What you think
You see
Activist photography from Israel and Palestine

The saying, "there's no war without an image of war", accurately reflects the manner in which conflicts in the post-modern world are often conducted. Sophisticated technology can relay information across the globe in real time so that millions, if not billions, of people around the world have simultaneous access. This has led to a fundamental change in the way people perceive their environment and the socio-national-political frameworks within which they live.   

In Israel, the last five years have witnessed the emergence of a new mode of photography that has succeeded in its unique way in going beyond trend. "Activist Photography" is a hybrid of journalistic photography and social-political activism and is already a synonym for photography that takes a stand and has an activist agenda.

Activist Photography has developed a new model of the photographer: photographer-demonstrator-reporter. The Activist Photographer seeks to become an integral and influential part of the event, to be both the input and the output, and thus to be responsible in part for the event itself. Activist Photography does not shy away from taking a particular political stance, nor does it concern itself with matters of ratings or popularity.

Photographers motivated by a socio-political agenda are not new to journalistic photography. Thus the claim that Activist Photography has been around for a long time is, in a sense, correct. The crucial distinction is that today's Activist Photographers are more acutely aware of their self-declared role, and of the environment in which they operate, namely, the media and the public.
 
In the post-modern era, photography offers the option of not looking at reality as a given. National-political conflicts do not exist as an event in themselves; they exist in order to generate the images that represent them. This holds for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With this in mind, the exhibition seeks to look at photography in a reflexive way and to examine, through the prism of Activist Photography, the role it plays in the battle for public opinion.

The exhibition wishes to draw attention to the increasingly prominent Activist Photography movement in the Israel- Palestine conflict. The photographers contributing to this exhibition come from diverse places and backgrounds in the conflict zone, but all see themselves as part of the struggle to make the public more aware of a reality they believe is fundamentally unjust.

The streets are the home galleries of Activist Photography. As public spaces that don't distinguish among people they act as the ideal spaces for the photos to be presented. The presentation of photos in this exhibition seeks to speak a similar visual language of a poster hanged on the streets wall. 
The images displayed here were photographed during protest activity throughout the West Bank, along the route of the separation wall being built by the Israeli government and within Israel proper. They represent a three-year period, 2004 -2007.

In these images, the event becomes a stage on which the different sides all play a part. Photography is also an actor on this stage; it is no longer merely the spotlight. The images evoke the question as old as photography itself: does reality create the photographic image, or is it the photographic image that creates reality?

 

 

Gilad Baram, Curator
giladbaram@gmail.com

The photographers Participating: Anne Paq, Keren Manor, Meged Gozani, Nir Landau, Oren Ziv, Shachaf Polakow, Tess Scheflan, Yotam Ronen, Eduardo Soteras, Gilad Baram