A Protester in Homs

‘Gazes from Syria: Ten Years of Uprising / Multi-Sided Civil, Sectarian and Proxy War’ is a series of 52 posters with ‘portraits’ derived from photographs published in the International New York Times over the last ten years, reporting on the war in Syria. The people in the photographs look directly into the camera: protester, opposition fighter, ISIS member, government soldier, civilian and men, women and children seeking refuge from the violence. They look into the camera, sceptical, guarded, tired, hopeful, defeated. Their gazes connect us on a very human level to the street in Syria, reminding us to look and to notice.

The second work, ‘A Protester in Homs, Syria’, is an endlessly slow zoom in on the face of one of these protestors. A voice-over narrates the photograph’s three stages of movement: the journey of the image from Homs in Syria to the front page of the newspaper, the relationship that subsequently develops between the reader and the protester, and the power relations that revolve around visibility. At the end of the zoom, the image rests on the face of the protester in the photograph, which eventually becomes illegible and dissolves into the inkblots of the newspaper print.

Both works take a critical look at what photography does in the news media. Although the images come from different sources – citizen journalists, professional photojournalists, media activists, ISIS propaganda videos – they all end up as printed dots on paper. Photography fails: the many vivid, tragic and painful events of reality are reduced to a printed page or a screen for consumption by the Western public.