03 October,2010 11:01 AM IST | | Anjana Vaswani
Ryan Lobo's photographs of war-ridden Afghanistan, Baghdad and Liberia don't tell the dark tale one would expect them to. Awed by the power of contrition and clemency that he witnessed, Lobo feels these images encapsulate lessons for anyone who has held a grudge
Observe any bunch of unsupervised children, and you are sure to spot it -- that basic human proclivity for warfare. The human race loves to fight -- kids shove each other over broken pencil points. Adultsu00a0 brawl over broken hearts.
An insurgent in Baghdad: Lobo says, they say the rules have changed
with insurgents killing press people. "In the past, reporters could meet
both sides and tell a story. Now it's impossible," a Mr Brown informs Lobo.
Later, in his account of Baghdad, Lobo says, "Two .50 caliber rounds hit
the wall close to my window earlier in the day. Were they from an
American soldier? Or was it insurgent sniper fire? I hear a lot of
automatic gunfire in the distance after dinner. Who knows really."
And at the end of each war, whether it's fought on a battlefield, in the middle of a bazaar or in a couple's bedroom, come anguish, hatred and rage.
At this point, one has a choice to make: nurture pestilent weeds of negativity, allowing them to suck out happiness or nip seeds of hatred in the bud, and forgive.
Monster in Afghanistan: Two soft-spoken heroin-addicts lead Lobo to
an abandoned building some distance out of Kabul. The structure is
bullet-hole-marked and littered with human faeces. One of the men
brings his little daughter along. The little girl waits while they smoke
heroin. Lobo wonders what will become of the child. "Maybe she will be
sold," says his companion, giving the girl a bar of chocolate. As they
leave, she makes "monster" faces. Sticking her hands out in front of her,
she roars.
And forgive, you can. Bengaluru photographer Ryan Lobo's pictures stand testimony to the incredible capacity we have to move on and find peace. Lobo has worked on over 70 films, many of which have aired on the National Geographic Channel, The Oprah Winfrey Show and PBS. It was during the course of working on one of these in 2007 that he came across some of the stories told in a photo exhibition in the city.
In Liberia, Lobo says he watched as "a woman with a scarred face forgave the remorseful General Butt Naked -- who got his name from fighting in his birthday suit (having lived in an occult-centric tribe, the General believed that fighting in the raw made him impervious to bullets) -- who had killed her brother and eaten his heart because he spoke French, the language of his enemies."
Telling us that this was just a photograph of a man on a truck in Liberia,
Lobo admits, "It looked like he was holding a cage together around him,"
as he tells us that when he went through the images he had shot in Liberia,
he decided to label this one, The Preponderance of Nature.
Afghan National Army Soldier in Poppy Field: Lobo writes that they were
later informed that those poppy fields are controlled by the Taliban, that
the farmers were probably Taliban and that the government troops had
not visited the area since four soldiers were killed right there, the
previous month. "We heard horrific things about what could happen.
We leave and they watch us leave."
In Afghanistan, where drug trade accounts for 50 per cent of the Gross National Product, a poppy farmer, says Lobo, "invited us to lunch after we had just destroyed their fields." This is the Pashtun way, Lobo learnt -- The Pashtun guest code. "They say they would all rather die than let us face harm," he writes in his account of the incident, baring his own astonishment.
Lobo's pictures also present a side of history you don't see in text books. Winston Churchill once remarked, "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it".
Text books will never teach American students who study the Iraq war, for instance, about the young men in that war-zone for whom the tag 'Gucci' takes on a macabre new meaning. "When a weapon is overly modified to look 'designer' they refer to it as a Gucci," Lobo writes, narrating an incident in Baghdad. "I hear Tony early on in the day calling an Iraqi guy's flashy modified weapon a Gucci. They are trying to look like movie stars, the Iraqi contractors."
War and Forgiveness is on display till October 4, from 11 am to 7 pm, at ICIA House, 22/26, K Dubhash Marg, Kala Ghoda. For details, call: Tamira 9619923403
