A symphony of colours

 

Carlos Palma is a conductor working within the field of social photodocumentary. He contributes with stories on the present, on human potential, while conducting us through visually symphonies composed by colour, light, sound, and smell. Presently, he is an accompaniment to the Syrian conflict, bringing out stories about million of people that have become dislocated due to war wagering: A Million Children Refugee and Reflections of Displaced Syrians, both from 2012, are just a small depiction of life possibilities in which the Syrian’s refugees have to engage with.

 

However, with this two series of works, Carlos Palma extends the space beyond what is a condition commonly reported and introduced by the media to those that live out-side of the conflict zone. The photographer’s contribution to the story being told is in providing an opportunity to observe real lives of dislocated people due to war belligerency. To show that reality, if not a unique view consisting of only one view point, exists in the intimacy with the subject and its surroundings. His critical positioning within the field of possibilities takes shape as a double distance from the subject being photographed, having a decisive importance in capturing a changing world, being at the point of transition from one state, of being without, to another, of being at loss. The criticality of photo-storytelling takes shape “through an emphasis on the present, of living out a situation, of understanding culture as a series of effects rather than of causes, of the possibilities of actualising some of its potential rather than revealing its faults.”

 

Visual trickery, a particular perception of the world

 

Take the following natural occurrence as an actual effect. Although the original source is the same – the Sun – lighting temperature and conditions differ from location to location, wherever you will find yourself in the globe. Near the Poles, it tends to be more orange; whereas, in the middle of tropical rainforest, the white light appears more greenish, while, on the other hand, near the Equator, it tends to be more bluish. A geographical place where shadows are more struck and small when comparing with those on the extremes, which are long and shallow. The perception of the white colour, therefore, varies according to our physical location in the world. In the same way does our perception of images and consequently of culture. They are culturally embodied, as well as our perception of their intrinsic/subjective meaning. Merleau-Ponty’s research on perception establishes that “Reality is not a crucial appearance underlying the rest, it is the framework of relations with which all appearances tally.” A thing has a place and a shape “throughout variations of perspective that are merely apparent.” These appearances do not attribute the object itself, but are “accidental features of our bodily relation with it, and not as being of it.” And, he further adds that as soon as this thing “finds its place in the system, it finds its truth, and perspective distortion is no longer passively endured, but understood.” The appearance is misleading since this relational system is brought together by various conceptual elements, such as cultural identity, religious dogma, family ties, social belonging, political affiliations, economical doctrines, etc. It is what defines objectively and position us as social beings with emotions, feelings, experiences, and acquired habits and behaviours. The question is, how there can the thing to be true, objective or real since perception is polarised towards the thing, and a lot of valid information exists and is lost in between!

 

In a digital-democratising age, Carlos Palma’s photo documentation double-deals with the dynamic of loss and with the limitations of photography in terms of narrative capacity. Photography is, by its own nature, a liar, a technical deceiver, an innovating storyteller. The object of the images created and brought to us by Carlos Palma are of everything; however, they are not honest. Those images represent reality. Those are visual lies, not about the subject that they tell us to believe but through its technical storytelling. Whereas, on one level, photography captures a particular framework of a particular moment in life, according to the intentions of the person taken the photograph, to represent what he or she thinks is of value or not, on a different level, most of the photos composed by the photographer imply that we are not viewing the "real" space of the scene, but only a pond  – "Reflections of Displaced Syrian." This series of images depict a double-infidelity reproducing life through composed movements brought into existence by the photographer’s eye. “A displaced family at the border area with Turkey, of Bab Al Salameh, photographed using the reflection of the rain water that fell on previous days,” “Water distribution for the displaced Syrian at the Syrian border post with Turkey, of Bab Al Salameh,” or “Reflection of Syrian displaced children in the rain water, stuck at the Syrian border post with Turkey, of Bab Al Salameh” are objectively photos that mix multiple surfaces: dirty soil, waste and water while juxtaposing heterogeneous fields of vision, including reflecting an inversed image of people’s bare life. With these two series - Reflections of Displaced Syrians and A Million Children Refugee – Palma brings photography to its bare technicality and physical autonomy.

 

Ponds are like mirrors; they reflect on concerns about spectatorship on the dynamics of gaze and on spatial relations. They transform the space by reincorporating the off-frame zone. The ponds in Reflections of Displaced Syrians transform the pictorial space by accommodating unseen perspectives in their reflection, enabling the absent to become present, visible, and exposed. While, with A Million Children Refugee, in living out a particular situation as social photo-documentary, the photographer predicates his own critical condition of observer, of reporting on the human’s potential.

 

Psychological states (internal output) that had caused other psychological states

 

The system of imposed rules of values and behaviour takes inputs, manipulates then, and send them as outputs. Then, from where is the meaning coming? Our thoughts are about things. They have meaning. One of our particularities, as human beings, is that we can think about things. Nonetheless, what we have on this imposed structured view of life is a system based on appearance that has no understanding at all. There is no meaning involved, only emptiness of symbols. It just receives inputs and sends outputs. At no point we do have any understanding about the thing thought. For this system of appearances the "correct" output is set by rules for or an analysis of this same data to find the correct arrangement of words and phrases in order to create a well-formed sentence in a particular language, the storytelling. As human beings, what is important for us is the semantic properties in the thing thought. Whereas for the former, syntax is what counts, how things are arranged together. So, when a story is told visually, what stands for us is the semantic properties of the images. We might know, or not, the code for all the combined symbols, positions, gestures, objects portrayed in the photo, etc. and be able to translate it, which is as far as the system is concerned with, but our main concern is in relating all those visual symbols to meaning in a particular culture, i.e. what do they signify for me?

 

In Babylon (2012), a movie documentary directed by Ala Eddine Slim, Ishmaël and Youssef Chebbi, a tent city is build on the main border crossing separating Tunisia and Libya, the Ras Jedir check-point, to accommodate more than a million refugees of various nationalities that fled from the escalating Libyan war conflict, as well as from other neighbouring countries. The documental observation taken by the directors’ “records the temporary camp’s construction, alongside intimate encounters with its diverse population,” which included Africans and Bangladeshis, “as tensions rise in” an “uncompromising environment, mediated by humanitarian aid workers and media agencies.”

 

The most striking documentation brought by the film, however, is the vacuity, the emptiness, and the removal of all and any content that might refer to a cultural background or geographical identity, except for the language spoken by each individual group between them. It is just like a white canvas waiting to be worked upon! In this puzzled state of deprivation where any referential that could help in the making of relations between objects and predications, signifiers and significations are absent, the subject is reduced to the minimum, resulting in loss. How can we believe, then, other people’s testimony about what are our common values and knowledge? To have a better human understanding about the things that surrounds us? On account of, as Hume claims, people having a natural tendency to sincerely assert falsehoods about what they want to refer to, due to the self-interest in what they affirm, to take advantages of other people, or because human beings generally find the feelings of surprise and wonder agreeable. Nothing is more twisted than the truth.

 

All those living in a completely empty space, like a refugee camp, are unable to find one’s way, not knowing one’s whereabouts, since they are all deprived of what can give them a comparative value in relation to the other. The result is a place showing evidence of social decline, where those living in feel an unjust infliction of life’s hardships and constrains. Refugee camps have become the new Babel, but a lying, social degenerative, or oppressive Bablyon, causing a doctorial depression combined with harsh discomfort.

 

Refugee camps as places of displacement

 

More recently, under the advent of the Arab Spring, and according to the world humanitarian organisation assisting children – UNICEF – in the winter of 2012, the number of children looking for refuge in Syria’s neighbouring countries had reached a million. Part of those dislocated children got stuck at the Syrian border post with Turkey, at Bab Al Salameh, in the Azazz province. They (the children) are painting a new world on a white canvas, which are the refugee camps. The children are painting with the ink they have at their disposal, in their hands – a child's hand is still not a "masculine hand" or a "feminine hand"; he/she faces emptiness waiting to be filled up. A true and powerful expressive set of colours: bloody red, lost green, grieving blue, survival black, etc. The children that are “traumatised, depressed and in search of a reason to wait,” as expressed by the High Commission of the UN for Refugee, the Portuguese Antonio Guterres – and let’s be real about this – are having the childhood that we all once dreamt about while we were kids, playing war games with friends on our own backyards, constructions sites, or other places that allowed our imagination to flow. Nonetheless, in this particular case, they are living it! In one of the pictures of A Million Children Refugee series, for instance, a Syrian child runs for cover while playing “at war” with his friends in a destroyed civilian building. At the same place where, a few days earlier, had occurred real fighting had occurred between the Free Syrian Army and Governmental forces. Whereas, in another photo of the same series, a seven year old child proudly shows his toy gun “Made in China.” If those that are more near, closer, are the daily references to those children, why should they believe someone that they never met that war is not a solution and that, instead, they should be in school? Children have a natural disposition to confide in the veracity of others and to believe what is told to them, in particular, by those who are the closest, who belong to the same group, blood, culture. Children are naïve and inexperienced in the ways of the world.

 

Like in the film Babylon – deliberately free of subtitles and referents that might have helped in the process of relating situation and stories within the narrative – the children and us, as observers of the Syrian conflict as it is captured by the lens of Carlos Palma camera, have become submerged by an extraordinary experience that places us both in the shoes of the tent city’s temporary inhabitants. Displaced from the normal arrangement or position of things, while something else takes its place. To turn to the next state in life, we must break with habits and other culturally imposed values and iconographies, "cross the great water," and open up our new-found emptiness to new experiences and inspirations. One has to become lost in order to find oneself again!

 

 

© Rui Goncalves Cepeda, 2013

 

Bibliography:

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Classics.

Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.

 

Film:

Babylon (2012), by Ala Eddine Slim, Ishmaël and Youssef Chebbi. Tunisia, 121’. Institute of Contemporary Arts: Film: Cinema on the Steps: Curated by Abdellah Karroum, August 20th 2013.

 

Part of the exhibition series Where Do We Go Now! run between 2013 and 2015 at VASA Project.