Posts Tagged ‘media’
Plight of Syria’s Kurds Breaks into the News
In the Western press, the story of Syria’s beleaguered Kurdish population has been overshadowed by coverage of their immediate cousins, the U.S.-friendly Kurds of northern Iraq and those of Turkey. Michael Kennedy’s story on page A6 in the New York Times of April 18 changes that. In a deeply sourced and widely researched report, Kennedy quotes longtime Washington Post correspondent and author Jonathan C. Randal and other experts on the Syrian Kurds’ long and heartrending struggle for independence against the long-running hereditary regimes of strongman Syrian Presidents Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad.
An old personal friend of my wife and myself, Randal always had a reputation among his colleagues of daring to go where no one else would asking the provocative questions no one else dared ask. Following on the pioneering 1960s book on the Kurds by another friend, New York Times’ Dana Adams Schmidt, Randal’s updated and highly detailed book on the Kurds’ struggle landed him with a subpoena from a Turkish court which he, characteristically, flew from France to Istanbul to answer in order to assert freedom of the press in some of the more dangerous corridors within a strife-torn nation wishing to qualify for membership in the European Union.
Kennedy’s fine piece in this week’s New York Times alerts modern readers to the seemingly eternal reality of tribalism as a stumbling block to national identity everywhere in the Middle East and south Asia — the fundamental resistance to political “modernization” as earnestly attempted under the evolving value systems and political motivations, in the course of their histories, by Britain, Russia, and now the U.S. Good luck. Or maybe Godspeed would be the more appropriate term, given the religious undercurrents always involved.
Another fine photographer who covered the Kurds extensively is Susan Meiselas. Visit her website www.akakurdistan.com, “a safe and anonymous space on the web to share some of the complexities of Kurdish history.”
Kurds with Rocket Launcher, Northern Iraq, 1965, photo by William Carter
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Fresh Light
Are traditional & modern / old & new media, really at war?
For fifty years I shot worldwide on film, printed in darkrooms on four continents, published in a wide variety of traditional media. I would not trade those experiences. To quote from my forthcoming book, “I count myself fortunate to have been seeded in the warm loam of classic photographic practice.”
But then I add, “Equally, I’m glad to make use of whatever new developments prove useful.” Most useful, indeed, are digital photography and the digital media, in their countless flowerings. Literally and metaphorically, I find myself emerging from the meditative close focus of the darkroom into the fresh broad brilliance of the “blogosphere.”
The frontier-minded U.S. has always been spellbound by the “new all new,” whereas traditional cultures located their main value clusters in the past. But the greatest artists often seem to surpass such timely strictures.
Near the end of his life the painter Paul Cezanne said, “Even though I am already old, I am only a beginner. However, I am beginning to understand…” Photographer Paul Strand said, “We are all students.”
In that sense, we are all, always, “emerging.” Every morning, the light on our doorstep is as fresh as Genesis. We only have to see it. A great teacher said, “One sees the world as one is.” The sculptor Constantine Brancusi said, “It is not difficult to make things. What is difficult is to reach the state in which we can make them.”
Some such quotes were printed in my 1996 book on the nude, Illuminations. Others appear in my Causes and Spirits, due out this summer, which opens with the lines of the Star Spangled Banner — “Oh, say, can you see?” — and riffs on the realization that the camera, besides being a profession, was a way for me to discover, at once, the world and myself.
A sampling of the results are on view at www.wcarter.us.
Photographing people of many backgrounds, in many places, one becomes acutely aware of their sharply differing tribal, social, and other identities – the source of seemingly endless conflicts. There are no easy answers, and indeed the future seems ominous on that level. In later postings here, I hope to say something more about tribalism, its possible origins and future. Blogging and the web seem to have raised the stakes.
For now, suffice it to say that in my work as a photographer, writer, and sometime jazz musician, my (unfashionable?) mode has always been not to dwell on the surfaces that seem to separate us, but to try to look behind and below those surfaces, to that which unites us.
Stay tuned.
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
By William Carter 