Confronting Views - Bruno Stevens
FACES As the number of deaths in the conflict in the Middle East grows every day*, the international public is less and less aware of the personal drama behind each “incident”. This creates the danger that the fatalities become just numbers in the statistics, which the governments on both sides use as pure propaganda to further fuel the violence on the battlefield and also to justify the most extreme policies.
I had witnessed the unbearable up close—lives torn, families destroyed—and wanted to take a few images from the eye of the storm raging across the Middle East. I wanted to use those portraits to show the more intimate side of the conflict.
Portraits of the dead. Not out of sensationalism, but on the contrary out of a strong personal conviction that there is more humanity in these photos of the “ordinary dead” than in most “news” images.
The portraits were taken in June and July 2001 and show Israelis and Palestinians. It was not my intention to show more from one side than the other, but the result was mainly determined by the different attitudes towards death in the two cultures and by the extent to which a foreign journalist is tolerated at critical moments.
On the Israeli side, there is a real taboo against death and a strong collective will to remember the deceased as they “used to be”. On many occasions I was offered family photos, but was not allowed to photograph the body of the deceased, as it was deemed “inappropriate”.
On the Palestinian side, I experienced exactly the opposite. I was always encouraged to portray the victim and make his or her fate known to the world, as an honorable cause to respect his or her memory.
The portraits radiate a clear power that promotes self-identification: with these photos the victims regain human dignity, they become really…
Alive.
August 2001
