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| 2006/01/07 06:34:43 | ||
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Lives on Fire
By Debora Kuan At a time when suicide bombings in the Middle East have become so frequent that they're almost a cliche, Kristen Ashburn's portrait series of Palestinian suicide bombers and their families feels arrestingly necessary. One is struck, first and foremost, by the images' chilling simplicity. Often with their faces covered only to reveal the stark gaze of their eyes, Ashburn's subjects--shaheeds, meaning martyrs--require that the viewer react to them as human. At the same time, the portraits allow an intimate glimpse at the pain and fervor on fire beneath the surface. Ashburn began photographing and interviewing members of the militant wings of Hamas and Fatah in August 2003 in an attempt to understand what drove them to their decisions, as well as the impact of the completed missions on their loved ones. Because some of her subjects feared she was a spy, Ashburn had to agree to conduct the shoots in secrecy at undisclosed locations. She was never given the names of her subjects or allowed to see their faces. "I had no control," she admits. Her interviews with family members of suicide bombers who had already carried out their operations were, by contrast, more transparent. One encounter that made a particularly lasting impression on Ashburn was with a Palestinian woman who had trained her son to be a shaheed. In her interview, the mother boasted, "Since the age of five Mohammed was throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, like all the children of Palestine...I told him, 'I don't want you to do any kind of small operation. I want you to carry out a big one.' I want my children to aim for big things." He didn't disappoint her. Soon after being coached by his mother, Mohammed joined a group attack on an Israeli settlement and was killed. Though Ashburn is often charged with validating the missions of aspiring suicide bombers by giving them a voice, she stresses that she in no way condones their tactics. She wanted to do the project because she was interested in the complexities driving a young person to choose suicide and murder, and in how such examples invariably infect the next generation. "Every street you go down, there's a billboard glorifying or celebrating [shaheeds], and you certainly feel the weight of that on young children," she says. "There aren't necessarily parks for the kids, movie theaters. They don't have distractions, and they don't have the kinds of heroes our children emulate." Of course, Ashburn was also aware of the crucial role the Gaza settlements played in fanning the flames of the conflict. Since 2003, she had been photographing Israeli settler life, and in August 2005, when all Israeli settlements were ordered withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, she returned to the Middle East to document the historical event. When she first began this project, she recalls being treated like a guest, escorted through the settlements by spokespeople who explained the communities' ideology and objectives. Two years later, she would receive a very different reception. "When it became clear that the settlements would be removed, I was greeted with both openness and hostility," she said. "Some people felt it was important to document the 38-year-old history of the community, and others felt that the press would only create negative material about them." Ultimately, Ashburn believes this pullout is a step in the right direction. "Hopefully, this freedom of movement will create an atmosphere of economic development and social change." Indeed, the bulk of Ashburn's projects--which often begin as magazine assignments and are later supplemented by a combination of grants, sponsorships, and personal funds ("I beg, borrow, and save to produce my work--it's a very difficult, slow process," she says)--are motivated by social consciousness and humanitarian responsibility. Although the settlers' removal from Gaza received no shortage of press coverage, many of Ashburn's other subjects drew her attention precisely because they were overlooked by the news media. In 1994, Ashburn began photographing neurologically impaired orphans in Romania, where she was volunteering as an aid worker. When she first arrived at the orphanage, she found the children--often abandoned by their families--were kept thirty to a room, given no education and no contact with the outside world. Appalled, she felt a responsibility to document their reality and bring attention to their circumstances. "They were given less consideration than barn animals," she explains. In 2001, Ashburn traveled to Siberia to photograph Russian prisoners living in inhumane conditions. The cells in these jails lacked proper ventilation, and the men were let out for only an hour a day. Most of these prisoners, not yet convicted of a crime, contracted a deadly strain of tuberculosis from their cellmates. "In essence, being charged with a crime there amounts to a death sentence," Ashburn says. That same year, Ashburn joined Contact Press Images and began photographing the impact of AIDS in Southern Africa. This work later earned her the 2002 Marty Forscher Fellowship for Humanistic Photography, as well as an award given annually by the French Association of Women Journalists. She recently donated the usage of these images to Keep a Child Alive, a nonprofit organization assisting victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. When she shoots on location, Ashburn works both with film and digital cameras. But with increasing pressure to transmit material quickly to newspapers or magazines, she anticipates that she will soon be exploring the advantages of digital capture. When on assignment, her preference is for smaller lenses, which are easier to carry and conceal in sensitive environments, and Olympus cameras, which keep lenses dust-free--an important feature given the desert locations in which many of her projects are shot. Last month, Ashburn traveled to Rwanda, where she is a project coordinator with The Rwanda Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches Rwandan children to photograph their lives and communities. It would be hard to find a more fitting mission for a socially-minded photographer: giving the voiceless not only a voice, which so much of Ashburn's work has done, but also a new language. -- excerpted from http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/cp/olympus/feature/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001772894 |
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