There must be a camera wherever there is inhumanity

I attended the opening of SA photojournalist Joao Silva’s Retrospective Exhibition on 23^rd October at Museum Africa.

The exhibition was first held in France and thanks to the Portuguese Embassy has now travelled to South Africa

The 55 images still float in and out of my mind.

 

They are of conflicts in South Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the work can and should be seen on his website www.joaosilva.co.za  along with images covering Prisons of Malawi, Child Servitude in Ghana and War In Lebanon.

Joao, had both of his legs blown off by a landmine in Afghanistan on 23rd October 2010. The last image of the exhibition is a triptych of US Marines clearing landmines – in the last shutter click he captured was as he stood on the landmine. Since then he has, so far, undergone 70 operations.

Having witnessed such violence in his life, I asked Joao if he still believed in humanity. His quick reply was, “more than ever” .

In his talk he did however speak of the necessity for a camera to be present wherever there is violence, crime and injustice.

His images are of brutality perpetrated from all sides making the point that there is no winning side in war.


As the photographs depict, the victim is always and ultimately a person and our humanity.

Joao’s approach, reminded me of The Family of Man exhibition held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955 with at least 12 subsequent reprinting’s of the photographic work.

In a prologue to The Family of Man book of images, the American poet Carl Sandburg wrote,  

There is only one man in the world
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world
and the child's name is All Children

Gary Younge wrote to this point in the Guardian News and Media recently when he said that Ebola shows that we are all connected, that it crosses all cultures and borders. He said, It shows that no matter how strong the gates around your community, how high the wall on your border, how sophisticated the alarm on your house; no matter how much you avoid state schools, public transport and public libraries; no matter how much you pay the premium to retreat from the public sphere, you cannot escape both your own humanity and the humanity of others, and the fact that our fates are tied.

Joao's work punches home the same point regarding war, violence, and our inhumanity toward one another, his images reflect the universality of human emotions and that our task is to not get caught in constructed ideologies that separate us one from another.

His exhibition also makes us appreciate the bravery and focus of the great photo journalists who go to the edge of human behaviour to remind us not to go there. Remarkably, the selected images taken amidst chaos and terror have even been composed to have a terrible beauty. (With apologies to Irish poet, Yates).

Thank you Joao Silva. We salute you.

 

Masters of War

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know I can see Through your masks.


You've thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You aint worth the blood
That runs in your veins
                                          
                                      - Bob Dylan (1963)


The dead-end of our human imagination


Arms, weapons and war are the dead-end of the human imagination; the end of being human and the beginning of being inhuman. The huge elephant sitting in the world is the armaments industry.

The number of deaths in wars are in the order of magnitude of hundreds of millions. Millions of people died in 19 century wars – the War of the Triple Alliance in South America wiped out more than 60% of the population of Paraguay.

What if we applied the human imagination to prohibiting and abolitioning the manufacturing of all instruments of destruction, all guns, tanks, cannons, revolvers and machine guns?

This should immediately begin with a prohibition of all children’s toys and games linked to the making of war. What are we doing when we give a 3 year old a plastic gun?

More light needs to be shone on the dark, murky global industry of arms manufacturing. Even though there has been an apparent decline in global spending on arms it is estimated that over 1.5 trillion US dollars are spent on manufacturing worldwide. We have a multibillion dollar international arms trade generally lacking in transparency.

The modern arms industry arose in the second half of the 19th century with the creation of large military - industrial companies about which we know very little. Governments may come and go but the arms industry shoots on. It is time to question this.

It is no surprise that the largest exporters of weapons are Russia, the United States and China. The biggest importers are India, the UAE and China. The largest arms manufacturing country is the United States. We need far more determined disarmament and non- proliferation agreements. Ultimately a prohibition on all manufacturing.

Accepting the manufacturing of arms as a reality is denying the reality of the human imagination. We can surely think our way out of confrontation and conflict?

The reason we have arms is that people in high places have vested economic and political interest in fuelling physical conflicts.

There is some good news however. In a remarkable book The Better Angels Of Our Nature, author Steven Pinker, reveals that there has been a tapering off of wars and atrocities that killed more than a tenth of a percent of the world’s population. The deaths decline as we come closer to the present. He says, The landscape of 20^th century values was a resistance by the populations of democratic nations to their leaders' plans for war. The late 1950’s and early 1960’s saw mass demonstrations to ban the bomb and public protest condemned the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War.

Let's begin the conversation around the question:

How do we start a global movement to lobby and protest against all companies manufacturing guns, bombs and bullets?

We should start by demanding the complete transparency of manufacturing companies, their export destinations and the deals made between them and governments.

The other conversation is how to use our imagination to prevent a turning to arms as the quick fix to solve human conflict. 

His brain has been mismanaged

with great skill.

Who's going to take away

his license to kill?

- Bob Dylan