Art celebrates, contemplates, challenges, and commemorates. In times of tragedy, art precipitates wisdom, and even enjoyment, out of horror. Or maybe our indestructible capacity to express and appreciate the creative force of life is the wisdom in horror.
Since October 7, 2023—the start of this intense phase of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine—I’ve been introduced to many Palestinian visual artists, poets, dancers, and musicians.
Recently, I saw this photograph of a Palestinian girl riding a makeshift swing by the award-winning Palestinian photographer, Mahmoud Abu Hamda from Khan Yunis.
Mahmoud’s photo sparked me to remember some of the photography that has been formative in my life and also some of the powerful photos that have come out of Gaza in the past 14 months. So I thought I’d share a few of these with you.
Weegee, my first love
My parents were visual artists, and our home was full of art books. Among these was a first edition of Naked City by the New York City street photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig).
The photographs in Naked City are black and white records of 1940’s New York City street crime and criminals, of bar life, of the impoverished and marginalized, of crowds and concerts and crowded tenements, and always of faces. Weegee was fascinated by the endless play of human expressiveness as it met the endlessly varied life of a metropolis.
From a very early age, I poured over this book hundreds of times. Along with the music of Woody Guthrie and Nina Simone, it was the most influential art experience of my childhood.
Weegee from Naked City: Children in the summer heat sleeping on a tenement fire escape
Kenro Izu is a Japanese photographer living in the U.S. I first encountered his work at a show in Europe. The gallery was purposely made dim, nearly dark, so that the astonishing light in his photographs could become more visible. This is the most perfect photograph of Mount Kailash I’ve ever seen.
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Garry Winogrand
Weegee primed me to love another street photographer, Garry Winogrand. His black and white images of 20th-century life are full of movement, chaos, and, well, attitude. A single image often seems to capture many colliding points of view.
Sometimes I feel like…the world is a place I bought a ticket to…It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.
I identify with the camera eye of Diane Arbus and its profound engagement with the astonishing phenomenon of human expressivity and our unlikely (but not unlikable) weirdness. She makes us see the unseen and denormalize the “normal.”
I don’t know all of the photographers who took these images, but they are just a few of the hundreds of photos from Gaza since October 7 that have imprinted themselves in my heart.
Gaza, September 2024, A Palestinian woman who lost her husband from the Dabbagh family in the Israeli attack mourns by hugging her husband's shoes in Gaza City, Ali Jadallah
Gazan photojournalist Motaz Azaiza holding a red stuffed bear that survived the bombing
Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza
Feel free to share or link to photographs that have been important to you.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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Thank you for this collection!
Moving and beautiful!