This exhibition captures the hope and horror of life in Gaza

This August, Israel killed five journalists in a double-tap air strike at a hospital in Gaza: Moaz Abu Taha, Mariam Abu Dagga, Mohammad Salama, Ahmed Abu Aziz and Hussam al-Masri. Abu Dagga, a 33-year-old photojournalist who worked with Associated Press and Independent Arabia, appears as a subject in Against Erasure: Photographs from Gaza, a new exhibition currently on display at London’s P21 Gallery. Part of a series of portraits of women in Gaza by photographer Jehad Alshrafi, the shot frames her in front of a bombed building; holding a press helmet and with a camera strap across her shoulders, she gazes away from the camera and into the sun, frowning slightly but with a look of resolve. It is one of the standouts of a deeply powerful collection of images.

Established in 2013, P21 Gallery is a non-profit platform for art related to the Arab world, with a particular focus on younger or less established artists. Against Erasure, which was organised in partnership with Kuwaiti non-profit Photo Humanity Grant, features images from 11 photographers based in Gaza: Mahmoud Abu Hamda, Belal Alhams, Jehad Alshrafi, Hammam Younis Alzyatuniya, Anas Ayyad, Majdi Fathi Suleiman Qraiqea, Belal Khaled, Ahmed Salama, Fatima Alzahra Shbair, Ali Jadallah, and Abdul Rahman Zaqout. While several participants are experienced photojournalists, the project was intended to capture events in Gaza through a more artistic lens. 

For Yahya Zaloom, one of two curators alongside Razan AlSarraf, this distinction is important. “If you look at these photographs, you’ll find that they have layers about normal life in Gaza, whereas photojournalism is more direct and in your face: this bombing happened and these people are dead,” he explains. “Everything over there is a disaster, at every level, but [these photographers] are trying to show a different angle on these issues, so we feel them more personally. They’re not like the images you see on social media and the news.” 

To curate a photography exhibition about a situation as horrifying as the Gaza genocide is a difficult task, and particularly for a Western audience. If you focus on images of death and destruction, you risk dehumanising Palestinians further, defining them only by their suffering and presenting Gaza as a place where only terrible things happen. If you go too far in the other direction, focusing on images of joy and resilience, you risk providing the viewer with a false sense of reassurance, the comforting narrative that everyday life continues amid the rubble and despite it all. Against Erasure, I think, gets the balance exactly right. 

For starters, it makes a difference that these photographers are themselves from Gaza, documenting their own lives and those of the people around them. These works are not the product of a patronising or sensationalising gaze: as Ali Jadallah, whose father and four siblings were killed in an air strike, said in an interview in Magnum: “When I photograph a grieving mother or a child walking barefoot through the rubble, I do not see them as distant subjects. I see my own family in them, I see myself.”

The exhibition does not shy away from harrowing scenes of desperation and grief, yet these coexist alongside images of endurance and hope. This range of emotions can be seen in ‘Tales Narrated by Hands’, a series by photographer and artist Belal Khaled which places hands at the centre of each image. In an image quite excruciating in its evocation of grief, a father bows his head and holds the body of his dead son for the final time. A young girl in a hospital bed raises an amputated limb with an expression both battle-scarred and defiant. Two hands clasp in a tight embrace, as one pulls the other from a flattened building. As Khaled has said: “These hands pulse with life and sing for hope; they are not just physical limbs, but a permanent symbol of resilience and determination.”

Of all the artists on display, Mahmoud Abu Hamdah’s work is perhaps the most obviously hopeful. His series, ‘Steadfastness and Resilience’, focuses in part on the children of Gaza: a young girl smiles playfully as she rolls a loaf of bread; a group of kids run across the beach, a rainbow in the sky behind them. These are joyful images, but they capture only brief moments of respite: in the understanding that Israel has inflicted upon these children – and others just like them – a level of suffering difficult to comprehend, they’re as potent as anything else in the exhibition. To see these children smiling, laughing and playing inspires not reassurance but a sense of urgency. It is to Against Erasure’s credit that experiences of pain and joy are both afforded the same dignity, as part of the full spectrum of humanity in Gaza.

Taken altogether, Against Erasure captures a range of experiences in Gaza: a place where life has been made intolerable, but which can’t be reduced to its suffering alone.  The images on display are artfully composed and conceptually interesting, forcing a deeper engagement than scrolling past atrocities on social media, sandwiched between comedy sketches and weight-loss tips.

Zaloom hopes the exhibition will serve two main purposes. “First, I want people in London and the Western world to know that people in Gaza want to live and want to keep doing creative work,” he says. The second relates to the traumas and tragedies experienced by these photographers: many of them have been injured, their homes have been destroyed, their family members have been killed (Abdulrama Zqout lost 13 family members in a single Israeli air strike, to give one example among many). “What they are doing, that they are still working and that people are seeing their work, is something like a therapy for them,” adds Zaloom. “These two issues are crucial. We want to show the world that people in Palestine love life — you can see the evidence of that in these images.”

In Regarding the Pain of Others, a book-length essay about the effects of war photography, Susan Sontag writes that compassion is an “unstable emotion”, which “needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” To bear witness, to feel horrified or sympathetic, is not enough on its own. Against Erasure serves as a reminder that we all have a responsibility to resist the boredom, apathy and cynicism which Sontag warned about, and that we all have a role to play in ending the genocide.

Against Erasure: Photographs from Gaza is currently on display at P21 Gallery, London, until October 10.