This image is taken from Michel Setboun’s third book about agencies. Eighty reporters were chosen to comment on an iconic image taken during their careers. The image we’re publishing today is a picture by Mat Jacob.
I took this picture of the 1st or 2nd of January, 2002, in Khan Younis, a Palestinian village in the southern Gaza Strip. Clashes were occurring daily during this second intifada. Behind me was an enormous wall designed to prevent stones from being thrown, and to block off Palestinian access to the sea. The New Year’s festivities had just ended, a truce had been declared. These two Palestinians were chatting among the ruins in the afternoon. They don’t seem worried at all. It was a day off from war: people were talking, loving, living their lives.
This photograph was included in a collective work put together by Tendance Floue entitled Nous n’irons plus aux paradis. New forms of political activism are an important theme for me. But this picture can also be understood outside of the Israeli-Palestinian context. When it’s exhibited in Tendance Floue’s publishing projects, there’s no caption. We like to decontextualize photographs to tell other stories, “restaging” and questioning the world.
BOOK
40 ans de photojournalisme, Génération agences
by Michel Setboun & Marie Cousin
Editions de la Martinière
250 x 285 mm
240 pages
9782732464022
39 €
http://www.editionsdelamartiniere.fr
