Beauty and Devastation: Dilemmas in Kent Klich’s “Gaza Works”

Today I visited the Danish Royal Library to view Kent Klich’s photojournalism exhibition, “Gaza Works.” I crossed the library lobby with its bright views of boats on blue water, and descended an austere gray staircase. I found myself in a dim and cavernous room with no windows. Intermittent shrieks and unintelligible shouting reverberated from some unknown location. Never, in that room, was I able to mentally escape the curated experience of desolate Gaza for the comfortable Copenhagen I knew rested above me. Always the uncomfortable background noise and dim, echoing space kept me anxiously engaged in the material.

In a statement at the beginning of the exhibition, Danish photojournalist Kent Klich explains that he aims to reterritorialize the mainstream narrative of the Gaza experience. Rather than offering short-term and sensationalist snapshots of disasters, he asserts that he has formed a more collaborative relationship with residents of Gaza, and thus has a different story to tell, one that humanizes Gazans and portrays a long-term struggle. In some ways, I found that Kent Klich delivered his intention, while other aspects of his exhibition were unintentionally alienating.  

The exhibition was divided into segments. There was a brief collection of black and white photographs of Gazans carrying their dead relatives, shouting and waving flags in rubble-strewn courtyards––the kinds of photographs I often see in sensationalist journalistic pieces. The largest segment of the exhibition was given to lamenting the loss of Gaza’s airport, of which now survived only a barren stretch of dirt, a few permanently-grounded airplanes, and some shards of mosaic flooring, which Klich displayed in a glass case. It was illuminating to learn about the demise of this airport, of which I had never heard of, and so in this respect Klich delivered on his promise to illuminate previously underreported facets of the Gaza experience. However, because the abandoned-airport photographs featured no human beings, and little accompanying text, I found it difficult to feel a genuine emotional connection.

The next segment also featured stark desolation. This was a collection of beautifully composed photographs of empty homes damaged by IDF raids. Here, an abandoned room with ceiling half-caved in, bullet-riddled walls, and armchairs bleeding stuffing suddenly became a work of art: the light, color, texture and arrangement of each photograph appeared deliberately composed. This mastery of craft, combined with a lack of human presence, lent the photographs a stark and unsettling beauty that seemed to me to subvert Klich’s intention of humanizing Gaza residents. These photographs were so clearly Klich’s work: a celebration of his mastery as an artist, even as they exposed ruin in hopes of eliciting audience’s political sympathy. Other segments also featured abandoned, precisely composed, artistically striking photographs: some of mammography machines, lamenting the lack of access to gynecological health in Gaza, some of the desert landscape after the so-called Black Friday conflict. These photographs, though compelling in their visual arrangement, resisted emotional involvement through their lack of human subjects.

For me, the most successful segments of the exhibition were the ones in which Klich’s role was less dominant, and the faces and voices of Gaza residents could shine through. The most emotionally moving segment of the exhibition, and the one in which I believe Klich fully realized his intended artistic mission, featured photographs that he did not take himself. This segment featured a long wooden table on which were arranged family photographs donated by various Gaza residents. From the table, people smiled with birthday cakes and wedding dresses, young men laughed on street corners, faded sepia people stared unsmilingly in the style of the day. Here were the people of Gaza, as I had never before seen them. The pictures bore a striking resemblance to my own family’s photos. These people––whom I normally only see present in the images of waving guns and flags, or absent, as in the carefully composed photographs of bombed buildings––now seemed real and breathing and human.

A collection of family photos from Gaza residents, displayed in “Gaza Works.”

Another successful segment also elevated the voices of Gaza residents. This video installation was entitled “Killing Time” and featured camera-phone videos taken by Gazans who were later killed in IDF raids. The videos are grainy, clearly amateur, and yet deeply moving, because we knew the subjects were headed for death. Men played soccer; a journalist waited at a police station; a young girl giggled with a garden hose. And here, finally, was the source of the intermittent shrieks that had persisted throughout the exhibition: a man swung a child playfully over a squawking, crowing rooster. This was nothing like the scene of suffering I had been envisioned when I heard the noises upon entering the exhibition. Instead it was a moment of play which further humanized Gazans for me and tilted my preconceptions of the Gaza experience.

In addition to illuminating parts of the Gaza experience about which I was unaware, “Gaza Works” challenged my notions of the genre of photojournalism. While I admire beautifully composed photographs as works of art, I found that when the photographs feature a peoples’ circumstance, without the people themselves, it can unintentionally exoticize the experience. It calls to mind when National Geographic used to feature photo-spreads of African tribes alongside photographs of rare animals, offering both for aesthetic consumption as exotic subjects. Instead, I admired Klich’s methods in the family-photo display and the video installation, in which he collected voices and images of peoples’ lives as they experienced them, therefore amplifying, rather than exoticizing, marginalized voices.

Klich’s work was clearly well-intentioned, and succeeded well in the segments in which it amplified Gazan’s voices; I only wish it had featured more clear evidence of collaboration with Gazans, such as quotations from interviews, or even portraits of their faces. Though imperfect, “Gaza Works” is a moving and thoughtful work of photojournalism by a skilled artist, and ultimately succeeds in further exploring and bringing to life a controversial contemporary topic.