Gazing at Gaza

“These days we are witnessing other photos. Gaza under Israel’s attack. Houses, apartments, schools, hospitals and places of worship razed to the ground “

This is the age of smart phones. Today only a few are still using those models, which provide a limited service: of talking to others or sending the text messages – and nothing more. An innumerable majority now possesses the smart devices with inbuilt calculator, map, search engines, clock, calendar, compass, music, movies, books, note pad, and camera. With the spread of smart phones, everyone has become a photographer, and every event, object, person is documented through pictures.

But Photographs – in comparison to other modes of making images, like painting, miniatures, sculptures, prints, drawing, that require a considerable time to execute – are created quickly. This speedy production, perhaps is one cause for its brief existence in contrast to other visuals, which survive centuries, even millennia. A photograph published in a newspaper is thrown into bin the following day, and immediately forgotten once transmitted on a TV channel, or gets buried under other images if posted on a social media timeline.

However some pictures do stay, longer – in the collective conscience of humanity. Like the footage of the Vietnam War, especially the American journalist Eddie Adams’s snapshot of Saigon Police Chief, about to shoot a Vietcong suspect (Nguyen Van Lem) on February1, 1968. The outstretched hand holding a gun to a defenseless man captures the cruelty of the invading army and its collaborators. Actually a rare document of a victim’s expression, on knowing of his death approaching in a few seconds.

These days we are witnessing other photos. Gaza under Israel’s attack. Houses, apartments, schools, hospitals and places of worship razed to the ground; thick smoke erupting from heavily populated localities; bombs exploding in markets; tanks entering occupied territories and tearing down urban residences assuming these contain Palestinian activists or their sympathizers. However, like other weapons bombs do not have an eye. These cannot discern innocent mothers of Gaza from the militants. An injured boy running towards a medical centre from the armed groups on the move. A family residing in its ancestral home, from the missile operators hidden in some shelters. The devastation caused by a bomb is often beyond its physical reach.

Yehuda Amichai, (the great Israeli poet translated into English and Urdu – and several languages) in his poem The Diameter of the Bomb, observes that if a bomb is dropped at a specific location, its impact is not limited to that site. It encompasses a “young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometres”. She “enlarges the circle considerately, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea”, which “includes the entire world in the circle”.

Being confronted by the pictures of men, women and children, injured, dead, displaced, jolts a spectator, and demands a response. Some tag these images on their social media accounts, others plan a demonstration, several organize public protests, and a few raise funds for the suffering population of Gaza. Every morning you switch on the news channels and you see misery, killing, destruction in the land of Palestine. People talk about it, condemn the Israeli actions, and mourn for the innocent children. There have been wars and conflicts in other parts of the world, for instance Ukraine; but the pictures from Palestine are exceptionally, explicitly and extremely horrific.

Like snapshot of a young girl standing in front of rubble, which was her house in an apartment building; a kid sitting in the middle of grey mess, which comprise a scorched car, debris, a plastic toy; a youth wearing keffiyeh surrounded by scattered mortar pieces, steel rods, being wiped out by heavy construction machinery; a group of men carrying an injured body wrapped in a blanket, one of them shouting, the second one’s face contorted in great grief, others either shouting or crying. All of them and their surroundings reveal their humble existence/neighbourhood.

There are other photos too. Of a lane with rows of 4 storeys buildings. All black, brown or grey, with huge openings made by missiles or explosives, and clouds of smoke in the background. The structures, and the street do not look as if humans were inhabiting these, but more like an installation of Anselm Kiefer. Another picture shows thick black smoke, and fire in the middle of a residential area, next to a few dismantled buildings.

One is certain that there must be thousands of other pictures of Gaza, since the 8th of October. Each one of these convey the same content, with a slightly different focus and perspective. Despite the fact that these were created by professional photographers, journalists, or ordinary people, all these images are important, because first-hand views fabricate history. No matter on which side you are, you cannot negate or doubt the photographic evidence. In a political, religious, military conflict, one hears diverse, often opposing narratives, but the presence of pictures preserves our – pleasant or painful past.

One may argue that every image, whether painted, drawn or photographed – is not neutral, hence contains the views (in all senses of the word) of its maker; but that is unavoidable. Like accounts of a crime or a road accident vary in respect to each witness. Similarly, every reader of a book, of religious, literary, or nonfiction, deciphers something different from other readers of the same text. Although pictures can be misleading, as Jean Paul Sartre writes about a photograph of World War II, showing a German soldier going through publications at a second hand book stall on the bank of River Seine. The French author and philosopher comments that the camera presented the man comfortably and peacefully exploring the books, but it didn’t include groups of Parisians on either side, disdainfully looking at a member of the occupying army.

Photographs record a point of view, but no matter how biased that is, it still offers a segment of truth; and preserves the past in a tangible format. As a growing child, I was fed with a certain version of 1971 war, taught at the Pakistani schools, but a visit to the National Museum of Bangladesh in Dhaka altered my perception: Discovering the press photographs of torture devices, human skulls, and exterminations, all displayed at the top floor of the Museum.
As a photograph is the product of an instant, the reaction of a viewer is also quick, and short lived. But a work of art, presumably, continues to exist for a greater period. So if a visual artist is using images from a recent catastrophe the challenge is how to make this not a reportage, but – borrowing the words of Paul Cezanne – “something solid and durable, like the art of the museum”. Several adopt an indirect, distant – but not disinterested course. Like the poem, Sar e Wadi e Sina by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in response to the 1967 Arab-Israel war. Due to its diction, lyricism, and depth the poem is still relevant, particularly for the present times, because when we read these lines today, we re-recognize the world through Faiz’s words.

Roland Barthes the French cultural theorist, begins his book Camera Lucida, recounting the experience of seeing a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852 and realizing that he was “looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor”. Coming across the numerous photographs of tormented inhabitants of Gaza, one realizes that he/she is looking at those eyes that looked at the death; and still gazing at it in Gaza.