This week it’s all about books – three books are reviewed Erika Diettes’ Memento Mori: Testament to Life; Tanya Habjouqa’s Occupied Pleasures and Olof Jalbro’s Refuge.
Erika Diettes ? Memento Mori: Testament to Life 
Imagine your husband, infant, lover, wife, or great buddy abducted without caution or cause, tortured and murdered simple for being within the incorrect place at the wrong time throughout a political struggle that no person definitely is familiar with. Then believe having no manner to honour this character or their life due to the fact their body has either been mutilated beyond recognition or dumped in which you can not cross.
This horror is what heaps of people stay with ordinary in Colombia where the armed warfare among the authorities, the guerillas and the drug lords have claimed over a quarter of 1,000,000 people this beyond fifty years.
Colombian artist and anthropologist Erika Diettes has made it her life’s work to honour the victims creating four elaborate bodies of work that come together in Memento Mori: Testament to Life, an exquisite double volume with slipcase that does justice to this phenomenal collection.
I first interviewed Diettes in 2013 about her body of work Shrouds/Sudarios, which features haunting portraits of women as they remember watching loved ones tortured in front of them. These portraits are printed on a grand scale on linen to resemble shrouds. I remember seeing this exhibition hanging from the high ceiling of the Mining Exchange in Ballarat (for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale) and walking between the portraits that swayed in the breeze, the light fabric wrapping itself gently around my shoulders and sending shivers down my spine. I saw it again the following year in a church in Sydney (for Head On Photo Festival) and this time felt it was even more moving given the venue, the hushed tones of visitors, the candles lit in sympathy.
Above:Shrouds/Sudarios
Diettes has endured to paintings in this mission developing extra our bodies of labor that suit together to tell an splendid story that is right away politically and socially applicable, but additionally deeply personal ? Diettes has spent many hours interviewing every of those ladies. This is a tale past the horrors of conflict. It is a story of humanity, of loss and of affection, a story that is underpinned by way of Diettes? Commitment to present voice to the victims.
?My paintings is inspired via the extraordinarily complicated social, political, and cultural state of affairs that exists in Colombia, along with theoretical questions raised by way of my response to the unrelenting violence that my us of a has experienced for many years. I have decided to bear witness to that violence, and to provide the victims ? Each the ones murdered and disappeared and their survivors ? Voice thru my artwork," she says.
?Because the work originates inside the direct tales of the families of the sufferers as well as in gadgets belonging to them, it assumes a significance that transcends aesthetic issues. I create a physical and emotional area inside both the pix and their installations this is recognizable to the mourners as a memorial and this is also available to other visitors, letting them go past the idea of a violent event and to become aware of with the humanity of the people affected.?
In Drifting Away/Rio Abajo, images of artifacts of the disappeared – a shirt, shoe, pair of reading glasses – are photographed in water and then suspended in glass. In Relics/Relicarios personal effects are embedded in blocks of polymer resin that resemble tombstones. These two bodies of work are joined by Shrouds/Sudarios in one volume of Memento Mori: Testament to Life. In the other volume is the final body of work that brings all three together in photographs of these memorials displayed in cathedrals and churches around the world, lit with the candles of mourners and visitors.
Above: Re lics/Relicarios
Above:Drifting Away/Rio Abajo
This is an amazing body of work and I am honoured to have Memento Mori: Testament to Life in my collection.
Publisher: George F. Thompson Publishing
Artist Website:Erika Diettes
Tanya Habjouqa ? Occupied Pleasures
Over four million Palestinians stay inside the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The population of this region have lived with warfare for decades and there may be a nicely-entrenched narrative round life right here.
But in Occupied Pleasures, published by FotoEvidence, photographer Tanya Habjouqa, who has Circassian and Jordanian roots and grew up in the US in Texas, takes an unconventional approach to capturing the daily lives of those Palestinians living in the shadow of conflict.
Here we see women practising yoga on a mountainside; guys pumping iron; a girl traversing the tunnels to wait a celebration, carrying flowers for the hostess; a family picnicking on the seashore; a young woman surfing. In these pix are humour and irony, laughter and sorrow, tales advised through Habjouqa's specific insight; it's far apparent she has a background in anthropology. She is also a founding member of Rawiya picture collective, founded through five lady photographers from the Middle East.
All pix (C) Tanya Habjouqa
Having worked as a war photojournalist, Habjouqa says with Occupied Pleasures she was looking for a new way to tell the Palestinian story that didn’t traverse the familiar “hackneyed tropes”.
"I am usually grappling for an angle to shake up what so lamentably are dogmatic, reductive views of this area?Every tale I even have executed changed into from an perspective of bringing a fresh evaluation, or new gateway into this area...Having blanketed a few dark occasions inside the Region, Palestinians continue to amaze me, how they maintain their humanity."
Habjouqa says Occupied Pleasures was a departure, "something far more intimate than anything I have ever done before. I had something to say in what I was documenting, a personal stake. It was for my children, a push back against misrepresentation. A move from traditional documentary to what is being called new documentary, and an attempt to say something different".
Occupied Pleasures is like a breath of fresh air in the rhetoric on conflict in the Middle East and is another title from FotoEvidence that pushes beyond the stereotypical boundaries to bring new insights.
Published by using FotoEvidence
Olof Jarlbro - Refuge
One of the true pleasures of writing this blog is the opportunity to review books from around the globe. Often a publisher will write to me having discovered my work online and offer to send me a book that ordinarily I might not have seen. That was the case with Refuge by Swedish photographer Olof Jarlbro, which came to my attention quite unexpectedly.
Refuge documents those who have fled Syria and find themselves confined now to the refugee camps in Bulgaria. Why Bulgaria? Jarlbro says his choice was premised on the fact that this destination was one of the cheapest offered by smugglers.
?There were no wealthy Syrians who fled to Bulgaria. The refugees there had been already economically fragile and from extraordinary minorities, that is why their tales felt important to me.?
Refuge begins with a story of Aleppo, the shattered lives of its inhabitants, as well as the shattered buildings. Jarlbro focuses on the people and their environs. In the quietness of these strong black and white images, many of which evoke thoughts of a ghost town, Jarlbro tells the story of what is lost juxtaposed against the strangeness of what has become daily life; a woman queues up to buy bread, a soldier calls to a stray cat, a man sits texting with his weapon over his shoulder, a child holds a gun in his open hand.
The second part of Refuge takes us into Bulgaria where refugees spend days, weeks, months on end faced with uncertainty. Housed in rough accommodation, the boredom and frustration is clear, but life goes on; a baby is fed, washing is hung on barren trees, tablets and mobile phones keep people connected, children sleep, mothers prepare meals, men play cards.
All pics (C) Olof Jarlbro
Refuge follows Jarlbro’s book Syria: The War Within, which he shot in 2012 after entering the country illegally. He says, “During my first hours in Aleppo, we drove towards the bombs, the smoke, the frontline. Instinctively I wanted to go the opposite way – toward safety and security…I imagined war as entering the gates of Hell, but adding madness and the unthinkable to it”.
He says that experience gave him some inkling of what those fleeing have been jogging from. But he also knew what they were leaving behind ? Full lives, houses, buddies, circle of relatives - a torment past knowledge. Jarlbro says travelling to Bulgaria completed the photograph permitting him to also record what the refugees were fleeing towards?An uncertain destiny, in a foreign country with little method or support, however a future that might nevertheless offer hope.
These aren?T smooth pics to have a look at, but then the scenario isn?T easy both and in a small way through the act of looking we are able to connect and recognize what those people face; for they're people first and most important earlier than the label refugee is given and right here Jarlbro has given them the opportunity to be heard.
Publisher:Rough Dog Press
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