ZEKE Fall 2019

Photo by David Verberckt. from his SDN exhibit, Waiting for the Rain. One of the 4,500 displaced persons living near
the capital of Somaliland. Tens of thousands of pastoralists have lost all their livestock during the past drought and became
fully dependent on humanitarian aid for their subsistence. Most have abandoned their nomadic way of life and settled into
makeshift camps where aid and food can reach them.
hundreds of exhibits of stunning photographs
that focus our attention on
challenging situations. David Verberckt
is a Belgium photographer whose interest
is to document and work closely with
people whose destinies are marred by
social and political injustices. His recent
exhibit on SDN, Waiting for Rain, is
about climate refugees from Somaliland
who have lost their livestock due to a
drought made worse by a changing
climate. The opening photo is one of
the 4,500 displaced persons living near
the capital of Somaliland, now fully
dependent on humanitarian aid for their
subsistence. Most have abandoned their
nomadic way of life and have settled
in makeshift camps where aid and
food can reach them. This is a powerful
frontal portrait of a woman looking
intensely in our eyes. There is no question
of her disappointment in her current
situation as a refugee. But she is not a
faceless victim. She is wearing a beautiful
turquoise scarf and earth-colored
head covering. Her expression is not of
pathos but rather the expression we may
see in our own mothers the world over,
an expression of familiarity, compassion,
and fate. Verberckt uses the simple but
effective visual tool of selective focus—
the woman’s face is in sharp focus while
the background recedes into blur. This
may be a textbook example of how to
make a good portrait, but combined
with the colors, the intense lighting
across the woman’s face, how her head
and shoulders so perfectly fill the frame,
the sweep and rhythms of shadows starting
in the lower left and ending with her
black headband, the bokeh (Google the
term if you are unfamiliar with it) of the
shadows, makes this a lasting comment
on how the human species has defiled
our planet yet how we resist by being
responsible stewards and take decisive
action to remedy the situation. It is also
a statement on how the human soul
(both the subject’s and Verberckt’s) lives,
struggles, and perseveres.
Meaning Can Heal
Humanity does not always win. In some
cases, the horrors are so great, the
perpetrators so debased, the victims so
broken, that it is not clear if the species
will survive. There are no comforting
photographs from the Holocaust, from
Rwanda, nor from other existential genocides
in history. During the Holocaust,
there was much art created by inmates
of concentration camps, but it doesn’t
reassure us. Rather the images makes us
question if God, or the human species
as we know it, can continue to exist
following the Holocaust? Viktor Frankl,
an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist
who lost his whole family during the
Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jews,
counseled his fellow prisoners with a
philosophy that argued that striving
for meaning, not pleasure nor power,
is what keeps us alive. Frankl was not
an artist, but in the throes of the worst
horrors faced by humanity, he invoked
the only thing left to camp prisoners facing
a near-certain death—a belief that
finding meaning can heal. Is that not
what artists the world over, and certainly
photographers, are always striving to
insist on? That amidst chaos, meaning
can prevail.
I can go on with equally as powerful
photographs on SDN and elsewhere
addressing equally as critical global
situations, but the question remains
“so what?” What effect does David
Verberckt’s photos have on either global
climate change or the specific situation
of displaced pastoralists in Somaliland?
What effect does Maryam Ashrafi’s
photos from Kurdistan have on defeating
ISIS? I hope their photos appear in venues
with greater readership than either
SDN or ZEKE magazine. I hope people
will see these images and perhaps gain
greater insight and empathy for victims
of climate change or ISIS, and perhaps
be driven to action. But I also believe
that David Verberckt, Maryam Ashrafi,
Younes Mohammad, and tens of thousands
of photographers the world over
who have made great personal sacrifices
and have worked tirelessly to make
great photos, have themselves taken a
stand against complacency because
they have been anything but complacent.
They, as any artist does, make
us confront a basic fact that amid so
much suffering in the world, there is also
beauty. But beauty is not separate from
suffering. On the contrary, perfection
and beauty gives us hope that things
can be different and better, that we can
rally, we are an intelligent species, and
we can rise from the ashes to heal.
42 / ZEKE FALL 2019