Four black and silver photos

1. On an iron-posted bed, a leg with a gaping wound is cooled by a fan. The leg is Sunita’s who was too near a bomb explosion during an uprising in Nepal.
2. Sunita’s face is contorted in agony as her wounds are cleaned, although we don’t see the medical staff working on her. At the head of her bed is a sister, her head veiled in the old fashioned way, her face dark and wrinkled, looking at the woman thrashing below her. Their hands are side-by-side on the iron bed railing.
3. Sunita’s husband holds her body, wrapped in her native clothing as he stands in a river ready to let her go.
4. The husband holds his hand in prayer. He is still standing in the river and just below him under the water the photographer has got the swirl of cloth covering the young woman as she sinks to the river bed.

These photos of personal pain taken by Philip Blenkinsop were in no way unique. Four of us had gone to the 18^th International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan that filled nine buildings, but we could only cover two in a day both for the sheer number and the sheer volume of suffering that they showed.

Stanley Greene’s “Beyond the Wire. Voyage to the Country of Hate” taken in Iraq shows what he sees as “the failure in this war. These photos are an attempt to direct the pictures away from the fast-food journalism and towards a subjective and intensely human focus.”

Not all photos were recent. One of us had “lived through four revolutions” when he had spent time in Argentina. He was quiet as he walked by the photos from his time in that country and only later did he mention neighbors that were among the “disappeared”.

An immigrant’s body lay under a cloth in a failed attempt to escape the devastation of his own country. Uprisings against dictators in different countries was a reminder to those of us that live comfortable lives that freedom is not easily won and perhaps less easily kept.

The four of us could leave, have tea and a snack at a tapas bar, return to our comfortable lives. Yet we are the abnormality in a world filled with poverty, war and devastation.