Amnesty International Gaza Exhibition

Here is the final episode in my bid to have an exhibition at Amnesty Internationals office in east London. Not sure how I should respond! Not sure how I feel about their approach!
“I’ve just had another discussion with Kristyan Benedict, the campaign manager for Israel and Palestine and we’ve looked again at your images. Obviously, over recent weeks and days, things have been moving rapidly in Gaza, and we’ve been doing a lot of work on the situation - issuing urgent requests to our activists to write letters, putting out press releases etc relating to the current and rapidly unfolding crisis. For this reason, we think it would look a little odd to have an exhibition up of photos that were taken so long ago, however interesting the images. We feel that anyone coming to an exhibition on Gaza would expect it to be very  current and illustrative of the current crisis.

I’m sorry to say no to the exhibition now as I know when we discussed it previously I was more positive, but I think given the unfolding situation there, we would really need to have something more current if we were to hold an exhibition.

Do keep in touch, and obviously if you do return to Gaza let me know as we may well be interested in more recent photographs.“

Landscape shots in the Gaza Strip.

Should I think of my personal documentary work as ‘commercial’ and not take it too personally…. after all a jobs a job! I don’t have illusions about it making any profit (though it is possible). And I know the images won’t change the world which is what we wanted to do with our photography in the 80’s when I first started taking photographs. I do want to add to the debate and maybe the work will have an impact in a positive way somewhere along the way.

~ by bip mistry on January 26, 2008.