Interesting Photo essay from one-time Leica Forum poster

A friend sent me a link to this <a href="http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/

applebyhebron/appleby_hebron.htm">thoughtful photo essay</a> by Rob

Appleby, who, if memory serves, was once a frequent contributor to this forum

(perhaps in greenspun days?). Anyway, it's worth more than just a cursory

look, regardless.

He already posted this on here today.

You know, it's an awful thing to say, but I think I'm suffering from "Mideast Fatigue."

I'm ashamed of myself for even thinking it, but we are all assaulted daily by news of

atrocities by all parties involved in the goings-on over there. I'm sick of seeing it. I'm

sick of hearing about it. It's been happening off and on for hundreds (thousands?) of

years. I wonder if it would stop, or at least go down in volume, if all of us in the rest

of the world would stop paying so much attention to it. Forgive me for being so

honest, but I think there are millions of other people who feel the same way.

Me too Jim: it's sort of like the myth of the town full of liars where everybody is saying something different and swearing that everybody else is lying. [Oh yeah, they've each of them got God on his side too. Gives them the right to do anything.]

Great place to stick thousands of English and American targ-I mean, soldiers.

>Great place to stick thousands of English and American targ-I mean, soldiers.

 

Well it was the British that started the mess and the Americans that perpetuated it!

I'm not tired of hearing about it. As long as it's happening, I want to know about it. But I wish it were not happeniong. I'm tired of our soldiers being blown up, shot down, dragged though the streets, all for no apparent purpose, and with no end in sight.

In the end, the soldiers chose to be there. The civilians do not. I think that it's a good thing that people are still going to these places and photographing them so that we may NOT forget what is going on.

 

No one hardly ever goes to Algeria to take photographs, yet people are still dying on a regular basis at the hands of a corrupt government and terrorists. I wish there WERE more photographs coming out of that place.

Since this is photo.net, not politics.net, I'd say that Rob Appleby's photographs are terrific. I looks to me like it took a lot of guts to capture some of these images.

 

Also, the comments about soldiers choosing to be there is ridiculous clap-trap. Most soldiers are young conscripts who have no say in the political realities they serve. This is as true of American kids in Iraq as it is for Israeli grunts.

 

I too have 'Middle East on the Brain,' but Rob's pictures are certainly worth looking at.

Rob's pictures are good, it's only the subject matter that offends.

Is it my distorted view, or are these photographs heavily dramatized (look at the edges) and the colors 'photoshopped'? Why? Isn't the situation by itself dramatic enough? What effect is the photographer trying to achieve here?

Looks like a classic dilemma. What does he want to be: an artist or a reporter?

"...it's only the subject matter that offends."

 

 

What's really offensive, to me, is kevlar-protected, helmeted soldiers who use live ammunition to shoot at boys throwing stones. What's really offensive is an infared-equipped helicopter gunship lobbing missles into an apartment building at night on the chance they might kill a suspected terrorist in his bed, and blithely accepting any other sleeping casualties that occur. Equally offensive is young women (women!) whose prospects in life are so dim, that martyrdom via suicide bomb promises the hope of a rosier future than anything their real life has to offer.

But as an American, the most offensive thing to me is the billions of dollars in life-support we have given to the state of Israel to allow this bloody game to go on far longer than it should have. But maybe that's just me.

 

Rob is rather obviously biased in his views, and his pictures, but so what? Maybe these images 'offend' only because they're a bit raw, and the images you're used to seeing have been 'filtered' (to use President Bush's term) by a media that has grown used to feeding its viewers pablum.

The "billions of dollars of life support" have averted another Holocaust.

Actually, the billions of dollars of life support came only long after Israel had established itself and beaten off its neighbours in 48 and after. Even after the six day war. Those dollars reflect primarily US interests in the region and have nothing to do with averting holocausts.