People live in conflict zones. A conflict zone need not
necessarily be a war zone, a border or a place where ethnic killing in
progress. A conflict zone could be right here, right in the midst of us and
right here within our families. Crisis strikes, people get hurt, injured,
maimed, made immobile for life at times physically and often mentally, families
disintegrate, love perishes, children get scattered, aggression finds new forms
and several are the aftermaths of each conflict. Perhaps, conflict ends and
peace is maintained by force or by habit. Political people and armies assure
that there will be no more conflicts. But where do you bury the memories? A
society in its collective existence might help itself to erase the bad
memories, but the individuals remain, always reminded of the scars that the
conflicts have left on them. Even the collective unconscious of the society at
times brings it back, the scars and reactions of/on the conflicts that had
happened sometime back, in fresh forms of violence, aggression and not the
least in the forms of lethargy.
(all the pictures including this one are by Barbara Davidson)
However, the great force to live, the very life spirit goad
people towards shinier futures and greener pastures; sometimes they achieve it
right in the middle of the erstwhile conflict zones and some other times they
gain it from the places where they have migrated to. That’s what exactly the
Los Angeles based photojournalist from the reputed Los Angeles Times, Barbara Davidson
aims to capture in her photo works. Ms.Davidson believes like a life mantra
that conflicts are not something that erupts and ends with or without legal
interferences or human persuasions. She firmly believes that conflict is
something that grows in different forms, in memories, in collapses and in the
attainment of greater life forces. The aftermath, that’s her theme for she
knows for sure that as a photojournalist she cannot be everywhere to intervene
and stop conflict, which is humanely impossible. What she could do is to follow
the victims, the left outs of the crises and let the world know about them so
that never ever such conflicts would be encouraged. It has been a huge fight
for Ms.Davidson for many in the editorial boards where she used to work and
even in her latest work place, Los Angeles Times, such conflicts and its
outcomes are ‘normal’. In one of her notes she says that an editor, seeing her
enthusiasm to file such stories told her, ‘such things happen (random shoot
outs –one of the horrendous chains of incidents that shook Los Angeles for
years together) that’s why they aren’t news any more.’
It is not just history that repeats itself as farce,
conflicts too. However, Ms.Davidson was not ready to see the aftermaths of
conflicts as farces that should be academically verified based on historical
learnt in classrooms or in libraries or in boardrooms. It was quite a difficult
to journey for her. A photojournalist can take thousands of photographs but it
is seriously an issue how many of it would ever see the light of the day
through the newspapers and magazines and how many of them would eventually
demand a follow up either from the people or from the authorities. Ms.Davidson
has been successful in getting the attention of the editors eventually and it
was not in futile either. The world of journalism accepted and recognized her
works and awarded with the Pulitzer Prize twice in 2006 (for spot reporting
Hurricane Katrina) and in 2011 (for featuring the gang war victims in Los
Angeles). In 2014 Ms.Davidson was given the ‘International Newspaper
Photographer of the Year’ for the second time. Perhaps conflict is an
interesting subject like salt as there is no place in the world which is devoid
of conflicts. While the scale and magnanimity could vary, conflict is the theme
and backdrop of our lives irrespective of the glorious histories that the
countries have. Hence, her photographs on the subject of conflicts have gained
more circulation now than her other works and Ms.Davidson is not apologetic
about it. According to her, the more people see them the more they get
sensitized.
Born in Montreal, Canada, Ms.Davidson is of Irish origin.
Her grandparents migrated to Canada and she is the third generation Irish who
could call herself a natural Canadian. In Delhi, when she stands in a packed
narrow hall with her power point presentation, a question coming from a
youngster about her privileged identity of being a white woman in the conflict
zones cannot be laughed off; she fields it well. Ms.Davidson was raised in
Montreal and she spent her life in poverty. Her parents did not have running
water or washroom facilities. But she could see them when she was a child but
money was not flowing exactly the way money in the plumbing systems was flowing.
She saw her family falling apart and she was raised by her mother. She takes
pride being brought up by a single parent but she says that he has never been privileged
and when you are not a privileged person your skin colour does not matter. As
they say it, there is a first world in every third world and a third world in
every first world. A white working class person or a white person in a first
world is as poor as a deprived coloured person in first or the third world.
Hence, Ms.Davidson asserts that while her skin colour has given her some
distinction while working in certain conflict zones predominantly populated by
black or coloured people, she never feels that privilege within her. Being
white is not a sin and being black is not a sin either. Perhaps, in my view, we
become complexion conscious only when we attach the idea of power with
complexion; mostly it is white and at times it could be black and other colours
too.
The highly acclaimed series of Ms.Davidson is a series of
photographs done on the incidents of random shoot outs between gangsters in Los
Angeles. They simply take out gun and fire at innocent people, if they are not
really fighting against each other. Gun culture has become a social menace in
Los Angeles during the last one and half decade. When Ms.Davidson turned her
eyes to the victims of such shoot outs, the subject had already lost its steam
as the incidents had become ‘common and natural’ therefore not newsworthy.
Ms.Davidson did not really want to pursue the conflict as conflict as she did
not want to shoot the dangerous shoot outs like a Hollywood dame in a
photographer’s guise would do. She preferred to follow the aftermath stories;
how conflicts changed the course of the life of people, mostly victims,
forever. When she managed to get the works printed in the LA Times,
suddenly the authorities and society woke up to the post-conflict trauma that
the victims lived. There are many touching stories that Ms.Davidson has been
pursuing for a long time (as she shows the photograph of a kid and tells the
audience that now he has grown to her shoulder level) but the one I like most
is a young black man cleaning the window screen of a car. It is obviously taken
from within the car that means at that time Ms.Davidson was inside the car. The
story goes like this. Cremation of the dead bodies is a very expensive affair.
If the dead body has offensive and telling tattoos (showing their affiliation
to the operating gangs in the area) they will not get any help while the poor victims
who get caught in the cross fire and perish might get government help in their
last journey to the other world. At times help comes very late. So it is a
usual sight of young men cleaning windscreens of the cars at the signal
junctions and collecting money for the funeral of their dead friends or relatives.
One cannot help but noticing the predominant black
neighbourhoods and victims in Ms.Davidson’s photographs which are done mostly
in black and white. A question is raised by a young man in the audience. He
says that he does not know the politics of this black representation but would
like to know why only black victims. Ms.Davidson has a very convincing answer:
The Whites don’t get caught in cross fires.’ The connotation is very clear and
subtle. The gangsters operate in the black neighbourhood. It has a lot to do
with poverty, power, masculinity, and top it all the affinity for crime that
comes out of a long history of deprivation and growing up in violent climates.
Right from the homes to streets, right from the social systems to education,
from social representations to familial representations the black population
has been violently weaned away by force and authorities. Gun culture and the
gangster culture is not just the reflection of their beastly nature but it is
an outcome of their history. Unless and until this history is reread and the
future course of it is altered the situations are not going to change. The Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) claims that the gun culture has come down
considerably but legal solutions always do not help, feels Ms.Davidson. (I
could not stop thinking about Will Smith, Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, Denzel
Washington, Samuel Jackson, John Travolta, Jamie Fox films where they play LA
Cops or villains). Ms.Davidson also says that the legal and penitentiary system
in Los Angeles or in the US in general is abysmal, which gets a kindergarten ‘Ooooo’
from the audience which is surprisingly comprised of the brink generation- they
cannot be more latest and irreverent, intellectual and casual than this.(I
really feel old and out of place. I could not see a single recognizable
photography artist in the audience...strange!)
Black and white is the favourite colour scheme of
Ms.Davidson and she attributes this to her fine arts training in Concordia
University. She finds black and white natural. She has a tendency to work on a
theme for a long time and then take a break and she feels that taking
photograph is not the real thing about a photojournalist’s life. It is all
about finding, recognizing and realizing the stories that need to be heard by
more people and if possible seen by a lot too. She says that her photographs
are anthropological to certain extent though they are not anthropological in an
academic sense. I have rarely come across photographers who talk about the news
value of a story and then the visual value of a photograph. An artist by training,
Ms.Davidson does not bat an eyelid when she says that she is primarily a
journalist and then a photographer. She explains her working method which could
sound a reverse process for many hardcore photographers. She finds her story
first and then looks for the right picture. Most of the photographers these
days take good pictures and develop a story around it. I am not here to judge
photographers in general but people have different ways of making a good image.
Ms.Davidson is in India for a month, working with the Apne
Aap organization for rehabilitating young girls reclaimed from sex traffickers’
hands. Based in Bihar’s Mithila/Madhubani region, Apne Aap has been working for
the young girls who are pushed into prostitution by none other than their
brothers and fathers. It is happening in a country where honour killings are
regularly carried out in the name of religion, caste and above all the right
over women’s body. The girls from a particular community have been the victim of
this ‘family tradition’. Apne Aap is about reforming that society. Ms.Davidson
works with them in her sojourn in India. She shows the photographs that she has
taken there in the rehabilitation centre. I feel they need more involvement and
a photojournalist like Ms.Davidson cannot do a sweeping job on them. India is a
conflict zone and a camera trained to any person on the road is as good as
focusing on a conflict victim, irrespective of age, gender and social position.
They are the victims of social oppression if not that of the attitude developed
by hegemonic ideologies. India is a country where the oppressor and oppressed
are the victims of power, money and caste or in the reverse order of it.
Ms.Davidson will find a treasure trove in this country.
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