Sharjah 24: “Photographs can tell the truth. The beauty and truth that come about in all the stories that have been told of all the places that we could never go! I wouldn’t have one per cent of the courage to go where she goes,” said art historian and gallery guide Sylvia Laudien-Meo of French photographer Laetitia Vançon as she took viewers on a guided tour of the exhibition “Tribute to Odessa.” The exhibition, part of Xposure International Photography Festival 2024 in Sharjah, had a collection of photographs taken by Vancon on a three-week assignment for the New York Times in the Ukrainian city in June 2022, four months into the war with Russia.
Vancon herself explained her mission, calling the truth subjective and her goal being one of bringing awareness of places where people cannot go but can relate to. Regarding her photograph Lining up in front of the Karaoke, where a group of people are seen queueing up for food in Mykolaiv, Vancon noted how war had made people resilient in spite of being in the line of the Russian offensive. “I work with a fixer, and brainstorm my ideas; so I asked to be present when there was a food distribution,” Vancon explained her modus operandi in the war zone.
There are so many different ways of reporting on the war but the wisdom and intuition of the photographer makes a huge difference, giving something that is timeless and can be translated into other places and other conflicts, Laudien-Meo stressed.
The next exhibition in the guided tour was the “Freedom Horses of Kurdistan'' by Benign Ahmad, which had a collection of 21 photographs to celebrate March 21, the onset of spring in the Kurdish calendar. Ahmad noted that the horses included Arabian, Kurdish and Andalusian, but underlined that like the animals on his canvas, humans are all one and the conflict over race and land was meaningless. He lauded the UAE where everyone irrespective of their race and religion live in peace.
“Signs of Your Identity” by Daniella Zalcman was the next stop on the tour. Laudien-Meo observed that it was heart-wrenching to go through the exhibition and realise how indigenous populations mostly in Canada were stripped of their identity. “It is a poetic image – of the minds and hearts, of their suffering and trauma,” she shared, noting that a book of the photographs has been published to distribute in schools in the US and Canada so that a part of history that is not known is made public.
The last stop is an exhibition titled “Piri Rimuri”, a collection of photographs taken by Seila Montes Gonzalez of the Raramuri people, an indigenous population in the mountains of Mexico. The photographer has captured their festivals, food and habitat, and how the youth have shifted to the plains for education and employment, often bringing the ways of modernity into their lives.
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