death | The mastery of life, work and Photography

Tears of the grassland. Sometimes the green green grass of home just does not feel so green.

I find myself (as just another white privileged male) thinking about what is going on in the United States of America. With over 60,000 people having died of #Covid19 so far, the riots seem at odds to my United Kingdom. We are told to socially distance and yet there are thousands of people coming together to fight for their beliefs in spite of the risk.

It makes me think. I don’t know how I feel. I am sad that Mr Floyd’s life has ended, of course. I’m sad that it is at the hand of another ‘white’ policeman. I’m partially bemused by the repetitious nature of this incident. It feels like I’ve seen all this before.

The fact is, I have… we all have.

It’s got me thinking about racism, what it actually is. I don’t think we understand it at all. We seem to have this perception that racism is some kind of violent attack (physical or verbal) on someone who ‘looks’ different to ourselves. It’s not. I think it is much more nuanced than that. In most cases it’s much gentler than that. Yes, you heard me, I said that racism can be gentle, passive. Here lies the problem. We make it out to be so easy to remove the scourge of racism from our society, but the fact remains, it remains. It is there, it is not often violent or even identifiable, but it is there.

I don’t think that most people think they are racist, in fact they will often stand up against racism because it’s wrong, right? Of course it is. We can rationalise it and it’s very wrong yet it survives.

I don’t think it’s truly possible to understand racism unless you have been subject to it. I don’t mean being beaten or spat on or verbally abused. I mean simply being treated differently, being looked at in a certain way, being labelled, being pre judged.

Racism isn’t about the violence, that is just a disturbing consequence perpetrated by a minority. It is cultural, it is systemic and it is self perpetuating and lives in a strange situation where our denial to accept that it is more prevalent than we wish to believe, keeps a society from actually dealing with it.

It’s uncomfortable. My knee-jerk reaction is to deny it, even to myself… but am I then simply allowing it to continue?

I offer no solutions. I really don’t know what the solution is, if indeed there really is one to be had. Clearly something has to change but human nature and its insecurities will always get in the way.

By all means comment and give your point of view, I would love to hear from you. In the mean time my thoughts go to the family of George Floyd and those close to him left behind and I say that with the utmost sincerity.

Life is not all smiles, in fact if you believe Buddhists, life is suffering. I think we all have periods of our lives when we can relate to that.

We experience bad things, this is only natural, although who can say that they experience pain (physical or psychological). This week I decided to go back to a place I went to as a child and never really understood, Belsen, one of the Nazi concentration camps of WWII.

Now to put this in context, I used to live near to Belsen as a child growing up in a forces environment, but as a child you should not understand these things (sadly this is not the case for all children). Going back to the new museum (since I was a child), I was initially shocked by the museum, it felt cold, impersonal, forbidding. As I spent time in there, the more I understood it.

My wife’s Grandfather served in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War and was one of the first to enter Belsen. As a keen amateur photographer who had his own kit, he was requested to take some photographs of what he saw, such was the dis belief of what they did see, there must have been a real fear that the outside world would simply not believe it. Sadly he suffered the effects of what he witnessed for the rest of his life. Many of the photographs and negatives were destroyed on the advice of a psychiatrist in the 60’s or 70’s. A few did survive and were given to the Imperial War Museum together with the camera they were taken on.

On reflection as you see the exhibits, the photos, the artifacts later discovered, it becomes clear. How can you soften this place, no matter how uncomfortable you make the museum, it CAN never be as dreadful as it was for these inmates.

I will always remember the story told to me by my Grandfather in law, on entering the camp there was a young girl, sat near the abandoned gates, malnourished and to weak to even stand. By the time he walked past her again a couple of hours later, she was dead.

Part of the exhibition (that does not feel like the right way to describe it), the memorial, is a video exhibit filmed by the AFPU (Army Film & Photography Unit), the fore runners of our existing trade of RLC photographers. The video is harrowing to see, as it shows the reality that made me a little uneasy, watching the dead being dragged around in ceremoniously by a limb only to be dumped in huge ditches. I am realistic enough to understand that due to the sheer scale of the problem, it had to be dealt with so quickly as the stench of death must have been almost too much to bear.

Sadly it would be at least a little bit comforting to know that as a result of these atrocities, similar events would be avoided, but alas, this has been proven not to be the case.
Even more disturbing I think is the groups that deny that these events have been fabricated, they never happened. I don’t understand that even with the weight of evidence in still and video imagery, there can be any doubt, but it makes me wonder what motivates this denial, or the continued refusal to accept the worst in human behavior. Whist that continues, should we continue to accept these situations? How do we, as a species stop it?