Red Pepper » In pictures

In pictures: Dale Farm

admin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:28:38 +0000

‘I don’t know why no-one’s ever took the time to find out what we’re really like – if we’re real human beings. They just say “move ‘em on, move ‘em on,” and that’s the top and bottom of it.’ – Barbara Sheridan, Dale Farm, 2011.

In 2001, a group of Irish traveller families bought a piece of land on a scrapyard known as Dale Farm and moved their trailers onto the site. They were looking for somewhere to settle since it had become illegal for them to travel the country by stopping on roadsides.

Subsequently, however, they were denied the planning permission from the local council in Basildon that would enable them to stay on the site. After a long legal battle the travellers have now lost their fight to stay and the council is spending £18 million evicting them – a decision that will make up to 86 families homeless.

For the people living on the site, the fight is not just about the land, but about keeping their culture, community and families together.
All photographs by Mary Turner, who has been photographing Dale Farm residents since 2009. More photos on her website at www.maryturner.photoshelter.com

Bangladesh: Forty years free

admin — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 04:36:10 +0000

When India was partitioned after independence, modern-day Bangladesh, as a Muslim-majority region, became part of Pakistan. Yet East Pakistan, as it was known, was effectively ruled from Islamabad, with Urdu the sole national language and Bengali not recognised.
Pro-independence sentiment was boosted in 1970 when cyclone Bhola killed up to half a million people. The poor relief effort organised by the Pakistani authorities was condemned by pro-independence leaders as ‘gross neglect, callous and utter indifference’.
In March 1971, the Pakistani army launched an operation to liquidate the growing nationalist opposition, gunning down demonstrations and targeting activists. In response, Bangladesh’s independence was declared, and the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) was organised. The War of Liberation lasted until December, when the entry of the Indian Army into Bangladesh on the side of independence decisively turned the tide against Pakistan.
Human rights violations were widespread, and many estimates put the number of people killed by Pakistani forces at more than a million. The United States supported Pakistan in the conflict.

Pro-independence leader Sheikh Mujibar Rahman addressing a rally at the Race Course Maidan, on 7 March 1971, brfore the army crackdown on 25 March. Photo: Abul Lais Shyamal.

Wounded freedom fighters near rehabilitation camp Dhanmondi, Dhaka. Photo: Anwar Hossain

Bengalis massacred by the Pakistani Army and Al Badrs (local Bengali collaborators) being salvaged, Buriganga, Dhaka, late 1971. Photo: Anwar Hossain.

Victorious freedom fighters at the village of Charkushai, Dohar Thana, Dhaka, late 1971. Photo: Anwar Hossain

These photographs, commemorating the struggle for independence, are from the collection of the Swadhinata Trust, a Bengali heritage association based in Tower Hamlets, London: www.swadhinata.org.uk

Kanaval: Mardi Gras in a Haitian town

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:11:59 +0000

Each year Jacmel, a coastal town in southern Haiti, holds pre-Lenten Mardi Gras festivities. Troupes of performers act out mythological and political tales in a theatre of the absurd that traverses the streets, rarely shackled by traditional procession. Mardi Gras in Jacmel is light years away from the sanitised, corporate-sponsored, tourist-driven carnivals around the world.
There appears to be no set time, route or parade. One can wander a deserted Sunday afternoon street and turn a corner to find a surreal masked man in drag with a snake necklace carrying a mini-me baby doll with an arm for a leg. Around another corner you might find a group with suits and bag masks on their heads made of kitten material with a board proclaiming ‘Down with the fat cats’.

It is a carnival of flâneurs and meanderers, rather than marchers and processors. The characters and costumes partially betray their roots in medieval European carnival, but the Jacmellien masquerades are also a fusion of Vodou mythology, ancestral memory, political satire and personal revelation.
I started this project in 1995, and after seven or so years it became apparent to me that there were many underlying narratives. As a photographer, I was always keenly aware of the difficulties and responsibilities in representing Haiti. Since the slaves’ revolt, Haiti has been a mythological epicentre for racist and colonial anxieties. And many of these encoded mythologies are reproduced and replicated through the visual representation of Haiti. Looking at my increasingly iconic photograph of the Lanceurs de Corde, the two men with the bulls horns, one of the first images I took of carnival in 1995, I was aware of how easily the wildly exotic image could feed into a deep well of stereotype.

While I could not eradicate all the power inbalance inherent in photographing another culture, or overturn the 200-year cultural demonisation of Haiti, I could at least find strategies for ‘damage limitation’. So I returned three times to Jacmel in a calmer, more tranquil, non-carnival period and collected the oral histories of the people making and wearing the costumes – the stories behind the masquerade. I tracked down the leaders of the groups and asked them to tell me their tales. I wanted to restore the narrative to the photographs and reduce the level of spectacle.
Carnival has become a potent vessel for a people’s telling of Haiti’s history. As Henry Ford once said, ‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we made today.’
What we find on the streets of Jacmel at carnival time unravels this statement with acerbity, threat, imagination, grace and wild surrealism.
The whole event is swirling around in a miasma of warped historical retelling. This is the kind of history-telling that would be making Henry Ford’s palms a tad sweaty. And so it should.