andrea & magda

the palestinian dream*

«It's not that we mistake photographs for reality; we prefer them to reality. We cannot bear reality, but we bear images - like stigmata, like children, like fallen comrades. We suffer them. We idealize them. We believe them because we need what we are in them.»**

David Levi Strauss

To which extent does the access to information that we have through the media correspond with the reality of the events? The question inherent in the very nature of journalism is perhaps without an answer. Regardless of ideological filters that preside over editorial decisions, the individual scope of all the elements that make up the chain of transmission of information contributes to the formation of the news that reaches the end user. This becomes even more disturbing when to substantiate the arguments set out the photographic image takes over, despite everything, it is still brought to witness the events of the world as an impartial tool. Nowadays many of us feed the illusion, cleverly induced by who manages the information, to have an unlimited access to information, but rarely there are questions about what the mechanisms are that govern the creation of information that we believe to reach but from which we are actually reached. Then on top of all this stratifies a terrible enemy: the stereotype. Striking examples in this respect are the images used in fundraising campaigns of most non-profit organisations operating in the world or the representations of conflicts, especially when particularly prolonged in time.

The image that for decades we are offered from the Middle East and from Palestine in particular, has convinced us that things are just as we are shown continuously. The photographs have built a … parallel and one-dimensional reality, conformed to the need of the experience of cheap horror that a flattened out press cliché offers its readers. In this regard the work Photojournalism Behind the Scenes by Ruben Salvadori is very interesting, it investigates the behind-the-scenes images of riots that, in fact, have completely different outlines. Accustomed as we are to accept the proposal of a unique reality and, thanks to the distance from the facts, basically reassuring despite appearances, we can not be surprised when we are shown something else, as in the case of Syria photographed by Ponomarev or even more of Palestine by Andrea & Magda. In the reality of this land do not exist only the uprising and oppression in the stereotyped forms on the basis of boys who throw stones or Molotov cocktails. In these territories they have also tried to start a process of social and economic transformation under the influence of liberalism in emergency support by the international community. In a country that in fact neither controls its borders nor that of its resources, the attempt of the then Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian National Authority to create a liberal economy, based on the recommendations of the IMF, has had effects that deserve attention from the world.

The dream of a Palestinian state worthy of the name would have to go through a major overhaul of the local economy. The effort has been very successful in the international community and the Palestinian elite, causing immediate and visible changes. Cities like Bethlehem, Ramallah or Nablus have seen the rise of the classic set ups of western economic well-being fast food, luxury hotels, shopping centres, gyms, riding clubs and of course banks.

Nevertheless, in all this Palestine remains very strongly dependent on aid from outside. But huge doubts remain about the outcome of this economic- social operation. And they are doubts that, perhaps, should be extended well outside of Palestine and its extraordinary context.

And if, the Palestinian dream concerned us too?

[ Sandro Iovine ]

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(*) - Winner of Premio Tabò within Fotoleggendo 2015.
(**) - David Levi Strauss, Between the eyes. Essays on photography and politics, Aperture, New York 2003, pag. 185.

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