. The scope of the work now demands that others start to send their stories for inclusion, and help evolve the project site from being just about my journeys in India, to a broader, more comprehensive site for stories and resources about India’s magnificent pluralist and heterodox heritage.

Britt Sloan and Radhika Saraf are students at Tufts, young photographers and sharp, intelligent and passionate individuals. I am very excited about their participation.

I also expect to invite a couple of the other students to the project site as well, but will start with these two.

I am back in Stockholm on the 14th of September.  New posts will once again start to emerge after I land.

Thank you all – all handful of you, for your patience, support and encouragement.

How Hindus Are Destroying New Delhi Or An Exercise In Absolute Foolishness Masquerading As A Stupid Opinion

Writer Rana Dasgupta, famous for his book Tokyo Cancelled, has penned a piece on the city of New Delhi and its rampaging obsession with things material, brand-obsessed, consumerist, shallow, callow and crass. Called Capital Gains it appeared in the recent issue of Granta magazine.

Fair enough – one can write similar pieces about pretty much any city in any ‘capitalist revolutionary’ city anywhere in the world. Take your pick, this story though well written and at times funny, could just as well be about Karachi, Rio De Jeneiro , Bangkok, Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing or even the now-under-China’s shadow, Hong Kong.

I enjoyed reading the piece, but the reason why I am writing this post is less the piece itself, since it was rather banal and unsurprising, but that in the midst of it I came across this rather amusing (and I mean that not in an amusing way) exchange that the write has with an editor at Tehelka magazine:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

‘Do you think anything will come of all this money they’re making?’ I ask. ‘Do you think they’ll try to leave behind a legacy?’

‘They don’t care about their legacy! This is a Hindu society: I’m back for a million more lives – how much fuss am I going to make about this one? Indian businesspeople might run a school or feed a few orphans, but they’re not interested in reform because they are bent on making the system work for them. Hinduism is very pliable. It rationalizes inequality: if that guy is poor it’s because he deserves it from his previous lives, and it’s not for me to sort out his accounts. Hinduism allows these guys to think that what they get is due to them, and they have absolutely no guilt about it.’

Frankly, and I realize that this is merely the opinion of an individual at a magazine that I otherwise respect, I was shocked that such reductive, essentialist nonsense made it past the editing sessions. This statement is so wrong that it isn’t even wrong, its just plain callous, and frankly lunatic.

A city of tens of millions of people, with a history and a heritage that goes back over a thousand of years and that contains within it an incredibly diverse, varied, complex community of people of all walks of life, beliefs, class, ethnicities, cultures, values, ideas, fears, doubts and dreams can never be called ‘a Hindu society’ alone. This is such a vast idiocy that it can’t even be laughed it. Delhi is one of the world’s great cities and what makes it so is that it is a cradle of the world’s heritage and civilizations and that billions have passed through her, lived there, defined it and more will.

It is a world city. Complete with the full complexity and vastness of what that term means.

The so-called Hindu businessmen with their indifference to reform are pretty much like tens of millions of other businessmen and capitalists around the world. Their being Hindu explains nothing about their exclusivity, pursuit of wealth and bombast, their greed or their general indifference. They are just businessmen, much like all the others (Muslims, Sikh, non-believers, gay, straight, black, white and other) that live and work and play and show-off in Delhi. Business is about profits regardless of who conducts it. There are strands of Hinduism (I use this term broadly) that call for asceticism and abstinence from desire. So by what definition is the tern Hinduism being used here by this editor? And what does anyone being Hindu really tell us about their indifference and/or greed? Nothing I say!

An elite, a capitalist elite, weaned on the belief that success is to the strong and clever is indifferent to the under privileged and exploited in all societies across the globe. I am sure that Dasgupta has been to the USA, or China or even to Pakistan. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. The Delhi elite are in fact too much like those in other nations and cannot be understood through the prism of religion. To attempt to explain what are secular acts – power, wealth, snobbery, indifference by deferring to something as ill-defined as Hinduism is irresponsible to say the least, and dangerous at the worst. I say dangerous because it encourages people to essentialize others, to reduce them to a mass and loose sight of them as individuals. It is the same issue I have by the repeated insistence of journalists, pundits, intellectuals and others to explain socio-political issues in Muslim and Arab nations through the prism of Islam. This is a distorting and randomizing prism that allows us to say anything about any situation based purely on imagined ideas of how people transform philosophies (which is what religions are) into worldly actions. It is near impossible to imagine that everyone does it the same way!

Full disclosure: I remain a big admirer of the Tehelka editor who actually made this inane comment and encourage people to read Tehelka magainze – a real example of courage in journalism.

I repeat a comment made by Robert Musil in his masterwork A Man Without Qualities that I am reading now as I wrote in an earlier blog piece called In Bed With Robert Musil Part I

…it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

The point being not that there are nine or three or ten or twenty characters, but that individuals are more than just one things and that a religion is simply one piece that can be at times a major and other times a minor influence of their decisions, priorities, values and behaviors. To attempt to blame this on religion, and worse on a religion as varied, complex, and near-impossible-to-define, as Hinduisum is even more egregious.

What is happening in Delhi though disappointing is in fact taking place in cities all across the globe and is not unique to India, or to Hindus. It cannot be understood, explained or blamed on something called Hinduism or the Hindu.

In Bed With Robert Musil: Part I

I am traveling with Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities.

I have a bad habit of writing in books I read. I will usually do it on the inside flap of the cover and never on the pages of the book itself. Readings will provoke thought, but more often, I will simply note down a page where I found a sentence or an idea particularly interesting.

What I love about Vintage International’s edition of Musil’s book is that it comes with a number of blank pages towards the end. This is not the only excellent thing about the version; the bindings are superb and allow the reader to bend and fold the book comfortably into his hands without cracking the spine. And its porportions are an excellent example of the size a book should actually be – easy to hold, carry, bend, store and pack.

Any by the way, one copy of A Man Without Qualities read with focus and reflection far outweighs the value of a thousand random and insipid books on a Kindle (who came up with that retarded name?) or any other electronic book readers. Do you really want to carry yet another recharger? Call me backward, old fashioned or just 43-years of age, but I can’t see how a reading medium that reduces your gazpacho soup recipe to the same form and flow as your The Adventures of Amir Hamza can really work for anything other than simple, easy, low-concentration fare.

Call me sceptical, but never thickheaded, I remain open to the idea that it may be more convenient to carry your entire library with you wherever you go, but is it really what reading is all about? And why is it that I can read 100 pages from the printed edition of A Man Without Qualities without tiring, while I can barely make it through a digital, multi-page online article on Salon or The New York Times Magazine?

I ponder.

So, back to Musil. I am traveling in India with him by my side, and I am taking you along for the ride. Over the course of the next few weeks, some snippets of insights that perhaps will also encourage others to read this wonderful European novel.

Patriotism remains a disease despite all attempts at modernity and greater moral civility. This passage could just as well have been written about Pakistan, India and a number of other nations determined to ‘celebrate’ their purity and superiority through banal and insipid and definitely artificial symbols and rituals:

Patriotism in Austria was quite a special subject. German children simply learned to despire the wars sacred to Austrian children, and were taught to believe that French children, whore forebears were all decadent lechers, would turn tail by the thousands at the approach of a German soldier with a big beard. Exactly the same ideas, with roles reversed and other desireable adjustments, were taught to French, English, and Russian children, who also had often been on the winning side…But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up.  (page 13)

The following passage should be read by most in America’s conservative and lunatic fringe right wing, including the making-too-many-apperences-on-TV and clearly determined to outline his warmongering credentials, the hideous John Bolton, former Permanent US Representative to the UN during the repugnant George W. Bush Administration:

Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm, or even, for a weakness of what they thought to be the Austrian character. But they were wrong; it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

And a wonderfully funny moment when Ulrich considers the consequences of his choice of a career in the field of mathmatics:

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toe; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it more frantically ever since, unable to share off that rotten feeling of antlike industry…The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference towards the whole, man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! (page 36)

I loved this statement that had me thinking since I read it:

Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows of the evening sun, without Walter; he remained behind at the piano. Clarisse said:

“The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do you think? Nietzsche maintains it’s a sign of weakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art.” She had sat down on a little hummock. Ulrich shrugged.

More in the coming days on this wonderful work, but I highly recommend it!

India Diary: August 6th 2009 The Aftermath/Tufts University Photography Workshop Sessions

I am back in India to teach a workshop and to continue my work on The Idea of India project.

I, along with The Aftermath Project founder and photographer Sara Terry, am teaching a two week workshop in Ajmer, India to students from Tuft University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

Thanks to a wonderfully imaginative collaboration between the grant program and the school, we will be spending an intense two weeks with nine students exploring stories that speak to issues of cultural and religious pluralism, and social and civil conflict aftermath.

Though the actual workshop will run from August 1oth till August 22nd, the students have already been working on their stories for at least a month now. They started to develop story ideas about four weeks ago and both Sara and I have been working with them to review, revise and approve the ideas. Some of the students have made contacts on the ground and carried out extensive background research on the subjects they are covering and the institutions and individuals they will be working with. Suffice it to say, it has been an intense learning process and we are not even starting until next Monday!

These workshops concentrate on the challenges of researching, structuring, executing and producing narrative documentary stories. They are less about the aesthetics of photography or the mechanics of producing it. Though of course some relevant details will be address. The focus does reflect the priority that both Sara and I place on the need to explore social, economic and political issues from the perspective of individuals and the worlds they occupy. Sara and I have had the privilege of helping students identity stories that relate to issues of cultural and religious pluralism, and stories about those dealing with the aftermath of economic, political, sectarian and other conflicts. We are pushing students to engage with the complex, to shy away from cliche’s about India and about her culture, and to prepare to explore and discover the autonomy and determination of even the most dispossessed and marginalized of her citizens. We are pushing them to see and document real people, in a real country, without prejudice and preconceived simplicities. It will not be an easy two weeks for the students, and for the teachers, that is for sure.

If possible I will try to blog about the progress of the workshop. Perhaps some of you are interested in following the work and sessions and to stay engaged with what we are struggling with and discussing. A lot depends on my internet access and of course time, but I will do my best to update the India Diary in a consistently.

The Palestinian Wedding Or More Studies In Farce & Fanaticism

A Wedding At Masara, West Bank Photo By: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org

This post today celebrates a Palestinian wedding thanks to the photography of Israeli activists at Activestills and Haggai Matar who was in fact beaten by Israeli soldiers while participating in this event, as he explains here in this piece called Assault-A Personal Story

And a different union of sorts, where yet another Palestinian family, living in Israeli-occuppied East Jerusalem is united with the long, painful and tragic history of the rest of the Palestinian people.

Update: By the way, this is not some random event; the transformation, or ‘Judaization’ of East Jerusalem is a project financed by many in the USA, including Irving Moskowitz about whose direct involvement in the hideous, and yes, racist, project is well explained in a recent Guardian piece called Irving Moskowitz’s Bingo Madness by the wonderfully clear headed Richard Silverstein who also rights a fabulous blog about all things Israeli and its associated illigal occupation driven pathologies, obfuscations, lies, and brutalities called Tikun Olam – which means  ‘healing the world’ in Hebrew.

There is an odd silence amongst the world’s finest photojournalists when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza. Few if any of the self-proclaimed best-in-the-business are anywhere near the determination, courage, dignity and civility of the Palestinian struggle to overcome the Israeli occupation juggernaut. Quick to rush to cover ’spotlight’ events – those making it to the front pages of the daily press and the prime-time TV news broadcast, their cameras are silent about situations that actually require the strength of their voices and the power of their images. Citizen documentation of the situation in the West Bank and Gaza in fact towers over anything that is being produced, or has been produced, by the professionals.

There is a growing and extensive archive of photographic and video documentation of the brutality, inhumanity, and infantile banality of the Israeli occupation and the horrors and humiliations inflicted on an unarmed and defenseless civilian population of the West Bank and Gaza. And its all being shot by amateurs! And when you compare it to the simplistic works being produced by the professionals, you get a sense that the professionals are simply afraid to confront the realities – with all its humiliations and brutalities, of the occupation itself!

But I digress.

Lets celebrate today, a Palestinian wedding!

Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman Or Scaring Children As An Imperialist Habit

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

He is the author of Engaging the Muslim World. He has a regular column at Salon.com. and writes the Informed Comment blog.

He has now written what I think is the first piece that connects modern day American imperialist paranoia in Afghanistan to 19th century British imperialist paranoia in Afghanistan. In a piece called Armageddon On Top Of The World: Not! he reminds us that:

What most observers don’t realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It’s at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British officers, journalists and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire.

He goes on to remind us that:

In fact, few intelligence predictions could have less chance of coming true. In the 2008 parliamentary election, the Pakistani public voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the British-drawn “Durand Line,” the border — mostly unacknowledged by Pashtuns — between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive from this group, but the vast majority of Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.

Lets repeat that statement once again: Most Pushtuns are not ‘Taliban’ nor ‘Islamic Radicals’. That there are fringe lunatics with guns and an overbloated rhetoric of armegeddon that is given undue and unjustified attention by scabarous and weak minded journalists and photographers is a crucial issue we prefer not to discuss.

It would be the equivalent of an Al Jazeera reporter insisting on covering the USA only from the eyes and from the hot-air rhetoric of militia groups in montana and nebraska, or the lunatic-fringe christian evangelical congregations in Florida!

The fact remains that bandying about the bogeyman makes for easy journalism, easy photography and easy sales. Fear sells. We know this well. The unfortunately an entire people, the Pushtuns, have been demonized, humiliatated, murdered, displaced and criminalized.

Mir Abbas Khan returns to his home destroyed by Pakistani Army bulldozers and helicopter gunfire. Near Kalooshah, South Waziristan

In 2004 I was in Waziristan, and spent a month there with the tribes that were being lassoed into Pakistan’s desperate attempts to appease the American war-gods. The story eventually appeared in print in Mother Jones magazine. Titled Frontier Justice its most prescient part was the conclusion that writer Malcolm Garcia wrote – based on an interview I had done inside Waziristan:

Consider … Mir Abbas Khan, in the photo on the opposite page. Look at his eyes, his ruined home, and back to his eyes—full of fear and hurt, but mostly rage.

Indeed, consider Mir Abbas Khan’s face and his eyes….and his rage. An innocent Waziri, Ahmedzai tribesman whose entire life was torn to shreds because he happened to be in the path of American and Pakistan military power games. This is in 2004 and Malcom and I argued back then – an argument that got me in trouble with Homeland Security the one time they picked me up at Miami Airport for a 3 hour intense questioning, that it is inhuman, immoral, illegal and a clear violation of their human rights and rights to justice to kill them with impunity and from thousands of feet in the air.

The Pushtuns are not ‘a tribe’, or ‘a mass’, they are individuals and these individuals, their lives, their families are what we are crushing and killing in the blood-laden fields of South Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. We have made animals out of them, reducing them to mere objects that we kills, see in the distance and attempt to blow away. Our embedded photographers continue this trend, showing the Pushtuns as alien to us, distant from our humanity, their passions, emotions, sufferings, and humiliations unknown and unfelt by us.

“Asim”, his eyes looked at me pleading, ‘”is it not possible for you to imagine that we too can act only because we are human?”, I was with Waziri madrassa students in Peshawar in 2008, as they were trying to explain to me how life for them and their families had become a living hell since 2003 as the Afghan conflict began to spill over.”Sometimes we too, knowing that it is against our laws, our beliefs and our Koran, act because we are just human beings!”. His face tightened as if about to implode “I want to kill because I may have seen my brothers body parts torn all over a room – I want to kill not because I am a fanatic, but becuase I am a brother” He looked at ‘Is that no possible for us?” I had no answer for him. We sat there in the silence, a dark madrassa dorm room, about 20 other students sitting around me, and just thought about what we had just heard.

We are precipitating a genocidal campaign against an entire people because we can’t be bothered to see them as human beings.

This war, which perhaps we once tolerated and remained quiet about, has lost its mooring, and we have lost our moral compass.  It, like Iraq, is a dishonorable war, that is being fought dishonorably and will bring nothing but dishonor to those who plan it and fight it.

Open See – Another Jim Goldberg Scream

Open See: Jim Goldberg

I love Jim Goldberg’s work. His new book is fabulous and best of all, complicated. Jim continues to employ his seemingly random photographic methods using all sorts of different formats, borrowed images and even scratching and writing on the photographs themselves.

Open See:Jim Goldberg

I have noticed a lot more photographers doing this – I even remember one well known photographer working on his prints on the terrace of the Hotel Pams during Visa Pour L’image, painting away on the prints with blood mixed in water. There, on the terrace, in full view of a curious public, it appeared an artifice. But I digress.

Jim’s work is informed by a far stronger, determined and clear vision. He is again a photographer whose technique and method I may not want to emulate, but I respect and admire them for what they produce. He remains one of those rare photographers where the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. You can see samples of the book’s images on the Magnum website, but it is obvious that it is the book that you want to possess and not merely glance at the images.

Many may not, some may not remember, but one of the pioneers of the ‘touched’ photograph was a the American photographer by the name of Peter Beard. Beard did a lot of commercial work, even a cheesy calender shoot for Pirelli tyres, but he always did it in his own way. Less his commercial efforts, I found his more personal works far more compelling and exciting, particularly because of the incredibly complex, free wheeling and intriguing scribbles and sketches that covered the images.

Peter Beard: Hippo And The Hand 1955/2006

I believe I read an interview with him where he argued that the image is incomplete until and unless the photographer has worked on it. This comment reflects an old fashioned idea of the need for the human touch and frailty on what is otherwise a purely mechanical product. Perhaps Beard did not value this instinctive, creative side enough and felt the need to push the works even further. Or that the spectrum of his creativity extended itself beyond the framing of the image and to the final image which appeared in his mind as he captured the negatives. It is however a process that produces unique objects, much like Jim Goldberg’s work which appears to continue this very practice of the ‘worked on’ image.

Yes, Your Taste In Music Sucks Or What MTV Erases!

That can either be me talking about you, or your judgment of what I listen to these days. So enjoy it regardless!

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an old style, talented, string band carrying on the tradition of some of the greatest string musicians from North and South Carolina. Tell me that Rhiannon Giddens voice isn’t simply hair raising!

The next videos is from the brilliant documenta/film called Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus – A tour of the American south through its music and its people.

I loved this film so much that I have been listening to the likes of Jim White, Wovenhand, Johnny Dowd, Mellisa Swingle, and The Handsome Family ever since!

This scene from the film, an interview with Lee Sexton, should be a photograph! I remember watching it the first time and thinking that I would love to have been there to shoot the moment – that perfect artificial light, the beautiful window beam, that perfect and magnificent presence of age and experience embodied in this man. The scene only gets better in the second session when a younger man joins him in the interview – this is a beautiful photographic moment! This is an American light!

David Eugene Edwards – the lead singer of what was once 16 Horsepower and now, more recently Wovenhand was also introduced to me by this film. This is Christian music but seriously spiritual music. Not the cheesy, mass produced, muzak you find in religious bookstores. This is the sound of the belief of the South and in it one begins to see and understand a certain side of America that we often ignore what with our obsession with things New York, LA or Chicago!

Then there was the beautiful Melissa Swingle who appeared in a short clip on the film and stole my heart! Well, my musical heart with the striking, jagged, interupted voice that had so much vulnerability in it that one could not help but be smitten. She lead for the band Trailer Bride, which has disbanded and now she is with a band called The Moaners – hard,, southern rock that I am not such a big fan of. But Melissa remains a wonderful talent – see her song on the film itself!

Moving on: Adem – brilliant, individual singer, you have to listen to. His new album ‘Takes’ is a must:

or

There will be more in the near future!

And What Did You Hear, My Blue Eyed Son

No words. Just music. Thanks to DuckRabbit for reminding me as well of one of my favorite Dylan songs.

Where did this music go? Where did these words go? Where did this voice go? Doesn’t our generation deserve this as well?

I wonder.

Joseph Rodriguez & The Documentary Eye

Joseph Rodriguez may be one of the last great classical documentary photographers working in America today. I can think of only a few others who represent a similar passion and commitment to telling the human stories. Brenda Ann Kenneally and Eugene Richards come to mind. I was fortunate enough to have Joseph as a mentor in my early years. I could still use him, but I know he has neither the time or the energy to mentor a photographer living thousands of miles away!

Joseph was featured in a rather interesting little book called Witness In Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, that also included personal and in-depth interview with the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, Sebastiao Salgado, Eugene Richards, Susan Meiseles, Graciela Iturbide, Dayanita Singh, Fazal Sheikh, and Antonin Kratochvil – a who’s who of great documentary photographers.

Here is a new piece that he has been working on. It is part of a series of stories Joseph is producing on the American prison system.

Notice that Joseph shoots human beings, not art objects or light or geometry or such. Human beings. His eye is drawn to gestures, movements, expressions and emotions. Its classic and its personal.

Asim

India As Fiction

I don’t have an exhaustive list – Indian literature is just too extensive and too diverse. I also have not read her writers in anything other than English and Urdu. That may still not represent a significant portion of India’s literary output. But India loves her books – anyone going to Kerala or walking into cafes in Calcutta will know what I mean. In fact, there was a Le Monde Diplomatique essay about the Kerala publishing industry and the love of books there called Kerala: Mad About Books.

Sixth on the list of seven objectives of Kerala’s communist-led state government’s literacy mission is “provision of facilities for library and reading rooms for creating an environment conducive for literacy efforts and a learning society”.

The grassroots level activism that brought about the literacy movement continues in the form of publishers like KSSP (Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad), which was formed in 1962 to publish scientific literature in Malayalam. Today KSSP continues its practice of door-to-door sales and Kala Jathas (literacy rallies). According to KK Krishna Kumar, its former president, KSSP publishes around 60-100 titles and sells books worth Rs 10-15m ($200,000-$300,000) every year.

Anyways, there have been rather ‘famous’ names winning awards recently some of whom are actually worth reading. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss comes to mind. Adiga’s White Tiger does not!

Of course, the late, great Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and the very popular (though less read) Satanic Verses. I believe that Rushdie has died as a writer since his move to the USA (no necessary connection), but the three works mentioned here remain masterpieces. Certainly Midnight’s Children can be accused of overwhelming the modern Indian novel with its innovation and audacity. Regardless, it remains a pivotal pieces of work.

Amit Chaudari is a beautiful, intelligent and sensitive writer. His Freedom Song and the more recent The Immortals are worth the effort.

Amitav Ghosh, whose In An Antique Land, is one of the most beautiful books I have read in a long, long time. It has (we are all adults here), truly one of the most evocative and sensual descriptions of a dance  – I had ever read! Ghosh’s prose is precise, concise and visual, an eye that concentrates on the essentials of the action, something that all photographers can learn from. Here is how he describes the scene, on a hot evening, in the remoteness of a village in remote Egypt:

It was long past sunset now, and the faces around the bridal couple were glowing in the light of a single kerosene lamp. The drum-beat on the wash-basin was a measured, gentle one and when I pushed my way into the center of the crowd I saw that the dancer was a young girl, dressed in a simple, printed cotton dress, with a long scarf tied around the waist. Both her hands were on her hips, and she was dancing with her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her, moving her hips with a slow, languid grace, backwards and forwards while the rest of her body stayed still, almost immobile, except for the quick, circular motion of her feet. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the beat quickened, and somebody called out the first line of a chant, khadnaha min wasat al-dar, ‘we took her from her father’s house’, and the crowd shouted back, wa abuha ga’id za’alan, ‘while her father sat there bereft’. Then the single voice again, khadnaha bi al-saif al-madi,‘we took her with a sharpened sword’, followed by a massed refrain, wa abuha makansh radi, ‘because her father wouldn’t consent.’

The crowd pressed closer with the quickening of the beat, and as the voices and the clapping grew louder, the girl, in response, raised and arm and flexed it above her head in a graceful arc. Her body was turning now, rotating slowly in the same place, her hips moving faster while the crowd around her clapped and stamped, roaring their approval at the tops of their voices. Gradually, the beat grew quicker, blurring into a tattoo of drumbeats, and in response her torso froze into a stillness, while her hips and waist moved even faster, in exact counterpoint, in a pattern of movement that became a perfect abstraction of eroticism, a figurative geometry of lovemaking, pounding back and forth at a dizzying speed until at last the final beat rang out and she escaped into the crowd, laughing.

Amitav Ghosh, from In An Antique Land

Qurratullain Haider penned in Urdu quite possibly the great Indian novel, River of Fire, and later did her own translation of it into English. A classic, and a must read indeed. It is vast in its scope and truly amongst the regions great books.

Upamanyu Chatterjee wrote what I think is also a great Indian novel, English, August – about a young Indian man forced by circumstance to take up a job in a middle-of-nowhere town with the Indian Civil Service, and longing to do nothing more than smoke pot and sleep! It is perhaps one of the finest studies of the divide between those who are called to serve as civil servants, and the communities they are expected to administer. And it is laugh-out-loud hilarious to boot!

Mulk Raj Anand has written a wonderful book called Untouchable.

Or Mukel Kesevan’s interesting attempt at a partition era book called Looking Through Glass.

I think someone mentioned Rohinten Mistry earlier (recently famous for being stopped repeatedly at airports by our fine, intelligent  Homeland Security officers while he was on a USA book tour. He cancelled it and returned home!) and his A Fine Balance is a heartbreaking but beautiful read.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things has to be mentioned if only because I am a huge fan.

Pankaj Mishra’s brilliant and poignant The Romantics is perhaps one of the most insightful books about how an Indian student living int he city of Vatanasi (Benares), an albeit intelligent, educated and liberal Indian, views the tens of thousands of foreigners who mill about India ‘discovering’ themselves or exploring ’spirituality’.

And the list of some other fascinating writers would include: Gita Mehta, R.K.Narayan, Ardashir Vakil, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ved Mehta – just getting started!

By the way, William Dalrymple’s recent works on India, though largely non-fiction (The White Mughals, The Last Mughal) are in fact fascinating historical studies written with the flair of a fiction writer. His earlier works on India including City of Djins are also fabulously fun to read. But certainly, The White Mughals remains one of my favorites because it explores the deeply heterodox social, political and cultural life of the Indians and the British before the rapid turn around of affairs with the arrival of the Evangelical Christian orientated, and far more racist (a connection between the two propensities I am not so sure about!) colonial administration post-1857.

Basically, Indian writers are ‘hot’ and in fact, so are Pakistani writers. South Asian fiction, that being written in English, is very popular with new talent emerging every month it seems. Tyrewala, Gasgupta, Mohamad Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Daniel Moinuddin and many others.

Phew lots to read!!

Asim

Disasters – The Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy And Management

I was sent a link to a fascinating magazine that concentrates on aftermath and reconstruction issues in the wake of conflict, disasters and other such events. I thought I would share it with you:

Disasters – The Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy And Management

there are some interesting articles, each of course, providing rich material for ‘aftermath’ works for documentarians and photographers. i don’t know the magazine too well and am looking through it now. but it addresses a lot of critical issues that would be fascinating to examine. there is a large number of essays on post-tsunami issues, many of them touch on what would make excellent documentary work. ironically, most of these issues are missing from media coverage. but of course!

asim

Anthony Suau: Quiet, Serious, Profilic, Focused

I don’t Anthony, but I do remember him for a little book he produced as we were preparing to wage war on Iraq. I don’t think a lot of people bothered with it, what with the hysteria and patriotic jingoism of the period. But Anthony went ahead and produced this little book called Fear This. I recommend you look it up. I don’t know how well it sold, but I suspect that given the atmosphere of the period, probably not a whole lot (I hope I am wrong). But what it did represent was an individual photographer’s response to the times. Here was a major, mainstream magazine photographer who held on to his individual sense of right and wrong, and very cleverly, in a quiet, civilized way, choose to say something about it.

Anthony Suau also won a World Press Photo award this year. Here is a short video of him. I also post this to show you what working with as little equipment as possible can be a powerful way to allow your individuality and voice to come forward. You are forced to rely on your skills, mental and physical, to compensate and adjust to overcome what first appear to be limitations.

I will post a few other videos in the coming hours/days. They will repeat the same mantra; simple equipment, sophisticated eyes, and a mind that is seriously seeing.

Asim

What To Bring…Some Thoughts

I had wanted to put together a well thought out, rigorously professional list of things to bring to India. I have been trying to do just that for a couple of days now. But each time I do the list just seems completely artificial and pointless. We are all different, and have different preferences. We all know what we have to have with us to make our photographs, and to be comfortable while working and resting. Clothes, toiletries, something fun to read, a couple of notebooks and a pen (preferably a fountain pen – more on that later!), a good pair of slippers. What else does a photographer need? Josef Koudelka famously said that 2 shirts and 2 pants are more than necessary and then its just a matter of going. Perhaps a bit ascetic, but he sets the bar for the minimum required.

I in fact do usually travel with just 2 pants and perhaps 3 shirts! I don’t know why, but I have a serious aversion to baggage. Even for a 6 week India trip I will not have enough to require checking my bags at the airport counter. Perhaps it is some need to feel that I can just pick up and leave a place any time I want, to roam without concern about my belongings and to be able to walk without exhaustion to any destination once I have disembarked from a bus or train. It is also the reason why I rarely carry heavy camera equipment, or even a laptop! A couple of camera bodies, a couple of lens, perhaps 40 rolls of film and i am off!

August is a beautiful month in Ajmer – it rains. This is no ordinary rain. This is India’s summer rain, considered a gift of the heavens. It cleanses the city, energizes the people, compels children to laugh all day and play carelessly in pools of waters. I remember this rain from my childhood. Karachi would seath in June and July, and August would bring relief in the form of downpours that millions anxiously waited for. The city would be bought to a standstill – water would collect everywhere, roads would back up, electricity would fail sometimes for hours, offices would be closed, schools too (yes!), and every one would be left to do nothing but….play! It was the greatest time of the year and the only one I remember when my mother would become a girl and rush out into the rains to run and laugh!

Fear not; its not monsoon that destroys our ability to be out and make pictures.

August is rain in Ajmer. Just remember that. It is a unique time for the city which is otherwise hot, dry and near impossible to work in because the heat just cuts through your skin and squeezes your lungs!

Ajmer is also where you can find anything you will need as far as daily needs are concerned; clothes – the light kurta is a near perfect piece of clothing for hot weather and very cheap. it is light and simple and found everywhere. It is also appropriate in that it will automatically erase any concerns about appropriate attire and so on. If you are passing through Delhi you can find fabulous ones at Fab India and other such places. I pick a few up each time I arrive and then just wear them out during my travels. Basically what I am saying is that you need not drag a lot of heavy stuff for fear of not being able to find things in India. Yes, of course, that silk full length, off-shoulder/Armani tuxedo may need to be packed if you feel you must!

Some people bring a lot of exercise equipment. This is tricky as jogging on the streets of India is not recommended – the pollution alone can kill you, if the traffic will not! I do yoga in my room – its easier, requires no extra equipment and ensures that I do not have to fear an unknown neighborhood. I am sure that there are gyms somewhere in the vicinity, but I seriously doubt if you will have time for, or that we will allow you time for, body toning and aerobics. Just so you know. Photographers are also very proud of their beer bellies and lack of stamina. Marks of honor!

I would also suggest that you keep your camera equipment to the bare essential. If you must know I only work with 2 lens – both fixed focal length. A 50mm and a 35mm. That is it. I find that people carrying a lot of different lenses are attempting to hedge against ‘unexpected’ circumstances and hoping that some lens combination will be available to capture every situation. The fact of the matter is that you can never get all the pictures you want. You will never be able to capture it all in all its infinite variety and variations. The best strategy is to select the equipment that best allows you to get most of your images. And since we will be working on close documentary work, you are best off bringing your simplest lenses, and putting aside long zooms and so on. But of course I am simply suggesting this because different people have different ‘equipment comfort’ levels. Certainly less is more in my book Besides, lugging around large camera bags to your subjects and sites is a bit of a pain. Not only does it draw a lot of unnecessary attention, but it can be an impediment to your ability to get others to relax around you.

The European AC Plug

Electricity can be tricky and particularly in the rainy season it can be fickle. Do bring a small torch to find your way to and from the toilet. I have a silly little one in my mobile phone and it works just fine. We are not out in the tundra here – just something that can help you navigate without breaking any bones.

Wall plugs are mostly European compatible, so all your Americans will need adaptors please. Best that you come with these, though I am sure they can also be found in Delhi or Ajmer. India uses a 2-pin plug though I have seen some very strange variations on this as well. My European plugs work fine though I know that the Indian plug is just a slight variation on this model.  The India variety has 3 round pins – the lower 2 actually fit the European plug. There are plenty of light weight adaptors available – Belkin has a nice and easy one that I have found to always work in India though I am not sure the one I have is still being produced. Note, most all digital cameras and laptops have dual-voltage capability so you needn’t worry about this. Power surges can be an issue, but I recommend that we by a surge protection power strip once we are in India for those of you worried about such matters.

Extra batteries for your camera are always a good idea. You may be working away from the hotel and it would be better that you have a backup.

Bring a toothbrush please. Thank you.

Bring light, cool, cotton clothing. I know people love those fancy nylon hiking pants with more zips than a space suit. Ok, I guess you can bring these if you want. Light shoes. Scarves may not be too fashionable. The girls should bring something to cover their heads – yes, a scarf because it is decent and respectable to do so when entering mosques, shrines, and temples. And perhaps even when meeting elders – it is a sign of humility and courtesy to cover your head. Not a must, just a thought.

Lip balm. Mosquito repellent. Imodium (yes, come on, be prepared!). Deodarant. All are necessary. All can be bought in India.

No fanny packs please! Ok, that is just a pet peeve that has no real logical reason. Lets just say its a question of taste!

For a more serious, well thought through, point by point list talk to Sam. I saw that he has one hell of a packing list on his blog from Uganda I am sure he will remind me of the 20 most important things I completely forgot!

I will update this one as other thoughts come up. But the general rule is; keep it simple and don’t over do the whole thing. If you forget something you can always find it in Ajmer.

Oh, yes, fountain pens. Do you realize that ball point pens place incredible pressure on your wrists and arms? It is one of the reasons why people do not write with them for any length of time. A fountain pen however flies over paper, and is a joy to write with. You can buy these very cool, cheap, disposable (if you must!) fountain pens in India. I love writing with them and find that I actually write a lot just to feel the pleasure of the pen moving over paper. I hope to get a quality one this time around. So chuck that Bic and pick up a fountain pen, take your notes in your fashionably cool Moleskins (yes, we do need some style) and feel the joy of writing again!

(Coming up in the next post; why the LP will reconquer audio playback again, crushing this fad called the CD!)

Asim

Proven: The Apollo 11 Moon Walk Was A Hoax!

If there was ever any doubt, this video erases them!

To be uploaded soon; video of my lunch date with Sasqautch which was rudely interrupted by an alien abduction attempt!

Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War

They took the New York Times on a war tour. The Battle For Pakistan it was called when the magazine finally published the photographs their boys had so carefully constructed and bought back. They had all the elements that would suggest valor, fear, desperate battles, the struggle of ‘a state’ against an unseen but clearly fearsome enemy. Though to my eye it appeared to be a lot of pictures of Pakistani soldiers ‘posing’ – the kinds of pictures I know these soldiers often pose for whenever I have had to photograph them. They know the routine – it is a veritable war zone cat walk, Pakistan’s Next Top Soldier! There are ‘buckets’ of IEDs, emptied villages, men behind bars wearing their self incriminating, evidence acceptable in our modern courts of war, skull caps and beards. The Battle For Pakistan, a nation of 170 million, with a cultural and ethnic diversity that baffles most, was apparently being fought against a few hundred men with outdated guns and plastic buckets IEDs!

They also took CNN on one, all expenses paid, luxury jaunt around the Swat ‘war zone’. Their reporter, breathless and in awe of his actually being inside this valley. Pakistan military confronts Taliban in key Swat city is a breathless regurgitation of the voice of the Army, the reporter not even attempting to ask any hard questions. Dressed in the requisite ‘toy soldier’ garb of multi-pocket pants and manly watch, it appears that he is attempting more to celebrate his presence in a ‘hard’ zone than actually doing any reporting. The soldiers languish in the background, looking bored and at ease. Some questioned are raised – but none that would break the ’spell’ of this great war. Kills are celebrated by some army spokesperson who i am sure off camera is caring father, husband, lover or son.Everything that the dead lying around the valley of Swat are not. A collection of random weapons – most look like they were from the early 20th century are laid out on tables, and some men – less than 5 are paraded in front of the journalists. Who are these men? What is their story? What are their crimes? What are their rights? We do not ask – they are ‘Taliban’ says someone and that is enough. The war looks like it is going well.

What should have been no more than a police action 2 years ago, is now being sold as Pakistan’s great war to protect America! A see-how-we-love you performance piece funded by American dollars and fueled by Pakistani greed.

What has happened in Swat remains largely unknown. The media has been blocked from entering. Refugees streaming out of the region – expelled in fact because they were ordered to leave or feared random slaughter from the Army, speak about there being no war in the valley, and the killing of innocents who are then paraded as ‘Taliban’ fighters.

We will also not know what has happened in Swat because few if any of the foreign journalists working on covering the region have any idea or interest in the social, economic, and political history of the area. These people have no stories. Pakistan is largely covered by journalists who are ill equipped to report on it. They do not speak any of its languages, they have little or no knowledge of its history, they do not understand its ethnic groups, their histories, or even the fundamental political history of the nation since its creation, and definitely not prior to its separation from India. They know little or nothing, other than what they need to know looking down through the telescope of the ‘war against terror’.

Slugging around a few cliches’ mostly picked up in elite living rooms in Islamabad, they venture out in righteous conviction that this is a war against the ‘Taliban’ – a word that today incorporates pretty much any entity we wish to place inside it and hence has no meaning at all! And yet, we are at war against this abstraction, quite like our war against ‘terror’ and that other one against ‘drugs’. In theaters soon – the war against ‘angst’!

The people of Swat, much like the people of Waziristan, or Mohmand, or Bajaur, or Mardan or any other ‘conflict’have no history, no political-economy, no agency, no connections to the wider nation, no memory, no emotions, no love or longings, and no human capacity for creating culture, life, society and values. They are just dead bodies, ‘Taliban’, refugees, that scuttle around as we need them.

I suppose some of them are being ‘professional’ i.e. ‘do your job and shut up!’. It means never asking the editors any questions, returning to challenge assumptions, attempting to offer insights based on their experience, working to alter the ‘angles’ being created in towers in Manhattan. You give them the pictures they want, and the best of them are extremely good at it.

I have to believe however that these photographers are smarter than their works suggest. They have to be. I have to believe that they are just subsuming their intelligence to deliver to the demands of what today are clearly even more exalted jobs; paid positions or contract positions with major magazines whose budgets can only hold a few.

I am reminded of something that Paolo Pellegrin admitted to after his coverage of the evacuation of the settlers from Gaza. His statement revealed a large gap between the theatricality and emotions that were created in the images – a necessity to support the master narrative of that ‘pull out’. That is, the wrenching decision that Israel had to make and the incredible concessions she was prepared to offer, and the suffering she was prepared to inflict on her own citizens, for the sake of ‘peace’ with the Palestinians. The photographs repeatedly show determined, pious, righteous, resisting settlers as Israeli police ‘fight’ to evict them from their homes. The world watch with a mixture of pity and awe and the photographers delivered the images that captured these scenes. Many went on to win major photo awards that also showed the ‘innocent’ settlers even single handedly resisting the determination of the Israeli forces. A heroic strugle, a heroic people, a grand national sacrifice, a nation torn, a people wounded, families destroyed, lives interuppted, all for peace.

And yet, while narrating his work, Paolo offered this incredible insight on his Magnum In Motion piece about the Gaza evacuations called The Evacuation – you can hear his words by clicking on Image #18 that shows Israeli police dragging a settler onto a waiting bus:

This obviously actually happened, and these [the images] are documents of real moments. But you felt that it was also a theater. The event was at some level orchestrated and in some cases the arrangement that was made was that the settlers in a particular community or settlement decided that they could not walk away from the settlement on their own feet because that was not the way that they wanted to leave. So they decided [that] they were going to be dragged away. That it was a decision. And that was an element in this story, the fact that obviously this was happening, but at the same time it was also the result of two parts (parties?) coming together and each with their own agenda.

There is a gap, between the intelligence and awareness of the photographer, and the photographs he returns with to fulfil the story he has been asked to deliver. Even the Magnum In Motion piece maintains the emotional and pathos atmosphere of the piece, at no time allowing any suggestion that this entire event or certainly major portions of it was also political theater. The piece ends with the heroic and lament ridden music of the Israeli national anthem the Hatikva - a shockingly poor choice given that the settlers were being pulled out from occupied territories! The designers of the piece remain true to the story that is being packaged, the emotions that are being sold, the angle that is accepted, agreed to and acceptable to the world. And certainly not be coincidence, the angle that the Israeli government, its think tanks, lobbyists and pundits defined for us.

Photojournalism and photography too easily depoliticizes what it documents, elevating the visible act that is otherwise mired in various forces outside of the photograph, to being seen as ‘complete’ and ‘true’ in and of itself.

The photographer’s mind and body can sense that he is part of something more than just ‘real’ events, that he has become part of a performance, and within that performance, complete with its pathos and sorrow, he has to continue to work and shoot the ‘right’ angles, the right emotions, the right ‘feel’ so as to not ruin the whole thing for the rest of the audience – the editors, the readers in the papers the following morning. Besides Paolo, who obviously realized that he was playing a part in a script that someone else had written for him, there were hundreds of other photographers. The same hundreds by the way that are repeatedly prevented from access to Gaza, or Jenin or any number of other sites in the occupied territories.

When They take us somewhere, we should ask ourselves why!

Which is precisely what the embedded journalists now touring the ‘war’ zone with the Pakistani army ought to be doing. Why are they being taken? Where are they being taken? Why now and not before or after? A modicum of skepticism would be useful even when producing what are clearly ‘filler’ mutli-media pieces to feed the ravenous hunger of the 24-7, multi-channel needs of our the business of modern news.

Kamran Asdar Ali,  acting director of the South Asia Institute and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin, has written a valuable piece called Pakistan’s Troubled “Paradise on Earth” in the Middle East Research & Information Project (MERIP). He points out again that:

The Taliban have plainly appealed to smoldering anti-feudal resentments in the Swat valley in recruiting their cadre. A handful of families own the fruit orchards and cow pastures that are the main sources of livelihood in the valley, and their agreements with tenant farmers are often honored in the breach. Wages for rural labor are low. The large landlords (khans) are also likely to hold the concessions for the timber forests and the contracts to operate the gemstone mines that also employ the working class of Swat. “Paradise on earth” or not, the Swat valley has seen a large percentage of its able-bodied men out-migrate since the 1950s.

Until 1969, Swat was run as a princely state under an autocratic wali, in a continuation of the administrative structure set up under the British. Though he is remembered as benevolent and forward-looking in his social policies, the wali held a complete monopoly over taxation and the exploitation of natural and mineral resources. Revenue collection rights were given to elites and every household was taxed at a high rate to fill the state’s coffers. The princely state had its own laws and also the privilege of raising an army; indeed, the wali had a personal guard, a cavalry unit and heavy artillery. The Taliban’s desire for autonomy has a precedent.

When I met with Maulana Fazalullah in early 2008 he was considered a ‘dangerous’ man. While the army patrolled the highways and mountain tops attempting to control the so-called Taliban, I was able to walk in to Maulana Fazalullah’s compound at the Imam Dehri center and sit down with him for tea. We spent a couple of hours during which he insistently talked about the corruption and brutalization of the people of the valley of Swat. The men sitting around him echoed his stories with those of their own; the corruption and venality of the police, the exploitation of their forests and water ways, the destruction of their way of life and values at the hands of property speculators and hotel owners, the continued struggle to find a decent life under the boots of the feudasl who decided everything on a whim. Fazalullah never spoke about the Americans, Afghanistan, the ‘war against terror’ or such. He just spoke about Swat, about the areas near and around his village. As we sat there nearly 400 volunteers from villages all over the valley had come down to help construct his new madrassa. They had bought their own food and supplies and were working 24 hours a day to construct the center. And money as well. The army sat on the mountaintops and watched. I am sure they could see that dozens of armed men milling about the compound as well. But it was the highways that they wanted to patrol, the local people they wanted to harass, and the foreign photographers they wanted to take to their ‘posts’ and ‘command centers’.

It does not take a lot of intelligence to see that you are part of a game whose rules are being defined beyond the headlines and journalist pieces.

Ali Eteraz wrote a fascinating piece about the Islamization of Pakistan’s constitution under the direction of Zulfiwar Ali Bhutto. He describes in a piece called Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State, that foreign media’s penchant to see everything in Pakistan exclusively through the distorting prism of ‘the war against terror’:

…these views, rooted in the “war on terror” frame of thinking, diagnose Pakistan’s relationship with Islam incorrectly. The real issue in Pakistan is not that from time to time a group of militants, while demanding the implementation of sharia, begins attacking civilians. This, while deplorable and painful, is a consequence of Pakistan’s constitution. The essential problem in Pakistan is its flawed constitutional framework, which forces every citizen to refer to their idiosyncratic and personal views on life through the lens of “Islam.” Such a state of affairs has the effect of concealing every political, material and economic demand behind theological verbiage, and that situation ultimately favors religious hard-liners and militants who are willing to use violence.

Further pointing out that:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

And that this had devastating consequences for how the people of the country had to use Islamic idioms to demand even the most essential and basics of needs from a government now drowning under the Islamization programs of the self-styled prophet General Zia-Ul-Haq. Even Nawaz Sharif, now desperately attempting to pull on democratic underpants, once attempted to draw up legislation that would have him titled Amir-Ul-Momineen – The Great Leader Of The Believers. Pakistanis do have a wonderful penchant for shallow grandiosity and empty bombast!

And finally, Tariq Ali has recently written a Diary for London Review of Books piece that reminds us of the venality and corruption that is Asif Ali Zardari, and the pathetic state of a nation that is increasingly convinced that in fact it was he who simply murdered his wife, the highly popular, democratic myth known as Benazir Bhutto!

Of course these nuances, particularly those raised by Ali Eteraz and Asdar Ali are difficult to catch in our morning internet read. Pakistan does not really exist, other than as a pawn in a chess game being played in Washington D.C. The people dying on the frontiers of Afghanistan are not real people. President Obama was shedding tears for the killed Iranian activist Neda the same day that his drones slaughtered 60 people in the tribal areas. The cynical exploitation of ‘human concern’ in one instant, and the callous, calculated, inhuman, purely barbaric and cannibalistic indifference to the erasure of another speaks poorly of the popular belief that modernity and morality go hand in hand. The Pakistani government (it should be called the Pakistani Cabal), now in the hands of a rank criminal, is a pawn that can only move in two or three preordained directions. And our reporters arrive in it and report on it with those ‘rules of engagement’ subliminally and explicitly defined.

Let the wars begin!

Photographing Poverty: A Dialogue

I came across this a few days ago and thought that it would prove a provocative read for all of us:

Child Labor: The Sequel

19th Century Public Art in 21st Century Photography

Photographing Poverty: Realism Or Sentimentality

Asim

You Must Remember This, A Kiss Is Still A Kiss, A Lie Is Still A Lie

Losing My Religion To Tomorrow’s Headlines

Via Sepia Mutiny:

This is RizMC

Realities, Myths, Fantasies & Paranoias: The Muslims – Get To Know Them Series

Professor Yoginder Sikand recently posted an extensive review of Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s Who Needs An Islamic State. The book is a fascinating challenge to political Islamists everywhere and confronts them on their simplistic, utopian and definitely mythical ideas about an earlier pure, ideal, perfect Islamic past. As Professor Sikand writes:

El-Affendi is particularly critical of modern Islamist ideologues, such as the Egyptian Syed Qutb and the Pakistani Abul Ala Maududi, who conceived of an ideal Islamic state as being totalitarian, anti-democratic, authoritarian and coercive. He is bitter about what he calls the Islamists’ ‘self-righteous pretensions’, which translates into ‘a readiness to resort to violence at the slightest pretext’. He likens them to the Khawarij or Kharijites, an early splinter group from among the Muslims, who saw themselves alone as true Muslims, and the rest of the world, including other Muslims, as deviant, aberrant, even anti-Islamic, thus ruling out any room for compromise.

While still upholding the notion of a Muslim state molded or guided by religio-moral concerns and principles, el-Affendi points to the serious gaps in modern Islamist political thought, indicating the way forward for the emergence of a genuinely democratic, pluralist and contextually-relevant Muslim political discourse.

∞

I also found Salman Hameed’s blog Irtiqa. As he describes it, it:

…tracks and comments on news relevant to the interplay of science & religion – including scientific debates taking place in the Muslim world. Irtiqa literally means evolution in Urdu. But it does not imply only biological evolution. Instead, it is an all encompassing word used for evolution of the universe, biological evolution, and also for biological/human development. While it has created confusion in debates over biological evolution in South Asia, it provides a nice integrative name for a blog that addresses issues of science & religion.

Salmam Hameed is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Science & Humanities at Hampshire College, Massachusetts and working “…on understanding the rise of creationism in contemporary Islamic world and how Muslims view the relationship between science & religion.”.

Check it out – There was an amusing discussion about a mythical Halal Browser – a poke at the recently announced Koogle a Kosher browser – no, I kid you not! The Halal browser drew some comments from Karachi blogger Tazeen Javed about its seductive features for the obscurantists.

∞

I also found, thanks to Salman Hameed something that I had been looking for for months – a survey of educational institutions in Pakistan and in particular the spread of madrassas as far as the country’s education structure goes. Here is a fascinating piece by Asim Khwaja called The Madrassa Myth that examines how pervasive a presence these religious institutions have in the country. The conclusion: not much! Though as one commentator points out, unregistered madrassas may not be in the data. Worth a read.

∞

And then from my own bookshelves I found, while dusting them of course, copies of Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Islam & Modernity.  Fazlur Rahman studied Arabic at Punjab University,  went to Oxford University where he wrote a thesis on Ibn Sina. He then taught at at Durham University and then at McGill University where he taught Islamic studies until 1961. A noted Islamic scholar, he was also the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. And perhaps most obviously, he was reviled and hounded out of Pakistan where he had been invited to head the Central Institute of Islamic Research. As explained by Hangingodes:

Anyone examining the newspapers of second half of 68′ would know with ease that the whole episode was one of the earliest and most unfortunate sagas of political hijacking of Islam. It is immaterial whether Fazlur Rahman was labeled a kaafir, an apostate or a religious hypocrite and how the political environment at that time overshadowed an otherwise academic issue; what is important however, that Fazlur Rahman proved to be a victim of misdirected traditionalist emotionalism and paid the heavy price of abandoning his cherished goal of transforming intellectual heritage of Muslims and deploying a modern religious education policy in Pakistan.

A brilliant man, a superb scholar, his works are the earliest influence on my own ideas about the study of religions and in particular the rigorous and modern examination and investigation of the religion of Islam. I recommend both Islam and Islam & Modernity as places to start, the latter is in fact a fabulously enlightening work!

India Blogs That Inform, Amuse, Confuse And Enlighten

If you are curious, here are some blog sites by and/or about Indian literature, politics, culture, history, arts etc. that I find fun and inspiring;

• Sepia Mutiny
• Amardeep Singh’s Blog
• Professor Yoginder Sikand’s Blog
• The DesiPundit

Not that you guys have any time to be blog-surfing!

Asim

What I Learnt From My Students & How It Was Not What I Had Planned On Teaching Them!

Earlier this year I taught a 1-week photography workshop in Dubai. I am not fond that city, and deliberately avoid going there for as long as I can remember. It has something to do with an early childhood memory of seeing poor Pakistani laborers being beaten with sticks by security police at the Dubai International Airport. I have since associated feelings of anger and sorrow with that town. But the workshop was being organized by a good friend and I could not say no.

The workshop was meant to be for new photographers – proficient with the technical wizardry of their cameras, but only starting to learn how to create documentary work. On the first day of the workshop I found myself standing in front of 11 students from various backgrounds, and staring at some of the most sophisticated and expensive camera equipment one can buy.

Some of the students were writers and editors from local newspapers and magazines. Others were starting out in photography and hoping to pursue careers as freelance commercial and feature photographers. There were a couple of amateurs who were there just to learn a little more. And a teacher of photographer from Kuwait who wanted to get away from that country and just be amongst others like him i.e. lovers of the craft of picture making.

The workshop outline was quite simple, and I am sharing it here with you because we will talk about some of the issues listed here during out time in Ajmer:

• Dominating Your Camera: S&M (Simple & Manual) Techniques For Controlling the Picture Making Process
  • Understanding light temperature and its impact on the picture
  • Watching light movement and mapping light
  • Measuring light and shooting only when it is right
  • Awareness of geometry and constructing images backwards
  • Out dated techniques for fast focus and proper exposure that can save you millions

• Lost In Space: Story Frameworks And Other Crutches For The Crippled
  • Introducing the story
  • Key story line requirements
  • Developing a checklist
  • What are the themes that will define the story
  • The theory of comic book photo essays and how to graduate to book.

• The Necessary Evil: Dealing with the Subject, Gaining Access and Developing Trust
  • List of subjects
  • Who is the subject or what
  • How do you convince them to let you shoot them
  • Arranging access to locations and individuals
  • Entering, working within and exiting situations/locations

The first day of the workshop went of fine. By the second day we had identified a series of stories the students wanted to shoot, each story contributing to an overarching theme around the issue of the economic crisis and its consequences (both good and bad) for the city. A fairly straight forward and obvious assignment with rich possibilities in this city.

But on the 3rd day things started to go awry.

I noticed that some of the students were avoiding stories that involved negotiating access and working with people! In fact, the act of packing your cameras, heading to a location, and working to negotiate entry and the right to photograph people and their lives proved to be the one thing the students struggled with most!

I had assumed that once the stories were selected, the outlines and frameworks defined, the subjects identified, it would be a relatively easy matter to simply head out, contact the right person, introduce yourself and begin loitering around their lives to find the right pictures. It proved to be the hardest thing to do.

Three students dropped out of the class rather than face their subjects as I kept insisting they had to. Four never actually overcame the process and continued to shoot from the side lines and tangentially. Only four – and its no coincidence that these were the writers and editors, actually managed to get inside the lives of their stories and come back with some surprisingly personal and human pictures.

4 out of 11!

It is one of the hardest things to do in the first few days at the start of any documentary and photographer project – to break through that invisible but concrete wall that first separates you from the stranger you are about to work with. And it can take creativity, compassion, determination and perseverance to scale it and it will test your self confidence and your conviction.

There will be moments at the start of a story, a project, when it will all appear hopeless, when  you will think that there are no images and that there is no story and that the subject will never give, accept or allow you to come close and be part of their lives for even a moment. It will all appear distant, confusing, chaotic and even self destructive as your mind works against itself and its better instincts and tells you to flee! You will feel tired, scared and lost.

The fact is that there is nothing you can do other than to keep going back, to stay longer, to resist the temptation to leave and remain, to put aside the camera and be human.

I did not expect that the last few days of the workshop would be spent encouraging the students to simply hang around, to simply wait and not rush to find the images or the story they had gone there to find. That to find deeper reserves of patience during those first 48-72 hours can be the difference between mediocrity and clarity. And that all photographers, good or bad, unknown or famous, go through this. The best work through it consistently though not necessarily with greater confidence.

We are discussing and thinking a lot about our stories and the readings and the crucial intellectual issues that inform them. But come August 10th you will be asked to start to think as a human being walking in to the lives of other human beings who are from a different class, ethnicity, culture, society, religion and come with vastly different life experiences, outlook and concerns. Suddenly all that we have read and thought about will fall to the wayside and we will be confronted with our own fears, insecurities, uncertainties and doubts.

Suddenly we will sense our frailties and our human doubts. And it will all happen in front of people who will be taking you as a serious professional and expecting you to know exactly what it is that you are looking for and need.

We need to be prepared to be tested. And to realize that it is not just a matter of scaling the wall, but of doing so such that the other welcomes you across. This is in the end a documentarian’s greatest asset; the ability to overcome the divide and get to a place where the subject offers you their hospitality, reveals to you their intimate concerns, shares with you their joys and troubles and believes that you are there to speak about and for them with integrity, honesty and humanity.

Scaling this wall is about going from being a stranger to becoming a trusted partner. And it will take perseverance and belief. That is why we have focused so much on selecting the stories and hopefully each of you has selected one your believe in and are seriously engaged with.

Those of you with more experience should be ready to help and support the others. I and Sara will of course be there, though I can confirm that I face these moments of severe doubt practically every time I go out to shoot. So you will not be alone – I will be cowering in the corners with you!

The stuff in the workshop outline above is the easy part. We will get through that without concern. And we have a fabulous 2-weeks to work through the rest. As Sara has repeatedly pointed out – this will be a unique experience and I am still impressed that the school is encouraging this level of on-the-ground work from its students. Some, not all, will jump over that wall without a thought. Others will take some more time. Regardless, it will be seen and felt by all, I promise you that. The question we will have to ask ourselves is how do we negotiate it so that it reveals what is on the other side and not damage it.

Asim

Panic Not! Ira Glass To The Rescue

After reading some of the recent posts focusing on the divergent and/or contradictory demands of academic and photographic project objectives, I thought that it would be useful for you all to step back and reconsider things.

Ira Glass. This American Life. A brilliant story teller. An amazing journalist. An inspiration to many. My friend Zoriah reminded me that perhaps the students should hear him talk about creative story telling and how the best of them actually work. He himself has written a post about Ira Glass on his blog.

So I am posting a bunch of his videos for you here so that you are inspired and excited and liberated!

And another where he talks about finding stories

And then of course the discussion wanders over to why failure is inevitable but holds us together is our aesthetic values (this is my favorite video in the sequence.)

And finally, the 2 major mistakes beginners make; to abandon your life and to abandon yourself in your work!

Ajmer is an incredible and rare opportunity to explore and unleash a creative side to you that liberates you from the strict, often well defined requirements of academic work. That is, you have to appreciate that the stories inAjmer allow you to tickle that human, creative, and imaginative side of you that you may typically hold back in your academic writings. That is, be quirky, be unconventional, be daring and be simply inspired. Not to say that all that can’t be applied to academic research and writings, but I think you all understand what I mean.

This is about story telling. It is about creating something that excites, informs and inspires. It is actually more difficult than a written paper because you do not have the luxury of endless references, tangential discussions on background, footnotes and such. It is just a pure, simple, straight forward story.

And it is a fabulous complement to what you are typically used to delivering; the photography reveals the human consequences and responses to the broader, underlying, academic issues you are exploring. Think of it as the hook that compels someone to read your more detailed research. For example, if we are examining Special Economic Zones (SEZ) than the research speak to their origins, goals and reasoning for creation, and also to the resistance of the local communities and why. The photo project then can reveal the human side of this story through one individual and concentrate on their agency, their response and their views. So the two work together!

We are 3 weeks away from entering a new world of people we typically do not meet and definitely do not know. This can be scary, but it is also one of the most exciting things you will do in your life. I promise you that.

Do not approach the photography like an assignment because you will struggle, panic and worse, fail at it. Approach photography as a human being first, who is meeting and trying to understand the lives, experiences and perspectives of other human beings. Hear their stories, and most importantly, hear your own responses to their stories. And it is in these personal responses that you photos and your narrative will begin to offer itself.

I quote Huxley: Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.

And what you do with your experiences with these amazing people you will meet will be based on you as an individual, a human being and then as a photographer using photographs and text to express it.

Where The Head Spun: Sunday, 12th July 2009

This week has been busy with some writings on The Idea of India photo project, but I did manage to come across some fascinating stuff:

Ikea Is As Bad A Wal-Mart; A piece in Salon magazine that reviews Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book Cheap.

Yes, it is our consumer habits that are driving these climate changes – the degradation of the soil, the cutting of forests, the polluting of the oceans, the exploitation of human labor in china and mexico, to name just two places, is all for the sake of our cheap consumer goods.  We may prefer to avoid this fact by trying to simply shop ‘green’, but shopping, and repeateded, frequent cycles of shopping are in fact why the problems are emerging.

Shell’s argument is simple; buy cheap and you have to buy often and hence continue to fuel the hunger of the machinery that in the end churns away at human lives (cheap labor) and the earth (trees, oil, water, cultivatable land, fresh water etc.). So avoid IKEA!

∞

Dr. R.K.Pachauri has a blog! I did not realize this. Dr. Pachauri is the Director General of The Energy & Resource Institute (TERI) and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and winner of a Nobel Prize for his team’s work on the environment.  Some interesting quotes:

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) brought out a report in 2006 which estimates emissions of GHGs from agriculture as a whole, of which 80 percent are accounted for by livestock production. These constitute 18 percent of all GHG emissions from human activities. An interesting comparison between a vegetarian meal and a beef steak, for instance, was provided by The New York Times in its issue of 27 January 2008 which is revealing. A meal consisting of 1 cup of broccoli, 1 cup of eggplant, 4 ounces cauliflower and 8 ounces of rice results in 0.4 pounds of emissions of CO2 equivalent. On the other hand a 6 ounce beef steak results in 10 pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions, which amount to 25 times that of the vegetarian meal with which the comparison was made.

Apparently the retarded Mayor of London was miffed and said that he would now eat twice the beef he normally did! I guess he has friends in the beef industry!

∞

Arundhati Roy seems to have lost her faith in the direction of modern ‘democracy’ particularly because, as she argues in her piece Democracy’s Failing Light, it has become a brand usurped by the most venal and calculated of opportunists, and used to veil injustices and terrible violence. Interestingly Pankaj Mishra had expressed similar dismay in an earlier piece called The Banality of Democracy where he argued that ‘democracy’ has become a theater that hides extremes of violence, and where the language of ‘elections’, ‘votes’, ‘citizen rights’, ‘liberty’ etc. is used to silence genuine freedom and justice.

∞

Today’s While You Wait Lobotomy Special! come from  this interview with director Claude Lanzmann, speaking about his new film called Tsahal.

I was laughing so hard that in fact I could not even post a link to this frankly retarded conversation when I first read it a week ago.  What adds spice to it is the subtlety of the interview who is clearly repulsed by Lanzmann’s racist and, lets be honest, stupid answers.

When asked a question (and it is clear that Lanzmann’s intellectual myopia does not allow him to recognize that the interviewer is setting him up), about why Israeli life is worth more than that of others, he says:

The answer goes back to the Shoah, the murder of the Jews in the Second World War. There are very few families in Israel who did not lose one or several members in the Shoah. The number of Jewish victims killed in wars and attacks must at all costs – and I mean that absolutely literally– be kept as low as possible. That is the maxim.

And the inanities continue, when further into the interview, and now clearly loosing hold on his sanity, Lanzmann reveals a toy soldier’s love of weapons of slaughter:

Weapons play a central role in my film. But I don’t know whether I would say they “fascinate” me. That’s not a fair word. Because the film is never about fascination. And yet I can certainly say that tanks are the most extraordinary machines. And the most extraordinary tank of all is the Israeli Merkava, because it was built in absolutely impossible conditions. The tank commanders love their Merkavas. The tank units spend at least three years of their lives in them. The Merkava was developed by the Israeli General Tal. He features prominently in my film. He says that Israel is an ideal country in which to develop tanks further and wage wars with them.

All this would just be interesting amusement, like reading the diary of a ’slow’ friend at school, if it were not for the fact that the interview is packed solid with false histories carried over from the 1950s! Mythological references to the ‘Jews sense of defensiveness’ are trotted out to argue and defend Israel’s current aggressions and love of violence. As if there isn’t a people, nation, class or ethnicity who couldn’t construct a narrative of past sufferings and argue for their need to perpetuate new ones! The Israeli canard of the ‘uniqueness’ of the Jew’s suffering is bandied about with abandon, and I guess leaving many an Armenian, Bangladeshi, Mapuche and yes Palestinian salivating at their ‘right’ to then perpetuate their own mass slaughters in the future!

Reductive ideas of about Arabs and Palestinians are displayed to create another old canard; Israel is perpetuatlly under threat and so it must kill – they make us kill them! Viva Meir!

Its is amusing and funny, and I wish the interviewer was even more acerbic and explicit in his disdain which he clearly has but holds in check.

And finally, the great toy soldier moment does arrive, this strange boy’s love for the butcher’s tools. The interviewer subtly tricks Lanzmann into revealing an infantile worship of weapons, like a boy who buys a sports car to compensate for his cowardice and overwhelming sense of inadequecy. I qoute Lanzmann’s hilarious reply:

Of course I rode in a tank during the filming of “Tsahal”. I have also shotgrenades from a Merkava. It was really easy to hit a stationary target, but I found it extremely difficult to hit a moving one. I have also flown on reconnaissance missions. During the work on my film I also saw the first prototypes for unmanned flights, drones, which were invented and developed in Israel. They are very unusual machines, but they do not feature in my film.

Oh dear. He rode a tank – Yeeeee Haaaaa! Lets get me one of them A-rabs!!

∞

Over at Dissent the writer/intellectual Ali Iteraz in a piece called Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State reminds us, particularly those from Pakistan, that the country’s slide towards becoming a religiously drunk state is  nothing new and does not begin just because of America’s recent wars in Afghanistan. He takes us back to the years of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – the man who is now a myth so sacrosanct that we forget that he began his career kissing up to Pakistan’s earliest dictators, precipitated 2 wars, and was directly responsible for the break-away of Bangladesh, not to say anything about the genocide that he helped encourage there. Some quotes:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

And as the government and its working increasingly articulated their objectives and plans through a language religious, the people too learned that couching their demands in religious terms was perhaps the only way to find action from the government. As Iteraz says:

Over the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan’s marginalized people also learned how to put Islam to political use.

In 1994, the poor locals of the quasi-autonomous Swat region, languishing in a broken colonial-era legal scheme, agitated for a more efficient system called “Sharia Nizam e Adl.” This system, being local and cultural in origin and mostly the construction of a man named Sufi Mohammad, had very little in common with the sharia that exists in the classical books of Islamic Law. But the Swatis figured that appealing to Islam would work, because, after all, everyone else did the same when they wanted their material concerns addressed. They turned out to be right. Benazir Bhutto’s government quickly consented.

His conclusion is, and it relates to the situation in Swat and other regions, that people are arguing through the prism of Islam because for decades that has been the only means to reach decision makers, and to effect any sort of legislative and political action on matters of justice, rights, and needs. I quote Iteraz again:

What is happening with the widespread religious militancy in Pakistan today is that the political and feudal elite like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who initially were beneficiaries of manipulating the Islamic character of Pakistan, have lost control of “Islam” to a much broader class of people. These out-of-power groups, after decades of alienation, want to have control in the political system and are attempting to acquire it by defining Islam, which is an amorphous idea, in a way they deem most suitable. Every day the abstract cry of sharia becomes a means of political agitation. Every day people organize into new movements around the declaration.

I recommend the entire piece, particularly to those who insist on solving abstractions with yet another delusional one that goes something like ‘If we implement true Islam we will solve all this’ or ‘Islam does not advocate violence’ and other such inanities. These are political and social issues – of man, for man and by man. Man uses whatever references, languages and forms he needs to argue for his food, his shelter and his security. It can be ‘democracy’, it can be ‘Islam’, it can be any number of abstract slogans, but underneath they are fueled by fundamental needs.

The Shock Of Gaza Or Salvaging Something From What Was Nearly Nothing

A few days after arriving in Gaza last January, I posted the following piece on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting’s Untold Stories blog site dedicated to the Gaza project that writer Elliott Woods and I were working on. I think it fairly captures what was going on in my head during that time.

On the Getty Images archive you can type in ‘Gaza Destroyed’ and retrieve over 5,500 images to select from.  If you run the query ‘Gaza Funerals’ you will get back over 7,000 images.  I was unable to check the Corbis archives because at the time of writing this entry their site was undergoing maintenance.  But I am confident that I would find a similarly large number of images for both the queries above.

The challenge for a photographer arriving in Gaza is that s/he is walking into a place that has been consistently and extensively photographed for decades, and that there are many fine, talented and professional Palestinian photographers who carry out this task for their various agencies.  In addition, some of the best and most talented international photojournalists have also made Gaza the focus of their work.

I have arrived in Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s most recent military operation against the region, Operation Cast Lead.  And I find that though the scale of this latest venture is larger than anything I can remember from my previous travels to Gaza, its impact and consequences are very familiar.

The official numbers state that over 1,300 people have been killed, of which it is believed that nearly 400 were children, about 50,000 made homeless, and over 5000 left seriously injured.

I arrived in Gaza just as the cease fire had been declared and I had been immediately struck by how familiar it all seemed.

The day before as I stood on the Egyptian border with Rafah and watched Israeli jets dropping their payload on buildings and tunnel construction sites I was unsure of my decision to proceed.  Cowardice has been my best friend and protected me from many dangers.

Why would I not listen to it now?

My first trip to Gaza was in 2003.  I then returned and continued to document the situation here, particularly in Rafah, Gaza, in 2004 and 2005.  The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement, and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along Rafah’s border with Egypt.

Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for this steel wall.  Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents.

As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses.

And now, as I walk through the devastation in Gaza from the most recent Israeli operation, I am struck by how familiar and how similar it all looks.  My photographs from this morning look little different from those I took back in 2003, 2004 and 2005!  In fact, a simple re-edit of the captions of my previous work and I could convince you that the photograph was taken just yesterday!

The scale is different.  Absolutely.  But the visible consequences are the same as: dead bodies and lost lives; destroyed homes and displaced families; angry funerals and political exploitation; protest marches and armed men promising revenge; physical destruction and families trying to rebuild.

We have been here before.  We are here again.

As I walk through Gaza with my little camera in hand, and around me scramble some of the world’s finest photojournalists capturing yet more of what we have already known and seen, I am desperately trying to find my own voice to this story.  And it is not helping that I know that in the not too distant future there will be yet more confrontations, and more military operations, and more funerals, and marches, and destroyed homes and displaced lives.

The cycle repeats itself.

Is there a way to stop the images from doing the same?

Asim Rafiqui, Untold Stories, January 22nd 2009

The work that emerged, first the documentation of the things and people left behind, and the portraits were a result of an adjustment that had to be made when I was confronted with the reality I saw and also the reality I felt. Gaza was there and dozens took it, but there was also a very personal reaction to coming back, a reaction I had not anticipated even as I had stood on the Rafah, Egypt border watching Israeli jets bombing tunnels a mere 100 meters away! It was only once I was in, and after a few days spent walking around and talking to people, that things started to fall apart.

This has happened before. It happened on a project about Polish immigrants in Slough, UK. The entire project work plan fells apart as I arrived in this incredibly non-descript, non-Polish town with nary a physical, cultural, or architectural clue to the presence of Poles – it just looked like any other lame, UK industrial city!

It happened in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti where the story refused to offer itself until and unless some personal risks that I had previously considered unnecessary had to be taken. Writer Malcolm Garcia and I discussed our situation for a couple of days at least before a decision was made to change our approach and go into the story in a new way.

And that uncertainty is in fact exciting, and a source of creativity if you can work through it. There have been instances when I have failed to work through – I never show those projects! I will share some of those situations with you when we meet in Ajmer.

How We Refused To Embed With Britney Spears!

I woke up this morning and read the following piece of news:

“Sweden’s four national newspapers, Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet boycotting Britney Spears concert at the Globe July 13. The organizer needs to press photographers must sign a contract that gives her the copyright to the images, and the right to decide which images may be published. ‘If they do not tear the contract we will not shoot,’ says DN’s image manager Roger Turesson.”

And I soon wafted into a day-dream that took me back to the world in late 2002 as the final touches were being put on the US military journalist embed program, and this announcement hit the front pages of a oh-so-imaginary-but-courageous New York Times:

“America’s four national newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribue are boycotting George Bush’s  Gulf War to be held in 2003. The organizers of this event demand that press photographers sign a contract that gives them [the organizers] the right to decide which images may be published and what, if anything, they will be allowed to document. ‘If they do not tear the contract we will not shoot,’ says New York Times photo editor Jane ‘battlefield” Schmoe.”

I have been accused of naivete, and stupidity by those in positions of ‘power’ at magazines and newspapers for constantly harping on this.

Today, with memories that do not go beyond the 24 hour news cycle, editors justify their decisions to continue to ‘embed’ their reporters with the arguments like ‘there is no other way to do it – its too dangerous otherwise’. They fail to realize that this is precisely what the embed program hoped to achieve beyond its simple control of the ‘image’ of the war.

We live in the very house we built!

(UPDATE: 25th July 2009: NBC’s new prime-time titilation is called The Wanted that unites ’special operations’ operatives with self-declared ‘journalists’ to hunt down what they describe – without evidence, right to defense, process of law, right to counsel, a fair trial and a full hearing of course, are the world’s most dangerous ‘terrorists’. Where they get this list is easily guessed at. But, my point is underlined by such lunatic programming – our ‘journalists’, our ‘military’, our ‘intelligence’ and our ‘government’ continue to conflate. and continue to loose credibility. we are not even pretending any more!)

By getting in to bed with one of the belligerents we asked our journalists and photojournalists to participate in acts of war. The Iraqi and Afghani has been dehumanized but can we for a moment imagine what it must look like from the hell they are standing and looking from?

Dressed as toy soldiers in camouflage our reporters/photographers are seen strutting around in US military camps, sitting inside US army Humvees during patrols, chatting it up with US army personnel as civilian bodies lay shredded all around, sharing meals with those who break through doors and threaten families, walking away with soldiers as they humiliate and drag men to prisons, sharing sleeping quarters with those who torture them, and speaking fluently the language of the pillager and occupier.

That is, as pure and simple collaborators with what are illegal, and brutal wars of occupation and pillage.

Is it any wonder then that it is ‘too dangerous’ to cover it from outside the embed?

I will add that real reporters have covered the war in Iraq from outside the ‘voice over’ of the US military. Urban Hamid and Dahr Jamal come to mind, and also the group of young photographers who took considerable risks to produce independent stories from the country and the war and horror that was bestowed on her by our leaders.

I will also add that there are those who did embed, and came back with stories and images that spoke beyond what they were intended to do. Chris Hondros comes to mind, Zoriah and also Ashley Gilbertson to name a few. But these are exceptions that reveal ways that individuals have attempted to get something more out of a bad situation. They are all unique characters, not easily usurped by others and their work beyond Iraq continues to confirm this. I am sure that there are others, but again, these are people working ‘against’ the strictures of the embed program and allowing themselves to think beyond what is being shown.

And perhaps in a great irony, I remember an Iraq photojournalist telling me that it was the ordinary soldiers that were most keen on helping him see the things the Army did not want us to see – they helped him and encouraged him to photograph the insanity of war perhaps in the hope that the images could stop their involvement in this madness!

It can be done, it has been done by more and it is the only and the right way to report these wars. But it takes commitment and a willingness to understand why we are ‘reporters’ and ‘photojournalists’ in the first place.

It can still be done.

The newspapers can still come together and finally refuse to participate in the embed program and possibly even pool their financial resources to allay costs. Imagine if tomorrow all reporters simply refused, announced that they were going to arrive independent of military cover and start to work to establish an independent presence inside Iraq and Afghanistan and make the investments to rebuild trust and credibility with them, and with us here in the USA.

We need to rebuild our commitment to journalism and in particular in the eyes and minds of the people who are dying for ‘our protection’ and our supposedly sacrosanct ‘way of life’!

Newspapers and news agencies around the world have in fact organized boycotts on a number of occasions.  A little research shows however that they mostly tend to be aimed at pop stars, and sporting organizers. There was a slightly annoying incident with the National Football League some years ago, another with the Indian IPL cricket leage and then another with the football World Cup, and another with the Australian Cricket Board. I believe that the band ColdPlay was also the target of a threat of an organized boycott.

If we can confront the power of Britney, why not then the US military?

UPDATES: Some pieces that I came across that highlight the situation in Afghanistan a little better include Escalation Scam by Norman Soloman and a review by Ann Jones of the HBO film Fixer called Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions. I also found the hilarious but vividly revealing blog site for freelance reporter P.J.Tobia who is reporting the daily realities of Kabul and other places he visits.

NOTE: I realize that this boycott, like any against a pop star or a sports league, is less about ethics and standards and more about money. Rights to images determines of who gets the financial benefits of the images. However, the same argument can also be made for why American newspapers so eagerly jumped into bed with the US military; there was just more money to be made. It is easier to give people what they want than to adhere to the ethical obligations of your profession. Journalism is not just a business but, much like health care, also a public good. It is why profiteering by medical insurance companies or health care companies, so repulses us. Remember the Hippocratic Oath? We believe in the sanctity of the profession and its ethics reflect the ethics of our society; we care for all and it is just. It is what defines a civilized and developed society. Journalism is similarly – a public good and has priorities and responsibilities that go beyond money making. It has to balance profits with professional responsibility to serve the public. So yes, of course, embedding was easy and profitable and every one was doing it and it was going to be a huge seller since the nation was drunk of mindless patriotism that demanded blood and soon. We wanted pictures of heroes and liberators, not questions about the immorality and illegality of the wars, the fake intelligence reports, the lies at the UN or about ‘yellow’ cake and so on and so forth. I know all this. I still remain naive, and stupid, and idealistic and believe that regardless of the market share value improvement, it was the wrong decision and one that continues to hurt the newspapers and us as a society and a now-struggling democracy.)

Great Moments In Film History: The Bat Mitzvah Singer, Starsky & Hutch

The singer is Dan Finnerty, and the scene is from the otherwise lame movie re-make of the tv series Starsky & Hutch starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughan and Ben Stiller.

Finnerty is also the wedding singer in this classic scene from the film Old School – watch Will Ferrell’s reaction!

There are things that only Hollywood can pull off!.

Fighting Ghosts And Selling The Good War Or Why Are The Toy Soldiers On The Front Lines!

Alex Webb Magnum Photos: The Invasion of Haiti 1994

The silence is deafening. As American troops are dropped in on Afghanistan to fight their fantasy war, there is no sound from our defenders of truth and checkers of power i.e. the media, about the operation, its objectives, our continued presence in the country, our blood thirsty allies, our ‘pretend’ Afghani democracy, our support of drug lords and genocidiares, our consistent killing of innocents and our blind faith in our own righteousness and unquestioned right to trample on another people and bend them to ‘our ways.

The glory of war is being sold on the front pages of our newspapers, none of which have the courage to ask what they know is in fact a fake war, aimed at a poor and defenseless people, fueled by the ‘intelligence’ and advice of a group of venal, corrupt, blood thirsty and power hungry clique of Afghani warlords, drug barons and oil huckster!

Here is The Washington Post’s idea of war. How purposeful!

Here is The Sacramento Bee looking at this war. How glorious!

Here is The Denver Post blinding themselves. Oh, Our Lord Calls!

Did someone in a marketing department at the pentagon think to arrange all this to coincide with hysteria and myopia that typically captures the nation on every 4th of July? I have to think so. Could they have found a better moment to sell ‘the good soldier’, and the righteous nation, by launching what is increasingly looking like yet another ‘ghost’ operation meant more for ‘domestic’ consumption and sales rather than any serious attempt to go after any real enemy. That something called ‘The Taliban’ are a manufactured foe is something I have written about in an earlier piece called To The Last Man: Fighting The Wrong War in Afghanistan. At most a band of village elders and fanatics with AK-47s scrambling about the remotest and barren regions of the globe have been re-cast as an existential threat to the world’s most powerful military and imperial power, and we all have fallen for it like children for the tooth fairy. Our think tanks, media ‘intellectuals’ and pundits, newspaper columnists and our politicians have become the finest marketing arms of the brand called ‘Al Qaeda’ and ‘The Taliban’, a brand that is perpetually maintained in front of our eyes and sold complete with music, video, and live performances such as this latest operation in Afghanistan.

I am reminded of the ‘great’ American military fantasy in the little country of Haiti – and Alex Webb was there to cut past the lies that these ‘toy soldier’ photojournalists love to sell once their work is done. He was abused for his ‘irresponsible’ pictures. I on the other hand remember hearing a rare honest voice.

Soon these ‘war’ pictures will be sent to competition around the globe, and winners will give interviews about how they wanted to ’shed light on the truth’ and other such gibberish that is used to obscure the fact they mostly want to glorify themselves. This band of clowns who confuse bravado with bravery  will then be awarded trinkets at annual photo competitions by behind-the-desk warriors in offices at major magazine headquarters in metropolises around the globe. No questions will be asked about the veracity of the work, the independence of the sources, the commitment of the individual.

Chris Hedges said it best in a piece called On War:

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war—death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.

Professor Marc Herold has been working to reveal the media’s role in selling us war. In a piece called War As An Edsel: The Marketing & Consumption Of Modern American Wars he points out that

By the first Gulf War, reporters were confined to pools and the Pentagon distributed video-game like footage to TV channels extolling the precision of U.S. weaponry. In September/October 2001, the Bush Administration hired the public relations firm, Rendon Group1, and also Ms. Charlotte Beers, former “queen of Madison Avenue” and chairperson of both advertising giants J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather (she had successfully promoted Head & Shoulders shampoo and Uncle Ben’s Rice), to “explain” the new Bush wars to Muslims abroad (and the American consumer), creating the new post for her of the State Department’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy with a half billion dollar budget.2 According to Colin Powell, Beers was fluent with branding and she was:

“from the advertising business. I wanted one of the world’s greatest advertising experts, because what are we doing? We’re selling. We’re selling a product. That product we are selling is democracy.”

Democracy sold abroad, war sold at home. But while the battle for minds abroad led by Beers and Rendon fared badly in Muslim lands, the battle on the home front to persuade the American public led by MIMIC succeeded eminently. The Bush Administration worked hard to encourage and benefit from a compliant mainstream domestic corporate media – led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Time Warner’s CNN, the Clear Channel radio network, radio talk shows, and major dailies like the New York Times, the Los Angles Times, and the Washington Post and journals like Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard – which served as giant megaphones of State Department and Pentagon positions on the Bush wars… Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the country, has scrapped even any pretense of objectivity with its sponsorship of pro-war rallies in major cities throughout the U.S. The mainstream media bosses recognized – led by CNN’s coverage of Iraq in 1991 – that media flag-waving, fabricated personal story heroics, action-movie like storytelling, techno reporting could boost TV ratings and profits.

And so here we go again – the blatant entanglement of our media barons with the purveyors of power are known and obvious and the war in Afghanistan is being ‘produced’ for us much as the previous wars. The tired cliches are being published by machine-tool journalists who cannot even bother to confront the obfuscating language they have become so used to using. Rory Stewart recently wrote about the use of language to curtail thought and achieve results in a piece called The Irresistible Illusion :

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’.,,It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists…It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate.

Our ‘brave’ photojournalists continue to cloister their minds and thump their chests as they rush into ‘combat’ protected of course by entire battalions of some of the best trained military men and women in the world. No need to think how they got there, or why they are there on the front lines.

The toy soldier lives.

The Afghani dies.

I still wonder how we got here and why the slide to this mediocrity has proven so easy!

Digital Image Management…Again

Some of you have been asking questions about which tools and what versions and such, so I thought it best to write another discussion about software and specifically about image manipulation tools.

First, there is no need to invest a lot of money in tools like Photoshop CS 3 or CS 4 if you have not already done so. Photoshop is expensive. This is a narrative photography workshop and our focus is on our stories, and the way in which we construct them and present them. This is not a photography tools and image enhancement workshop so we need to worry about whether we have the ‘best’ or the ‘latest’. We just need the workable.

There are some excellent image manipulation tools that pretty much do all if not more than Photoshop CS 3/4 offer. Remember that Photoshop was not specifically designed for photographers, and there are products now available that were in fact specifically designed for photographers.

Tools like GIMP and GIMPShop are free, created under the Open Source software development structure. They are reliable and excellent and do most all that Photoshop can. And there are simpler, more basic products also available on the internet but the nice thing about the GIMP structure is that it can handle most all RAW formats including the .DNG format.

Also, there are the more simpler photographic tools like Lightroom and Aperture, but one that few people know about and is in fact very good is LightZone. It quite cheap, less than $100, and more importantly, it is fast, completely non-destructive in its image tools and of a size that will not grab a lot of your hard disk space.

I already discussed alternatives to iView Media Pro in a previous post.

Ok, enough about toys!

Our Unbreakable Bond With…Er…Some Israelis

In response to an earlier post I received some comments that claimed, in an ironic mimicry of an idiotic argument often used by the Israeli government, that ‘there was no one to talk to’ in Israel, I am putting up this post to help us find ‘people to talk to’ in Israel.

So here are some suggestions for organizations we would do well to join, support, participate with, talk to and stand alongside.

• B’Tselem
• Gisha
• Yesh G’vul
• Combatants for Peace
• Breaking the Silence
• Rabbis for Human Rights
• Hadash
• Peace Now
• The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions
• Courage to Refuse
• Parent’s Circle
• Anarchists Against the Wall
• Gush Shalom
• The International Solidarity Movement

I am little tired of the simplistic and dismissive ideas about Israel that seem to pervade conversations many young people from backgrounds Muslim. We have allowed our anger at the wrongs committed against the Palestinians to reduce us to ignorance and mindless invective.  I have said it before and I will say it again; we do not know Israel and the decades of ignorance of  its society, politics, history, culture, conflicts, strains and possibilities weakens our goals and our cause for the search for justice for the Palestinians.

Another place to begin would be to read those who know her, and write about her from within. Journalists like Jonathan Cook have been covering Israel’s politics and society for years. His books (Disappearing Palestine, Israel & The Clash of Civilizations and Blood & Religion) and articles reveal the complex political and societal workings of the country and help us understand her policies towards the Palestinians and the various agendas at work. His work helps us understand where to focus our resistance.

Ignorance, stupidity, and sheer thick headedness will not change anything, nor will it weaken the resolve of those we wish to confront and stop. There are individuals in Israel, yes, Jews, who are opposed to her policies and her terrorism against the Palestinians. These Jews, these Israelis, share with us our understanding of human life, morality and justice. So why not join them, stand alongside them, add our voices to theirs just as they will add their voices to ours?

If You Are In Chicago…

…then this may be worth stopping by for a listen:

Projects Related To Women's Issues

For those of you looking at issues related to women in India, or matters of social justice in general, here are a couple of organizations based in New Delhi that could offer an invaluable place to start are:

JAGORI

SHAKTI SHALINI

You can also read more about women’s organizations, NGOs and such at InfoChange India. They also have a links to many institution and other resources that could be useful.

I would recommend stopping by there when you guys are in New Delhi, though of course I expect that where relevant you would be contacting them now.

Asim

Give Me A Homeopathic Lager Baby!

more about “Give Me A Homeopathic Lager Baby!“, posted with vodpod

Homeopathic medicine has been under even more intense scrutiny lately.

The death of Thomas and Manju Sam’s 9 year old daughter made this a major news story. As Phil Plait, of Discovery Magazine’s Bad Astronomy Blog, wrote:

The infant girl, Gloria Thomas, died of complications due to eczema. Eczema. This is an easily-treatable skin condition (the treatments don’t cure eczema but do manage it), but that treatment was withheld from the baby girl by her parents, who rejected the advice of doctors and instead used homeopathic treatments. The baby’s condition got worse, with her skin covered in rashes and open cracks. These cracks let in germs which her tiny body had difficulty fighting off. She became undernourished as she used all her nutrients to fight infections instead of for growth and the other normal body functions of an infant. She was constantly sick and in pain, but her parents stuck with homeopathy. When the baby girl developed an eye infection, her parents finally took her to a hospital, but it was far too late: little Gloria Thomas succumbed to septicemia from the infection.

Gloria’s parents were convicted of manslaughter in an Australian court. Gloria suffered horribly in her last weeks. Doctors have testified to that fact. I can’t help but feel for the Sams. They must carry their pain with them, for they loved their daughter and wanted only what was best and right. Personally I feel that they should have been forgiven by the court, because the loss they have suffered, a loss they will carry for life, is punishment enough.

There are many who defend such practices – those claiming ‘holistic’ thinking, or ’spiritual’ beliefs, or espousing convictions in ‘chakras‘ and the ‘life forces’ around man.

So be it.

But they would do well to remember that belief is not fact and that conviction is not truth. Homeopathic doctors, chiropractors, and other ‘higher spiritualists’ are exploiting gullible individuals who may otherwise mean well in their search for greater truths. Yet the same people, many from well-to-do middle-class, educated backgrounds, will scoff with scorn at ritual exorcisms of demons, voodoo fire rituals, and other ‘backward’ or ‘tribal’ customs. They fail to see the similarities.

Modern medicine has its own issues, not the least of which today is the dangerous and probably fatal nexus of corporate interests, profiteering and the excessive influence pharmaceutical firms have on our doctors and hospitals. But the facts are that modern medicine works, and that it has to remain the principal resort of the sick and seriously ill.

Drink real beer. Take real medicine.

UPDATE: My friend Nicole Slavin pointed me to a couple of sites that continue their struggle to bring sense and sensibility to the self-indulgent and deluded. Check out The Skeptics Guide To The Universe and Sense About Science. The Discovery Magazine blog mentioned above is called Bad Astronomy Blog

Broken Promise: Israel Known & Unknown

HAMID SAMONI Father of Zakaria Hamid Samoni, 8 years of age, who was killed by a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter

The Summer 2009 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine dedicated to matters Middle East has been published just as Amnesty International releases its report on Israel’s 22 day assault that began on December 27th 2008 on the territory of Gaza.

The report (download a copy at this link) provides a broad human rights and war crimes background to the work that writer Elliott Woods and I recently completed in Gaza thanks to the generous support of the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.

Elliott Woods essay Hope’s Coffin focuses on Gaza’s young generation and its view of the future. My essay Portraits of Survival steps away from the conventional Gaza conflict photography and concentrates on portraits of people left to deal with the scars of this recent conflict. You can also read our field reports that we compiled for The Pulitzer Center while we were on the ground in Gaza.

Peter Lagerquist has also contributed with an amazing piece called Tracing Concrete that examines the who examines the legacy of British methods of detention and barricading in Palestine, a legacy that now live on in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The issue emerges a few weeks after some other news. Noted Israeli writer, journalist and intellectual Amos Elon passed away on the 25th of May 2009. His voice, his views and his courage in speaking honestly about the situation in Israel/Palestine will be greatly missed. As Tony Judt says in his obituary:

Amos Elon’s commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question. But for just this reason his awkward stance, relentlessly engaging with the country’s failings, set him apart. His courageous refusal to endorse the clichés with which Israel’s defenders parry every criticism contrasts not only with the defensiveness of contemporary left-wing Israeli commentators but also and especially with the pusillanimous apologetics of Israel’s American claque.

His pieces in The New York Review of Books – Olmert & Israel, and Israelis & Palestinians are just samples that offer us insights into his clarity of thought and courage of conviction. And it his breath of vision that also offered us insights into the failings of the Palestinian leadership that is also responsible for the mess their people are in today. Again, from Tony Judt’s obituary:

His sympathy for the “stateless, dispossessed, and dispersed Palestinians” did not blind him to the ineptness of their leaders. He had met enough Arab and Palestinian politicians to know just how inadequate they were to the tragedy of their peoples and the tasks facing them.

His pieces provide us an important and complex backdrop to the crisis in the region and the forces that work against what most would call a just and civilized solution.

In addition, the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk also passed away recently. He wrote frequently in Le Monde Diplomatique and was a incisive thinker about the state of Israel and her politics. His pieces for the Le Monde Diplomatique like Limits to Tolerance , Israel’s Failed Invasion, and Israel: An Army In Power remind us once again of the powerful voices within Israeli society, politics, media and culture that are not cowed by her leader’s trenchant and shrill assault on things human, moral and just.

We do not know Israel. I am always struck by the fact that so few photojournalists have paid attention to the complexities and conflicts within Israel. As a photographer I remain dismayed at how little photo-journalistic work has been done on the country itself rather than its occupations next door. I believe that today we can learn more about the nature and reasons for the occupations and wars by looking inside Israel. To understand why life in Gaza is as it is one has to look at the Israeli communities around Gaza.

Writer Peter Lagerquist has argued this frequently and even created a powerful proposal for a magazine piece on this. As yet my attempts to take his ideas to photo editors have only been met with blank stares. It seems that we are either not ready to ’see’ Israel, or not ready to engage in the complex.

In the Arab world the country is seen as a monolithic pathology, a state consisting of homogeneously fanatic ‘yehudis’ with a thirst for Arab blood. To say nothing about the many ‘James Bond/007′-inspired conspiracies that simply exaggerate her powers and influences around the globe, to say nothing about bestowing its incompetent and mediocre leaders and secret agencies like Mossad with intelligence and a genius they hardly deserve!

Its complexities are lost to most, and with them the chance to engage and join the voices that are from within Israel speaking out against her injustices. We know well the righteousness and religiously sanctioned occupations of the West Bank and Gaza, the continued discrimination and harassment of its Arab citizens, its amnesia about the violence and inhumanity that underlined her founding, its celebration of violence as emancipation, its militarization of its culture, politics and society, its complete ignorance of the very continent and culture it actually sits in, and its aggressive and destructive influences in the politics and societies of its neighbors. We know it and we condemn it.

But we should also know that Israel needs to be engaged and entangled with. In particular, we need to connect with those within her who are confronting its structures of power and repression. As academics, intellectuals, politicians, students, writers, photographers, artists, activists and critics we have to add our voices to the minority within that is also risking its safety, welfare and security confronting what Kapeliouk called an army with a state!

Kapeliouk was one of the founders of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which recently won an award for their ‘citizen journalism’ campaign where they handed out video cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to document human rights violations. B’Tselem then uses the footage to advance human rights and law enforcement in the region. And how many know that some fine work about the reshaping of East Jerusalem has come from a young Israeli photographer. Yoav Galai has spent many months documenting the destruction and reshaping of the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Its a story and situation that deserves even more attention. He continues to write about the area in his personal blog site as well.

Elon and Kapeliouk offer us examples of courage that we would do well to emulate. Not just when it comes to Israel, but to our own societies. Their voices may now be silent. But their ideals, courage and vision must be carried forward.

What's On My Computer Or Thoughts On Digital Image Management & Manipulation

I do not subscribe to the idea of more being better. I have a very limited interested in acquiring new software packages, or hardware devices. To that end I try to keep my digital image manipulation and management tools to a very basic set. Furthermore, I am a photojournalist and do not typically produce the high volume of images that sports, fashion and product photographers produce each day. Keeping this in mind, here is what I loaded on my white core 2 duo macbook.

iView MediaPro: this is an image management software application that I use for importing, annotating, naming, organizing, archiving, resizing, searching and distributing my digital images. To use this product effectively you must also have a very basic file organization strategy so that you know the follow:

1. What folder should your RAW take of the day be downloaded to & how to name it to differentiate the folder from the previous day’s shoot and future downloads
2. What are the naming conventions that you will consistently use for your RAW image files?
3. Whether you wish to use the industry standard .DNG RAW format or leave your files in their .NEF (Nikon), CRW (Canon) or other vendor exclusive RAW file format.

For example, I will have a main folder called AJMER PROJECT. Under that folder I would have one called RAW IMAGES. Under that I would have folders for each individual day’s shoot and named appropriately using dates in the names e.g. AJMER SHOOT 10-07-2009, AJMER SHOOT 11-07-2009, AJMER SHOOT 12-07-2009 and so on. This way you now know where your RAW files are, and they are organized by the day the images were taken. Remeber that your RAW filles also need to be renamed once they have been imported and I again suggest names that reflect the day of the shoot e.g. ajmer_110709_001, ajmer_110709_002, ajmer_110709_003, ajmer_110709_004, ajmer_110709_005 etc. for all images shot on august 11th, 2009  for example.

iView Media Pro can then be used to create multiple ‘views’ into your RAW folders – 1 st selects, 2 selects, etc. so that the original files remain where they are, but you use the visual editor and its thumbnail links to move around and organize the files the way you wish to see them. All IPTC metadata updates to the images – captions, location details, copyright information etc. can be managed from within iView Media – make sure that you hit the ’sync’ buttons once you have inputted the data otherwise the IPTC metadata details will not be updated to the original files!

Note, those of you shooting video and audio should also think about how to create a folder structure such that audio, video and image files that are related can be maintained and kept together. Naming conventions can be very critical when it comes to such matters.

The same concept applies as you work on your images and create your JPEG versions fter photoshop adjustments. Note, you can open your images from within iView Media Pro and import the image straight in to Photoshop or Gimp.. You can create a folder under the main project folder for your selected, JPEG images, leaving the names as they were so that you can retrieve the original RAW file should you need it, but of course change the .DNG/.NEF to .JPG.

You can of course read all about Digital Asset Management (DAM) from any one of a number of interesting books published on the subject. It can be a complex process and depends on your type of work and the different media types you are managing and creating.

NOTE: It appears that iView was bought by Microsoft (thank you Sara Terry for pointing this out to me!) and this product is now available as something called Microsoft Expressions. I have no idea how much of the original iView Media has been retained, however, you can probably find downloads for the original product on the internet. Send me a private email to ask how. Alternatively, if you are freaked out by Microsoft as I am, try Photo Mechanic, another product popular with professionals. Has pretty much all the same capabilities as iView and then some. Also, there is always iPhoto for those of you on Apple machines.  And then of course there is blueMarine, a free open source photo workflow product. I am in fact experimenting with it as we speak as it does offer some very nice capabilities.

Photoshop CS4 Or GIMP; I don’t know how many of you know but GIMP is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program – a free image manipulation software that does most everything Photoshop does. Those of you looking to save cash and work with an excellent and reliable product can look in to this. I do use GNU, but I am a heavy Photoshop CS3 users because of my reliance on layers to carry out my image work. GNU handles them differently and I am still more comfortable with the Photoshop approach.

And that it it! I do all backups to extenal hard drives manually. And there may be some who would argue for a different approach, so be it. The key is that you are organized, that you can retrieve images from your archive efficiently. Feel free to create folder structures, naming conventions etc. that best suit your work and style. Just be consistent and do indeed keep it simple.

Aside: I do not use Lightroom or Aperture because I do not produce on any given day the volume of work that would justify the use of any one of these products. I am familiar with both and have so far preferred Lightroom because it seems to be a smaller, faster program. But again, I do not use these for my work. At least not yet.

Asim

Getting Past The Obvious: Photojournalism & Lesser Explored Frontiers

Dayanita Singh is an Indian photographer. She used to be an internationally famous photojournalist until the day she realized that the India editors kept asking her to shoot was not what she herself was experiencing. There was a gap between the cliches being asked of her and the complexities, human and social, that she knew lay unexamined behind so many of the stories she was being asked to do. Whether the stories were about poverty, prostitution, child labor or any number of the conventional cliches we seem to love to produce from India, Dayanita Singh was unable to turn off her mind. She was amongst the first to produce a series of images of India’s emerging middle class. She had seen this phenomenon at a time when others would not take it seriously.

Dayanita Singh’s work is beautiful, brilliant and difficult. And one project that I have always loved is a story she did on a Muslim eunuch and her daughter title ”Myself Mona Ahmed’, a beautiful, human portrayal of a subject that has been drowned in cliches and populism – we love to gawk at these creatures and stories about ‘transvestites’, ‘eunuchs’, ‘lady boys’ etc. are on the rosters of many photojournalists. And yet Dayanita’s work is brilliantly different because it is so modest and so honest.

You can read an interview with Dayanita Singh about this story and how she produced it.

You can also find pictures from the work on the NB Pictures website. Just go to the main menu and select ‘*nb photographers’ and choose dayanita’s name.

I encourage you to see and understand this work. It will help you see one very important hallmark of an aftermath photographer; the humility and courage to respect the subject agency of action.

Too often the subject is reduced to a mere victim, the better to allow ourselves or our audience to ‘insert’ itself into the story as ’saviours’ or ‘interventionists’. This has been the traditional approach for a lot of ‘NGO’ driven work, or even ‘news’ journalism that has been arguing for ‘intervention’. Where there is such a need this is essential. But quite often photojournalists and journalists will create this ‘need’ and erase and/or deny the actual lives and actions of the people they are working with.

‘Myself Mona Ahmed’ reveals a story of a strong, independent individual confronting her society, its prejudices, proud to be a mother, dreaming large dreams and never waiting for anyone.  Its an ordinary story about an ordinary person who happens to have a persona and character that is to many of us rather extraordinary.

Such respect for the possibilities, abilities, convictions, determinations, courage and agency of the others is what enables a photographer to find those more complex, multi-faceted stories that typically reflect an aftermath sensibility.

Asim

India Research Resources

There are some fine online news and analysis resources that may prove very useful for you as you research your stories and India in general. Please do check them out – and use their web based search facilities to look for articles and stories that may help give you ideas and insights:

• Tehelka Probably one of the best independent investigative journalism magazines/websites anywhere in South Asia if not the rest of the world. Staffed by some amazing writers and investigative journalists, Tehelka is famous for taking on the powerful and the wealthy with little or no concern for its consequences.

• Countercurrents This is an Indian alternative news and analysis site that invites writers from around the globe to discuss issues of national and international important. You will in particular find their sections on ‘Communalism’, ‘Dalit’, and ‘Human Rights’ particularly interesting.
• Outlook India An English weekly news magazine worth reading – fairly populist, it does however cover the width and breath of issues Indian.
• Frontline India Another excellent Indian news magazine, but with a more analytical, rigorous approach to its subjects.

Browse them at your convenience. Research your stories on them as well. I think you will find a lot of articles and discussions related to the subjects you will be exploring in Ajmer.

Asim

John Steinbeck's 10 Minute Lesson In Photography

At the start of my photography workshops, I offer the students 2 options.

The first is a sheet of paper in an envelope that they are invited to take home at that very moment, with a full refund of their workshop fee, and trust that what I have written on the enclosed sheet of paper is the only photography lesson they will ever need.

The second of course is that they remain the entire lenght of the 7 days workshop, their fees in my pocket, and walk out of here with the foundations of knowledge and inspirations that can help them continue their path towards becoming real photographers.

No one has ever taken the envelop!

∞

So whats in this envelop? Well, for you, and only for you, I will reveal what is on that sheet of paper. And also tell you that I fundamentally believe that the students should have just taken the envelope and spent the next few weeks simply practicing what they had read!.

The envelope contains a passage from John Steibeck’s The Grapes of Wrath which reads:

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building had greater depth and more solidity than in the daytime light and these objects were curiously more individual – a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. And plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.

From John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Page 115, Penguin Books, 2000 Edition

You must go back and read this passage many times, but each time keep the following things in mind.

• What time of day are we talking about?
• What is the color and quality of the light that is falling on the house?
• What is the direction of the light?
• What is the angle of the light
• What do the shadows look like, and how may they be moving as time passes?
• Where am I, the reader, being made to stand to see and experience this scene?
• How would this very same scene look say 4 hours earlier, and why would I not shoot it then?

You are now ready to be seeing photographers.

Steinbeck captured the fundamental idea of a photographer; an individual uniquely and obsessively sensitive to light and its textures, movements, and shadow creations across objects and landscapes. It is how the greatest of artists saw. It is how Caravaggio saw. And the brilliant de Chirico saw.

Phew, that was an exhausting teaching session. I must now rest!

Your Brain Of Mud Or President Obama’s Magic Show In Cairo

“It is well”, I said carelessly “…beware! Play us no tricks, make us no snares, for before your brains of mud have thought of them, we shall know them and avenge them. The light from the transparent eye of him with the bare legs and half haired face [the white man with his magnifying glass] shall destroy you and go through your land: his vanishing teeth shall fix themselves fast on to you and eat you up, you and your wives and children; the magic tubes shall talk with you loudly, and make you as sieves. Beware!”

Qautermain confronts the African Kukuana tribe, from the book King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

Ruth Mayer, in her work Artificial Africas, points us to Mary Pratt’s book  Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation, in which Ms Pratt:

…differentiates two main stances in colonial self-stylizations, an imperial ‘rhetoric of conquest’ suffusing the absolutist era and an ensuing rhetoric of ‘anti-conquest’ demarcating the split consciousness of Western travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries, their paradoxical desire ‘to secure their innocence’ in the same moment as they assert European hegemony

she further points out that:

To contain an imperialist system within a rhetoric of anti-conquest calls for confusion … and indeed a highly contradictory symbolic system resulted from the efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable. What I call ‘trick translation’ is perhaps one of the most persistent troupes for casting colonial contact in terms of mutual understanding without abandoning the idea of a clear-cut hierarchy of communication and an European [today American] monopoly of meaning production.

It was an act of ‘trick translation’ that Barack Obama had actually come to perform on June 4th 2009 in Cairo, Egypt.  To offer a language of ‘anti-conquest’, and should we add ‘anti-involvement’, in a region with the most deeply entrenched American political, economic, and military involvement since WW II.

On June 4th 2009, President Barack Obama (a man I voted for!) took the stage on the soil of one of the region’s most despotic and repressive regimes. But more than that, he was standing in the center of the geography of American imperial projections that has been the Middle East since the British, Germans, French and other smaller European nations were forced to leave it in the 1940s.

The Middle East is home to some of America’s most important client states – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, The United Arab Emirates and of course, the unbreakable, Israel. It is also the site of some of her largest military bases and home to tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American military and undercover operations personnel. It is the site of her most extensive energy resources and investments. It is the site where she has repeatedly engaged in covert and overt political and military operations to ensure access and control to these energy resources. It is the region where her operatives, military, covert and political, keep a close hand on political and economic developments and work to ensure that the nations of the region remain in the realm of American influence.

But, we are here to weave a rhetoric of ‘anti-conquest’, and I focus on those specific areas of his speech that I felt were particularly obfuscatory and Huxlian (Aldous Huxley being one of the original genius’ to describe a modernity where language becomes the most powerful weapon of war and conquest).

∞

Like a great white hunter confronting a group of cannibals about the eat his friend alive, President Obama arrived with a few rhetorical tricks up his sleeves meant to appease the torridly infantile minds of his audience and hosts by offering them trinkets and hoping to dazzle them with his erudition and ‘respect’ for their histories.

We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world — tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate

The determination to see something called ‘the Muslim world’ as one large homogeneous entity is the hallmark of a classic Orientalist mind who fails or refuses to recognize that the polity of ‘Islam’ covers a remarkable diversity of people, cultures, ethnicity’s, and most importantly histories and heritages. To say nothing about the horribly embarrassing fact that the largest number of Muslims in fact live outside of the Middle East (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India contain the largest number of officially defined Muslims), and where many practice regional varieties of Islam that many in the Middle East consider blasphemous!

More importantly, it is an act of the most egregious arrogance and even ignorance to suggest that if there are ‘tensions’ between a people who may be Muslim, and a nation that is in fact imperialistic and colonizing in the lands inhabited by Muslims than it is because of ‘historical forces’ and not because of  immediate military, political and economic realities.

Perhaps I am being naive in believing that it is less the crusades that concern the Palestinians, or their slaughter by Richard the Lionheart, and more the ongoing and brutal military occupation of their lands being carried out by one of America’s favorite client states, Israel!

The hubris of a statement the attempts to erase the entire post-WWII history and engagement of the United States of America in the region of the Middle East, and replaces it with imagined ‘historical forces’ that point to events and imagined acts from hundreds if not thousands of years in the past is staggering! Perhaps President Obama, this self-claimed student of history, needs to return to his college library and pick up a few books on the American entanglements in the region. He could not do badly by starting with Robert Fisk’s  The Great War For Civilization, or Michael B Oren’s Power, Faith & Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 – Present . I could suggest many others.

And to say nothing about the fact that the issues that cripple the Middle East are the least likely to be understood if seen as emerging from the region’s ‘Islamic’ character. They would in fact be better acknowledged if seen, as we see most every other region of the globe, with a careful and rigorous examination of the local and regional political, economic, social and strategic issues that infect the region. The crisis in Lebanon and the crisis in Kuwait have separate, if only tangentially related if that, issues and require a local focus.

It is this refusal to engage the region in its specificity that allows a number of American intellectual, commentators, politicians, journalists and other opinion makers to repeatedly conflate entities like Hamas with others like Hezbollah, the Islamic Brotherhood with Al -Qaeda. In a tribute to the most obscurantist and simplistic ideas perpetuated by classical Orientalists, the American administration and her providers of thought (think tanks, hired intellectuals, lobby and media organizations) continue to aggregate largely diverse and political complex matters that should in fact be examined within their local and regional social, political and regional contexts.

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Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than this statement – a classic Orientalist construction that cleverly claims modernity for ‘the white man’ while falsely praising the natives for their ‘traditions’  (read: backward, anti-modern, unchanging, out-dated, medieval), was that probably none of the luminaries in the audience, representing the worst and most illiterate of their nations, understood what had just been said to them!

And ironically, it was a statement that would have appealed to the most obscurantist and fundamentalists of reactionaries in the audience; the people who in fact work day and night through state control of media, culture, society and speech to ensure that their people remain in the shackles of ‘traditions’ and avoid such modern day comforts such as full and enforceable rights as citizens of a functioning democracy with the rule of law and equality for all. In that room full of hereditary leaders or despots, there could not have been a mind not nodding in quiet agreement at the American presidents endorsement of Islam’s ‘traditional’ values and the threat it faces from the ‘foreigner’s’ modernity, for after all, these same people use this very argument, with the help of their obscurantist mullahs and TV celebrity preachers, to demand that their citizens not ask for such modern innovations such as equal justice under the law, juridical accountability for elected representatives, legal and social ad human rights,  and a representative polity.

But the presence of this orientalist canard was certainly a surprise. Recent works by the historian Jack Good (The Theft of History) and Marcel Detienne (The Greeks And Us)  have challenged Europe’s belief in her modernity and certainly her assumptions that she was uniquely equipped to facilitate it. As John B Hobson states in his work Eastern Origins of Western Civilization:

“Eurocentrism errs by asking wrong questions at the outset. All Eurocentric scholars (either explicitly or implicitly) begin by asking two interrelated questions: ‘What was it about the West that enabled its breakthrough to capitalist modernity?’ and ‘What was it about the East that prevented it from making the breakthrough?’” But these questions assume that western dominance was inevitable, and lead historians to scour the past for the factors that explain it. “The rise of the West is understood through a logic of immanence: that it can only be accounted for by factors that are strictly endogenous to Europe.”

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His words were frequently met with applause. President Obama threw them some crumbs, and they gobbled them up like hungry natives. Condescension were accepted as genuine respect and appreciation by people so devoid of dignity and honor that they will accept false pearls to disguise their being real swine. (I hope people get the colonial reference here!)

They applauded when he spoke to them in the only Arabic phrase he could be bothered to remember; the greeting of Assalaamu alaykum. How touching. Taking a note right out of an off-the-shelf travel guide to sites remote and exotic, Mr Obama did not forget that even ‘attempting’ the local lingo will result in smiles and graciousness!

They applauded when he appeared to respect something called ‘Islam’s’ contributions to European civilization.

Perhaps most had failed to realize that he was referring to contributions that were some 500 years or more old while retaining, subtly of course, the right to all other innovations since then for the more civilized and ‘modern’ Europe. Or the fact that, once again, it was not ‘Islam’ that made these contributions but individuals of questionable Muslim, Jewish, and other uncertain origins who were given deeply to issues of intellectual inquiry and study and open to influences all the way from China and India, who just happened to be living under a Muslim dynasty made these contributions.

Algebra is not a religious achievement – it is a human achievement, produced by men for man and with the effort of man. Religion has had no influence on the creation of this, or the arch or the compass or the other items Mr. Obama seemed to think ‘Islam’ contributed to. To attribute the discover of vaccine to a spiritual, religious, and some would argue, mythical philosphy is ignorant and anti-intellectual. It would be the equivalent of suggesting that Penicillin was a Christian discover, or the splitting of the atom a Jewish one! But apparently such inanities go down well in the Middle East!

(Rather than applaud, they should have hung their heads in shame; there is not a library of note, nor a university of even mediocre repute in all the lands across all the sands in all of the oil drenched nations in this region! That Arabs (and Obama was speaking to Arabs, not Muslims or even a nebulous ‘Islam’) continue to contribute to modernity, science, culture, arts, literature and the future, but must often flee their homelands and do so elsewhere!)

They applauded again when he spoke about Islam’s traditions of tolerance and racial equality. It was bizarre to say the least to offer this conventional sop to a room filled with representatives of intolerant and at times rascist regimes, applauding a philosophical concept alien to the very societies they have created and rule. They applauded when told that Thomas Jefferson kept a copy of the Koran in his personal library – did they imagine that he consulted it for his political and personal affairs, or was influenced by it?

They applauded when Mr. Obama claimed that the 7 million American Muslims enjoy incomes and educational levels that are higher than the American average. What that says about the deprivations of the average American, particularly the African-American community I am not so sure about. Who are these extremely successful and wealthy Muslims we do not quite know. But to make a claim to suggest that in fact in America the Muslims even do better than the Americans is sheer nonsense!

Their success or failure, as that of any immigrant in the USA is independent of their status as ‘Muslims. The Asian American, the West Indian and most recently the South Asian Indian community are highly successful immigrant communities and there is no way to claim that their religious choices are a determinant or a measure of their success. Furthermore, given that America allows only the ‘best and the brightest’  or the very wealthy from ‘other’ nations to come to the country, particularly when they are from Asia and/or the Middle East, it should not surprise us that these immigrant communities in fact do rather well.

But this obfuscation was essential to hide America’s ridiculous and immoral detainment, harassment, incarceration, deportation, and torture of hundreds of ‘Muslims’ either living in America or abroad. It was necessary to say to hide the rendition programs targeting of Muslims, the ‘black’ sites and their exclusively Muslim inhabitants, and the air and environment of overtly racist anti-Muslim sentiment that pervades American print, radio and television, particularly if you are of the conservative kind. And I will not even mention what the Evangelical fanatics and retards have been saying and encouraging amongst their congregations! By the way, I doubt that the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis festering in hovels in Jamaica Plains, scrambling from apartment to apartment to avoid the prying and ‘black’ eyes of the Homeland Security Department, quite fit into this fabulous President Obama statistic.

They applauded when Mr. Obama claimed that the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it. Which left me perplexed because I was sure that I was told that we had invaded Afghanistan to liberate that nation’s women from ‘oppression’ symbolized by the burqa! And yet as devastation and horror now marks that country, with the arguments for the liberation of their women center stage, I wonder if it is not time to bring the daisy-cutters and pilot-less drones back to the USA where apparently women are being given constitution protection for a practice that elsewhere is considered by the Americans to be a sign of their backwardness and oppression!

And is this the same government that did not go to court to protect the rights of men and women being held at Guantanamo? As men continue to die in American ‘black’ site custody, I find it shocking that legal and judicial resources are available for women’s right to cover themselves where as they have been argued away for men we are torturing, murdering and discarding at unknown locations around the world!

And the inanities continued.

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President Obama called the war in Iraq – this most brutal, hideous, illegal and greed based invasion of a nation in recent memory, as a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Quite the soft way to describe an event that was and is in fact nothing less than an illegal, unprovoked, premeditated invasion of a sovereign nation (to say nothing about the genocidal 12 year sanctions regime instituted against the civilian population of a de-armed state!)  led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands, the deaths of nearly a million, the torturing of thousands (pictures of which President Obama recently decided to censor to protect our delicate sensibilities – we are so civilized) and frankly remains a hell hole for those outside the centrally air-conditioned ‘green zone’ and should in fact be a crime prosecutable in the International Court of Justice.

Oh but wait, as President quickly added,  he believes that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

Ah, then its ok. For now at least we have a ‘democracy’ that requires private/corporate armed militia to protect politicians, businessmen, journalists and anyone not sanctioned by the many crooks and criminal organizations that now actually control the country while  masquerading behind banners of religions and sects. And for added measure the under cover assassination teams/death squads, massive torture centers, prisons, 24×7 hour private security, walls/dividers, daily 24×7 military patrols, towns like Falujah that remain under marshal law, kidnappings, criminality, a dysfunctional social and civil service, and the entire government under the guidance of our American generals and politicians necessary just to keep this duct-tape kleptocracy together for a little while longer.

Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.

What then are the consequences, Mr. Obama, of the fear and trauma of the Iraqis and the Afghanis who are in fact at this very moment confronted as they are by American tanks and pilot-less drones trying to understand how they will act contrary to their traditions and ideals? Or perhaps we will just blame their actions on ‘Islam’.

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Speaking of America’s intolerance of extremism and violence, Mr Obama went out of his way to celebrate Israel. Walking in the footsteps of his predecessor, he proclaimed with great stress America’s ‘unbreakable’ relationship with the country. He even manufactured completely fictitious ‘cultural and historical’ ties. I can’t imagine what ties a group of European religious fanatics determined to create an ethnically exclusive state by intentionally and violently colonizing and driving out its original inhabitants would have with the United States of America? Oh yes, I forgot, it would be the penchant for violent European colonization of native lands, institutionalized and military cleansing of them from these lands, and the celebration of the now completed fact as liberty, modernity, progress and civility, with a neat set of ‘reservations’ for the unfortunately who survived. How silly of me!

It is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.

No Mr President, they have not suffered in the pursuit of a homeland. They have suffered in the dispossession of it.

They are waiting not for gifts from America, but for their rights, rights for which we have gone to war for other nations (Bosnia, Kuwait and now would love to for Chad) but remain silent on their behalf.

And in what can only be described as the most contorted reading of history, Mr Obama laid claim to the entire process of decolonization as one of a long heritage of non-violent resistance

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed…from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.

I wonder if Mr Obama is reading the same books of history.. I also wonder as President Obama escalates the now senselessly immoral and unjust conflict in Afghanistan if he listening to himself!

The history of colonial Africa, Middle East, South and South East Asia is marked by repeated and consistent armed insurrections and resistance to the colonial enterprise. The colonialists often painted this resistance as ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ but none of the occupied people, even the Africans who were so savagely raped and enslaved, did not ‘go quietly into the night’. To say nothing about the intellectual, artistic, cultural and political resistance to occupying and colonizing regimes across the globe. Edward Said’s Culture And Imperialism would be a decent place for him to begin to start to understand regimes of resistance to colonial oppression that existed from the very moment the colonialists arrived on the shores of Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Or if Said is too politically sensitive for him, then perhaps he would like to read a fellow African; C.L.R. James’ masterful The Black Jacobins will remind our President of the power of violent resistance in breaking the back of a rapacious and brutal colonizer and usurper.

And if these nations and peoples of the far South and Africa are too complex for him to understand, then perhaps he would do well to remember if nothing else then the American Revolution and the great American war of independence, celebrated every year with great fanfare on July 4th. I believe that General George Washington would take umbrage to the suggestion that violence is a dead end. Or perhaps he would remember the American Civil War, a war that liberated the ancestors of his black citizens and moved America towards the path of modernity. Perhaps if they had followed a non-violent approach…… But then again, the oppressors and users of violence always love to lecture the oppressed about their ‘barbaric’ violent resistance and their need to demonstrate ‘civility’ by adopting a softer and more nuanced tone to the occupiers continued and increasingly military and violent responses!

Notice how the occupier is never told to adopt a non-violent occupation!

And the sheer arrogance to lecture to an unarmed and hopelessly repressed and dehumanized people, while their lands are under brutal military occupation from the only nation in the region that has in fact repeatedly attacked, occupied, summarily killed and displaced lands and peoples across the entire region is sheer mind boggling. The Palestinians are being asked to renounce violence, while the Israelis are being funded with more arms, more jets, more tanks, more training, more excuses for their illegal nuclear weapons program, and more aid packages – all of which continue to go towards and fund the creation of more settlements and more dispossessions and more brutality and more killings and more strangulations.

Continuing what has now become an almost too-boring-to-repeat cliche’s, President Obama placed all the blame for the violence, the intransigence of the conflict in Palestine on the Palestinians. There, in the world he was weaving on that stage in Cairo, where there is no Iraq and no Afghanistan, and no oil and interests, and business connections and shady deals and under handed greed, there was also no nuclear-armed, American funded, religiously fundamentalist, military controlled, ethnically discriminatory pseudo-democracy only for Jews with its American funded M16s and jackboots across the throats of a helpless and desperate people.

Yes, we are told that it is not the military bases, the settlements, the Wall, the check points, the gates, the farm lands, the murdering settlers, the curfews, the summary arrests, the targeted assassinations, the random detentions, the expropriations, the home demolitions, the expulsions, the incarcerations, the discrimination, the humiliations, the bombings, the phosphorous, the slow and daily grinding away at human dignity that are all part and parcel of a highly sophisticated military, architectural, social, political and economic settlement regime. Its the Palestinians with their handful of AK-47s and their donkey carts!

Calling the democratically elected Hamas Government as having ’some support’ amongst the Palestinians, while calling upon the corrupt and discredited Palestinian Authority to develop a capacity to govern President Obama continued the insistent, anti-democratic approach of supporting the very people the citizenry rejected, while rejecting the very people the citizenry selected.

The only democratically elected official government in the very Middle East Mr. Obama claims to be talking to, and it is just not the one that we want.

Israel is in illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It has permanently constructed roads, settlements, military camps and emplacements, check points and gates, a massive Wall, security fences and cameras, farms and industrial estates all across the West Bank and done so with the absolute and complete support of the United States of America who funds these activities through a myriad and complex set of private, corporate and governmental institutions.

It is not there because the Palestinians are ‘violent’ or have ‘rockets’. It has been there because it wants these lands. It has done everything in its power to destroy the prospects of an independent Palestinian state, and only the beltway in Washington D.C. are a handful of people who think