World Press Photo exhibit
After months of cultural drought, I finally made it to a great exhibition yesterday. It made me realize how important culture is to how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to the world. After seeing the photos, I felt like I started to reconnect with people in other parts of the world, not in that I had had similar experiences exactly, since many of those depicted were of war and violence, but on some level there were universal feelings and reactions and relationships.
Here is the link to the event:
2006 World Press Photo of the Year
I can't cut and paste the winning photo in here because of copyright laws, but take a look -- the wealthy Lebanese girls in the convertible here looking at a demolished building show that Israel's bombings affected people of all economic levels.
The exhibition included both single photos and photo series from all over the world. Some of them were about war, some about sports, and some about nature. Some were so disgusting you could barely look - limbs blown off in Iraq or Africa, blood and guts and murder. And these, strangely, seemed to converse with other photos from nature, like a series of a leopard seal killing a penguin. So we aren't the only ones who kill in cold blood, but we certainly do it on a greater scale.
Yesterday was the last day of the exhibition, and the gallery, near Mexico City's Zocalo, or central plaza, was packed with curious observers. People lingered at photo after photo, reading the captions with care and marveling at the human emotions that bubbled up from the images. For that time, in that room, pushing politely to see every single image, we were all connected by our humanity.