Human Rights Watch’s role is to defend and protect human rights around the world, giving a voice to the oppressed while holding oppressors accountable for their crimes. When Libya fell, last year, Peter Bouckaert, the organisation’s emergencies director, was on the ground with his team, ensuring that valuable Libyan archives were secured and protected from looting and destruction.
“In the course of their efforts, Human Rights Watch came across several major archives of photographs from the Gaddafi era as well as the King Idriss period,” says Susan Glen, the curator of The Gaddafi Archives, a key exhibition at this year’s London Festival of Photography. “Realizing the historical value of the never-seen archives, Bouckaert worked with Michael Christopher Brown and the late Tim Hetherington to photograph the images in the archives, as he did not want to remove the originals from the photo archives. The photographers were only able to re-photograph a fraction of the vast archives, but the images that were recorded show just how historically important the archives are.”
According to Glen, the exhibition will “highlight photography’s role in recording and documenting an important period in Libya’s history that we can only now begin to truly understand.”
“This archive is unique and rare and contains over 1000 images across a wide range of topics,” say the organisers. “King Idris is seen welcoming a young Queen Elizabeth II in 1954 on her second foreign trip as monarch, the early Gaddafi years vividly show a strong relationship between Colonel Gaddafi and his hero President Nasser of Egypt. Rare images of the period when Libya was effectively closed to the West from the mid-70’s until the revolution depict social chaos, the era of the Green Book, torture and military misadventure and Gadaffi’s strategic foreign trips to eastern Europe and the Middle East. The exhibition looks behind the ‘grip and grin’ smiles of the political photo-op propaganda to reveal what was really going on.”
In addition to providing the photographs, Human Rights Watch will also contribute essays and video reports from Libya to the exhibition, to give visitors a multi-faceted experience focusing on Libya’s experience under Gaddafi’s dictatorship and the challenges the country faces moving ahead. “Human Rights Watch also plans to release a detailed report on the circumstances surrounding the capture and death of Gaddafi in Sirte at the exhibition,” says Glen.
EXHIBITION
The Gaddafi Archives – Libya Before the Arab Spring
June 21 to June 29, 2012
Slade Research Centre at The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London, WC1H 0AB.
