Prototype mapping of The Crescent, the Cross, the Star, the Void by Oscar B. Castillo

By Kali Handelman

We are very pleased to share with you our first ever collaborative special issue. The remarkable photography and prose included here are outcomes of an exciting partnership between The Revealer and the Magnum Foundation’s On Religion project which was funded by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs and received additional support and guidance from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the NYU Center for Media Culture and History. This work was created by jury-selected teams led by photographers in cooperation with artists, journalists, academics, and creative technologists. Each team received a grant from the Magnum Foundation to work in locations as far-flung as France, Mexico, Iran, Israel-Palestine, and the U.S. and each has succeeded in finding ways to give us incredibly different and deep pictures of religious life in the world today.

The result is truly an embarrassment of riches. Despite the fact that the geographies, traditions, aesthetics, and perspectives of each project vary widely, in preparing this issue we found fascinating threads connecting all of the work. There are themes of religious syncretism in Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s work from Philadelphia, just as there are in the images Yael Martinez and Orlando Velazquez produced in Guerrero, Mexico. Rasheed reflects brilliantly on how generations of movement through different religious communities and commitments led her to archival work and to the Moorish Science Temple in Philadelphia. Martinez and Velazquez met the challenges of representing the unrepresentable through their astonishing “intervened” images of traditional religious rituals in Guerrero, Mexico. Also thoughtfully and beautifully confronting issues of what the photographer can and should show, Solmaz Daryani and Sasha von Oldershausen teamed up to examine and reveal how the Mandean community of Iran is dealing with the pollution of their sacred Karun river. While, from the place we perhaps most associate with complicated interconnections between land and religion, Tanya Habjouqa and Dimi Reider created a fantastically playful and also critical depiction of the ways in which sacred and profane conflict, meet, and blur in Israel-Palestine. And reckoning in their own way with the meeting of the Abrahamic triad, colonialism, and nationalism, Oscar B. Castillo and Karim Baouz have created an incredibly wide-ranging and sensitive web of portraits in their exploration of religious life in contemporary metropolitan France.

Each of these projects is unique, showing us faces and landscapes that are revealing and challenging in myriad ways. Taken together, as a composite body of work, they are an inspiring set of models for new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religion. We hope that they will be useful to artists, writers, scholars, and anyone else invested in asking difficult but important questions about religion. Likewise, we’d like to think that moving forward, instead of lamenting those images we wish that people would stop making and disseminating, this work will be model for producing new, better, and more complicated, and compelling work in the future.  

Speaking of which: if you like the work in this issue and will be in New York City on June 8, 2017, we strongly recommend attending the Magnum Foundation’s Photography Expanded Symposium on Collaborative Approaches to Creative Documentary Practice. There, you will have the opportunity to hear from some of the photographers included in this issue, along with an incredible line-up of other thinkers and artists. 

In the meantime, we are extremely proud to have this opportunity to share the innovative and beautiful work that these teams made together, and are deeply grateful to everyone at the Magnum Foundation and the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs for making it possible.

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Kali Handelman is editor of The Revealer and program coordinator at the NYU Center for Religion and Media. 

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Yossef is a follower of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, a lighter, more mystical version of Judaism that appears stringent to secular Israelis but is borderline psychedelic for the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim, where he was born and raised. He buys a chicken for the yearly “kaparot” ritual – the passing of one’s sins onto a chicken that is ritually killed and is given to the poor for a holiday meal. Yossef loves animals; he always brings home strays, despite orthodox Judaism’s ambivalent approach to pets, and normally he donates money to charity directly, but this year he wanted to acquaint his son with the sacrifice. He talks to the chicken, feeds it a children’s snack and solemnly wipes its bottom when it defecates on his spotless kitchen floor. He works in real estate and is about to move to a settlement; he’s not into politics but says that the atmosphere there is so much more liberal than in the largely anti-Zionist, ultra-conservative Mea Shearim. The chicken flutters onto his shoulder. He grabs it by the feet, gently spinning the chicken over his son’s head while reading the relevant invocation; and walks it off to slaughter. (Photograph and caption by Tanya Habjouqa)

Writing by Dimi Reider with photography and interviews by Tanya Habjouqa

The story of the Holy Land is told and retold daily. Reciting the bare facts seems almost superfluous: home to about 10 million people, all under one or another form of Israeli control – military siege in Gaza, military occupation in the West Bank, ethnically discriminatory democracy with the same rights nominally but a gradation of privileges practically in what remains. The story of religion in this territory is even better known, and has been told in the same fashion for much longer: three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, coexist uneasily and unequally. Each has held sway at some point over the past two millennia; each has been employed to pursue earthly, material goals by the elites and underdogs of each faith, across generations of fervor, disenchantment and schism. Countless gallons of ink have been spilled describing the contestation between the three faiths and the way it shapes politics.

The purpose of our project was to side-step the trichotomy and to describe the people and places where Islam, Christianity and Judaism meet and overlap; and to side-step the dichotomy of secular and religious, sacred and profane – showing how closely the two blend in almost every iteration.

This was what gave the project its original title: The Un/Holy Land. It seemed like a simple enough mission statement, as we set out: capture the spaces where the sacred is profaned, and where the profane is elevated onto holy. Find the spaces where what is holy to some and what is holy to others blend and overlap: syncretic shrines, recycled and appropriated worship places, desecrated mosques and empty spaces arbitrarily consecrated for service; cemeteries keeping long-exiled communities alive. Find the edge people: those who feel that the constraints of any organized religion are too narrow, so they make themselves a place in the crevices between one faith and another. Find the people who form the crevices: those who stay planted stubbornly within their faith, but push it apart, forcing it to be porous enough to include them.

In the end, we found all of those, and none. Some rejected us outright – a glance at the title of the project was all it took for one ultra-Orthodox winemaker to eject one of the team members from the door. Others embraced us, bringing us into their homes straight off the street, sharing with us more intimately and vulnerably than they would with friends and family. Others still wished us well enough to try and talk us down a peg. When hearing that we were three young secular professionals – a Palestinian, a Texan-Jordanian-Circassian and a not-not-Jewish Russian-Israeli pursuing a project on the very seams that make up religiosity and religion, a settler rabbi – who offers virtual reality tours under Temple Mount and posed for us as a highway desert Jesus – chided us: you are like three men writing a book on feminism.

“Crusader” reenactment.
“What does the Holy Land mean to me? This is my home. My children’s home. It was once the home of my forefathers. When I chose to focus on this period for historical recreation I didn’t see the parallels. I just like the narrative and its connection to the landscape. But I do now, and I’m not the only one. There are parallels between the crusader kingdom and the modern State of Israel… We [Russian-speaking Israelis] also feel part of a reenactment in a larger sense: We also came to Israel on a crusadeof sorts.” Gennady Nizhnik, tour guide and re-enactor of the Battle of Hattin, aka Raynald of Châtillon, Prince of Antioch (1125-1187). They stand in the freezing rain twelve kilometres and 830 years away from their West Jerusalem apartment, in what was once the courtyard of the Crusader castle of Belmont and later the main square of the Palestinian village of Suba. The village was used as an outpost by an Egyptian militia in 1948, and depopulated by the advancing Israeli forces during the war. The Palestinian refugees and their descendants are scattered around East Jerusalem, less than 20km and almost 70 years away.

Nearly a year into the project we have abandoned our original idea and the binaries that come with it; the land is neither holy or unholy, and it is both, and so much more; strangeness reflected in weirdness, realpolitik in surrealism, loneliness in multitudes and the shifting moods of crowds in a single stationary figure, a gate, a hill, a home, a gaping hole where a home once stood or is yet to be built; a true Sacred Space Oddity – or maybe Odyssey – depending which notion you subscribe to, of observation or of exploration, an erratic flow of events, or a twenty-years detour on a way to a place you could once call home.

It’s not that the land is a hall of mirrors – it’s rather one huge, broken mirror, where each shard reflects something entirely different and where the edges are too jagged and brittle to be glued together. It’s not so much an old church icon or a crusader’s map; it’s one of those garish optical illusion posters from a 1980’s undergrad’s bedroom, seemingly depicting only noise, but if you look at it from a very particular angle, it’s “really” a car or a boat. Only here it’s working in reverse: you think you’re looking at a house, but all you really see is white noise. The only thing that emerges from the noise are the people: the self-made characters who bring together scraps of landscapes, timescapes and stories, like hermit crabs solitarily constructing their out of what infinitely larger, impersonal forces have carried their way. The photographs in this selection – first pickings from an infinitely larger, ever-expanding project – reflect their gaze on the land and on us as much as they reflect our gazes on the characters and on ourselves; they are co-authors of the project and they reflect the land in themselves as much as they see themselves reflected in the land. There is no way to tell a single, comprehensive story: focus too hard on a single detail and all else dies and fossilizes, open your eyes too wide and the land and everything in it fades away.

A short drive and a world away from the disappeared village of Suba and its crusader is Hussein, 8, who wants to be an astronaut. Mohammad and Mariam Hussein at their home in Jalazoon refugee camp outside Ramallah. Both were born at the camp, but see their true origin as the Bayt Naballa, a disappeared village supplanted by the communal village of Beit Nehemia. The Holy Land, Mohammad says, is only the area around Jerusalem and Bethlehem, really. Religion, says Mariam, shouldn’t be used by political movements to achieve concrete goals. Their grandparents were told to leave the village in the War of 1948, when the invading Arab armies were advancing on Jewish positions in the area. The army was pushed back, and the village fell to the Israeli militias. When the villagers tried to come back they were shot at, often killed. Over the next few years, the village was repopulated with Jewish immigrants from Iran. Few of the hundreds of thousands zooming by on Israel’s main highway knew it was ever there. Mohammad and Mariam can’t ever go back. Their son is in the background, agitated and constrained in his favorite astronaut soon. He roams around the living room, insisting: I AM GOING TO THE MOON.

***

Sacred Space Odyssey: (The Un/Holy Land) was written by Dimi Reider as part of a collaboration with photographer Tanya Habjouqa and consultant and artistic contributor Muhammad Jabali with support from the Magnum Foundation’s “On Religion” project.

***

Tanya Habjouqa (Jordan, 1975) is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in gender, social, and human rights issues in the Middle East. Represented by NOOR, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity but also with an eye for the absurd. She is the author of Occupied Pleasures, heralded by TIME magazine and the Smithsonian as one of the best photo books of 2015 (winning her a World Press Photo award in 2014). She mentors young grantees from across the Arab region for Magnum Foundation’s “Emerging Arab Photographer Documentary Fund” together with the Prince Claus Foundation and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. Tanya is a founding member of Rawiya, the first all female photo collective of the Middle East and she is currently based in East Jerusalem. She lectures in ‘Narrative and National Identity in Photography’ at Al Quds Bard University. 

Dimi Reider is an Israeli journalist and facilitator based in London. His work has appeared with The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Haaretz, The Nation, Politico, and the London Review of Books, and he has appeared as commentator with the BBC, Al Jazeera English and MSNBC. He is an Associate Policy Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). 

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“Me at age seven posing for one of many photographs of me reading or hanging out in the library”

by Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Most of my youth was spent between three places: my school’s publishing center (where, before I left second grade, I’d written, illustrated, and published over a dozen books), the local library (where I pursued self-designed research projects), and my dad’s desk (where I’d stand next to him while he was studying Quran and ask him as many questions as I could before he had to move on to memorizing the next verse). What unites all these experiences is an inquisitiveness that I imagine at times both delighted and frustrated my parents. I remember asking my father once, “If trees have bark which is like skin, does it mean that when I pull it off, it hurts like it would if I pulled off the skin of a human?” My father didn’t answer me directly, except to say that I shouldn’t go around picking bark off of trees for fun. The tree bark question was one of many matters that highlighted my almost encyclopedic engagement with the world. I needed to know everything, particularly about how things felt or why things happened. By high school, my questions shifted away from non-human life to human-life, and I wanted to know more about my parents, particularly why my dad’s last name was different from my aunts’ and uncles’, why we went to Masjid and they went to church, and why I could never have pepperoni pizza at school.

My first serious conversation with my dad about these things began late in high school by which time he could see that I was already quite comfortable traveling between religious communities: I was attending a Catholic high school as a practicing Muslim; One of my friends was Mormon and their dances were gender-segregated so my parents allowed me to attend; Another friend’s father was the pastor of a non-denomination Christian church where I would sometimes join them for services; And some Fridays I would go to Shabbat dinners at the home of another friend.

My father, Kamal Saleem Rasheed, with my eldest brother in 1983 (left) and 1984 (right).

The first questions I had for my dad had nothing to do with Islam itself, but was, instead, about why he decided to become Muslim, how his family felt, and if he thought he made the right decision. “I felt like I was at a buffet,” my father recounted. “I was going from religious community to religious community, getting a bit of this and a bit of that, but never really feeling full.” Before my father converted to Sunni Islam under the leadership of Warith Deen Muhammad, he had grown up in a Protestant Christian home where he attended church until, at the age of twelve, he swapped out Sunday sermons for rounds of pool at the local Boys & Girls club. Throughout college, he explored Black Nationalist groups, was interested in Rastafarianism, and spoke to several members of the Nation of Islam. But, it was a specific community on 47th and Bond in Oakland, California where he and my mother decided to take their shahadah.

A page from my father’s archive of religious notes composed of typewritten text, collaged photocopies, and handwritten marginal notes.

Five years ago, I found a burgundy binder on my father’s cluttered bookcase. Inside was his archive of religious notes composed of typewritten text, collaged photocopies, and handwritten marginal notes on the back of the his pharmacy school handout listing dosage limits. My dad’s notes were written in the immaculate print that came to characterize the precision of his thought process at the beginning of his conversion. He showed an interest in how to enjoy prayer (which was still evident later in the way he steadfastly met his prayer times even while in chemotherapy and while on bed rest following surgery). His notes also revealed how important it was to him to draw knowledge from the Qu’ran, hadith, and secondary sources. He literally collaged these pieces together to create a narrative, a syllabus of sorts to lead him throughthe early years of his practice.

My father’s binders of notes and our intermittent interviews piqued my interest in the religious lives of other Black people in the United States. Surely, my father was not the only Black person who transitioned in and out of communities. And surely, many of pre-1950s historical texts I’d read about Black religious life in America could not be right in assuming that most all Black people practice some form of Christianity with a spattering of the community absorbed in what was popularly called “cult” religions, otherwise known as practices other than Christianity. I decided to take this interest further, and, five years ago, I formally started Mapping the Spirit as a way to learn more about Black religious life. In its early iterations, this project was a series of interviews with my father, a sampling of photographs, and a few videos.

In 2015, I was able to expand the project when I was awarded a joint commission from New York Public Library Labs and Triple Canopy to do archival research on early 20th century Black religious communities. I chose to focus on the Moorish Science Temple of America because I’d learned about them from a teacher at my masjid when I was fifteen and a friend of mine had joined the community in 2010. Most of my research including piecing together photocopied fragments of an archive at the Schomburg Center for Research. What emerged from this work was a question around what the archive (and an archive in general) does and does not hold, what it reveals and what it conceals, and what it has the potential to illuminate. I was left wanting to know more about why people joined the Moorish Science Temple of America and why some people left. When I was awarded the Magnum Foundation grant in 2016, I decided to continue building from the archival work I was doing through this joint commission to create a new archive, one that presented the texture of everyday life amongst members of the Moorish Science Temple of America and other communities, one that could accommodate synchronic and diachronic assemblages of archives that live in binders as well as institutional archives whose interiorities are at times made through discovery and chance.

Sheik Azeem Hopkins-Bey of Temple #11 in Philadelphia, PA sharing some of the archival photographs and ephemera housed at the temple (2016)

This project, Mapping the Spirit, thus emerged from my interests in exploring the texture and interiority of Blackness, particularly, Black religious and spiritual life. Archives that hold official texts, building deeds, and organizational history provide contextual background, but, I found, they do not provide much in the way of interiority. This interiority is what Edward Said calls “human density” in his essay “Islam through Western Eyes” what Kevin Quashie calls the “inner reservoir of thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, ambitions, that shape a human self” in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black and what my mother affectionately calls, “the inside bits.” Essentially, I asked, what kind of discursive work are existing public archives of Black religious life doing and what more can be done? Beyond canon and a list of beliefs, what more did I think was worth knowing?

Brother Robert Webb-Bey at his home in Memphis, TN in 2016

My answer to the question “What more can be done?” emerged not as an effort to digitize existing archives or to write more robust finding aids, rather, I was compelled to talk to and collaborate with current Moorish Science Temple community members in order to create an archive that held long-form interviews, photographs, ephemera, and other uncategorizable items.

An answer to the question of “What more do I want to know?” emerged not as a desire to identify the origins of a particular verse, but a yearning to know what these community members were thinking the first time they read a holy text in their faith. Understanding black spiritual experiences involves several moving pieces and a recognition that this capacious and sprawling inquiry requires me to be comfortable with itinerancy and movement: movement between archives (Schomburg, my father’s binders, Mapping the Spirit), movement through temporalities (my childhood, conversions with my father, religious conversions, and the project’s own evolution), and movement through multiple religious communities.

The “Mapping” in the name of the project exposes this productive movement through locations, institutions, concepts, and communities. But more than that, it asserts that spirituality is not the arrival at a destination, but a series of movements. Mapping the Spirit seeks to document, in some way, that movement through a series interrelated chapters that focus on specific communities and their layered narratives.

Thus, the first chapter of the project centers the stories of members of the Moorish Science Temple of America. This chapter begins with my friend Robert Webb-Bey. I first met Webb-Bey in 2006. At that time, he was traveling between Sunni Muslim communities and exploring the work of Sufi philosopher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen while simultaneously completing a Masters Degree in African-American/Black Studies with a focus on African spiritual traditions. We often had conversations about his own spiritual pathway. Raised as a Jehovah Witness in Camden, Arkansas, he was constantly working to understand his own movement within and away from communities as well as what spirituality meant to people of African descent in America. While visiting him and his wife in Memphis, TN in October of 2016, I asked him to draw a map of his spiritual journey. After a few iterations, he sent me the above image. This image bears the marks of an attempt at linearity, then betrays itself through a series of branching lines, carrots that signal the insertion of a later remembered thought, and a title (“Journey: The Neverending Story”) that reminds us that there will always be more to add to this map.

Brother Robert Webb-Bey drew a map of his spiritual journey from being raised Jehovah Witness in Camden, Arkansas to traveling between Sunni Muslim communities, then exploring the work of Sufi philosopher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen before joining the Moorish Science Temple of America five years ago.

***

Mapping the Spirit was created with support from the Magnum Foundation‘s “On Religion” project. Kameelah Janan Rasheed designed the project website which was built by Corey Tegeler and which you can explore here.

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, former high school public school teacher, and writer working in installation, photography, printmaking, publications, and performance. In addition to her full-time work as a social studies curriculum developer for New York public schools, she is currently an artist-in-residence at Smack Mellon and on the faculty in the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited her work at Jack Shainman Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2017 Venice Biennial, among others. Rasheed has forthcoming solo and group shows in Philadelphia, Portland, and New York City for 2017 as well as 2018. Recently selected as a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize, she is the recipient of several other awards and honors including Denniston Hill A-I-R (2017), Alumni Alumni Award for Art in Community-The Laundromat Project (2017), Harpo Foundation Grant (2016), Magnum Foundation Grant (2016), Creative Exchange Lab at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2016), Keyholder Residency at LES Print Studio (2015), Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs (2015), Artadia Grant (2015), Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship (2015) Art Matters Grant (2014), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2014), among others. She has spoken and facilitated discursive programming at a number of institutions such as the ICP-Bard, New Museum, Montclair Art Museum , Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, the Center for Book Arts, Creative Time, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Interference Archive, Northwestern University (forthcoming), Maryland Institute of College of Art, Hampshire College, School of Visual Arts, Parsons, The New School, NYU, Columbia University, Barnard, and the University of Illinois. Her writing has been published in The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Guardian, Creative Time Reports, Hyperallergic, MoMA Blog, Walker Art Center Blog, among others. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, she earned her B.A. in public policy at Pomona College and her Ed.M at Stanford University in Secondary Education. Learn more about her at www.kameelahr.com 

Corey Tegeler is a creative technologist who designs and programs sites and platforms on the web. He often collaborates with large cultural and academic institutions, as well as with individual researchers and artists. His creative practice aims to tell stories and disseminate information to the public.

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Two men pray on the banks of the Karun. Just behind them, a tangle of overgrown cane obscures the pervasive litter that collects here. (Photograph by Solmaz Daryani)

By Sasha von Oldershausen and Solmaz Daryani

“At one level there are no photographs which can be denied. All photographs have the status of fact. What has to be examined is in what way photography can and cannot give meaning to facts.” – John Berger, Understanding a Photograph         

On the banks of the Karun River, the photographer gazes through her viewfinder and shoots, capturing two Mandaean men dressed in their ritual white. One crouches, while the other one stands, reading from the Ginza Rba, the Mandaean holy book. His face is obscured by a white scarf, wrapped around his mouth and head. Both men face the river.

Behind them, overgrown cane stands taller than the men themselves blurring the background. A single errant plastic water bottle sneaks into the frame. But what is not pictured here are the frayed plastic bags, the foil wrappers that get caught in the foliage, or the small community of drug addicts who reside in tents within the tangle. Sometimes they come to the clearing to watch the Mandaeans pray. Sometimes they throw garbage at them.

“Don’t take photos of the places that are dirty,” says Ms. Khafaji, administrator of the mandi in Ahvaz, where Iran’s Mandaeans go to worship. “Take photos here; of the parts that are clean.” The photographer lowers her camera for a moment to consider the landscape. At the banks of the Karun River, it is difficult not to capture the sullied parts; the pollution is pervasive.

Ms. Khafaji takes pains to appear well appointed. She wears a pale pink manto – the compulsory coat-like garment worn in public by women in Iran – and a headscarf made of an even paler shade, inscribed with blue line designs. A gold bangle hangs on her wrist, its dangling charm casting a shadow by her side.

She stands partially obscured by a doorway of the mandi, where she reprimands a young woman for wearing red on Ashura, a major religious holiday of mourning for Shia Muslims, who typically wear black in honor of the day. The young woman looks up at Ms. Khafaji with a blank, almost defiant, expression and rubs her nose with a gloved hand—her gloves, a sign that she is menstruating.

Two women, returning home from a Mandaean ceremony during the Muslim holiday of Ashura, rush into an alleyway to hide from view so that their ritual white clothes won’t offend the Muslim majority, who typically wear black on the holiday. (Photograph by Solmaz Daryani)

Though they do not observe the holiday, the Mandaeans display respect for the customs performed by the Shia Muslim majority; they appear cautious not to draw more attention to their tenuous place within the margins. Two women, returning home from a Mandaean ceremony during Ashura, wear black mantos thrown over their white prayer outfits, their white pants still visible beneath the black hems. They rush to enter an alleyway, where the building walls obscure them. Here, they are safe from view.

***

The Mandaeans, a minority religious community that for centuries was concentrated on the border between Iran and Iraq, in recent decades has been forced to diffuse due to social pressures and political discord. In Iran, their numbers are estimated to be somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000, though no census count exists. Not officially recognized by Iran’s constitution, they lack opportunities that the Shia Muslim majority is afforded. But beyond the institutional biases they face are the more pervasive social ones, which they feel from the broader regional community. Among these is the stigma of being najis, the Muslim concept of ritual uncleanliness.

The Karun River is their sacred site; the place where, for centuries, they have performed baptisms following rites of passage—birth; marriage; illness; travel; sin. According to their doctrine, living water is their closest connection to the world of light. But the water that runs through the Karun is also heavily polluted.

Industry and overexploitation of the Karun have spoiled the vitality of the critical water source and turned its blue waters green. The acrid smell of sewage is inescapable—a consequence of the volumes of wastewater that gush directly into the river, untreated.  

Here, at the confluence of the Karun, the Mandaeans are forced to confront an irony implicit to the environment they inhabit: Debased by stigmas of uncleanliness, they are simultaneously left with no other choice but to jeopardize their health and wellbeing by engaging intimately with the polluted water that runs through the Karun.

Hyper-aware of being considered unclean, the Mandaeans are trying to dispel the myth, not perpetuate it. This poses a challenge for the photographer who attempts to document the community for whom the sullied waters are so important.

On the one hand, the photographer feels a responsibility to document what is “factually accurate” (though, within the realm of photography, fact is a relative term). On the other, she must negotiate the needs of the community that she, Iranian, but an outsider, has been given access to. It is a great responsibility, indeed, as John Berger writes in his book, Understanding a Photograph:

Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us.

For Berger, this weapon can be “used to deceive and misinform,” he writes, and contribute to a global system of misinformation. He uses the example of the system of publicity, in which photographs are used to propagate consumerist lies. So, too, can the photograph be used to proliferate political propaganda. And when people are themselves the subject of the photos, they are rendered object; a single representation that can be used to exploit an entire people, or else robbing them of their asserted identities.

This form of visual violence is echoed by Susan Sontag, who writes in her book, On Photography, that ‘to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder.”

The Iranian photographer contends with an even greater challenge when her audience is Western: With so few alternatives available to the mainstream narrative about Iran, she must contend with the possibility of her own perspective being misappropriated and used to describe the condition of the whole, rather than just a single representation that lends nuance to existing narratives. The photographer wants to remain an observer – on the outside – not rendered a “native informer” whose perspective is limited to the interior experience of a particular time and place.

***

A middle-aged Mandaean woman, wearing a floral cotton dress and pink sandals, sits on the bottom step of a stairway that leads into the courtyard of her home. Five cats surround her and coyly coerce the food from her hands. The woman is a friend to cats—she has many—but when Muslim visitors come to her home, she stows them away in a room behind a closed door, so they do not think of her as dirty.

The photographer treads lightly; she enters through the frameworks her subjects present her. When they open their doors to her, she steps cautiously within.

Literal and figurative edifices help circumscribe the representation we want to convey, and omit or obscure the details that undermine that depiction. We build walls; we live behind closed doors. The photographer captures just a fragment of the spectacle in her frame.

Young women get ready for a Mandaean singing ceremony. Many young people within the Madaean community who have felt social pressures from the broader regional community are now choosing to emigrate abroad. (Photograph by Solmaz Daryani)

Though these structures present an ideological quandary for the photographer (“How do we best represent these people within the Western cultural construct? Within the frame itself?”) for the subjects themselves, they offer a degree of agency—both within their sociopolitical confines, and as a symbol/representation that exists within the photo itself.

But the flux of the Karun cannot be contained by walls, doors or the edges of an image, nor can the pollutants that spoil its waters. Every living organism has a limit to how much pollution it can absorb before that waste becomes poisonous—a limit the Karun long ago exceeded.

***

At the banks of the Karun, a tarmida – the second rank of Mandaean priesthood – stands ankle-deep in the water and uses an aluminum pail to bail the water directly from the river. He will return home and boil the water, not as a means of purifying it, but rather, to separate the sediment. He drinks the water daily. “The water you see here is apparently polluted,” he says. “But the water is innately, physically, scientifically and ritually clean.”

According to Mandaeism, any living water—that is, water that is in flux—serves as a connection between the elevated world of light and the earthly world we inhabit. Strict adherents of the faith believe that running, living water is impervious to contamination.

Others in the religious community, especially its younger adherents, are not so convinced. Some avoid the weekly baptisms and reserve close interaction with the water for the more significant occasions, like baptism rites after marriage. Siamak, a young Mandaean man, said he had become ill after drinking the water from the river during a religious ceremony. “The water needs to be clean and purified kilometers before the spot we take water from so that we can say that it is clean water,” he says. “It needs to pass rocks and soil to be purified.”

“The place we take water from is polluted all the way. Although we boil the water and keep it in earthenware crocks, I think it is not drinkable. It is still polluted.” He adds, “In Ahvaz, our whole life is polluted. After a while your body gets used to it.”

During the baptism ceremony of a recently married couple, the mother-of-the-bride suffers an asthma attack. The city of Ahvaz is the world’s most air-polluted, and many suffer from respiratory illness because of it. (Photograph by Solmaz Daryani)

A cluster of Mandaeans convene at the open shores of the Karun River on a bright Sunday for the baptism ceremony of a recently married couple. During the ceremony, the mother-of-the-bride has an asthma attack and removes herself from the proceedings, so as not to make a scene. The city of Ahvaz carries the title of world’s most air-polluted, and many suffer from respiratory illness because of it.

“The photographer chooses the event he photographs,” Berger writes. “This choice can be thought of as a cultural construction. The space for this construction is, as it were, cleared by his rejection of what he did not choose to photograph.”

The photographer hands the mother-of-the-bride a tissue, and standing above her, captures her blowing her nose. Her hands are spotted with age. Further downshore, where the river eddies, bags and bottles caked in silt amass in a pile. A bloated, dead cow bobs like a buoy at the river’s edge. They exist, only outside the frame.

The Karun River functions as a sacred site for the Mandaeans of Ahvaz. According to their doctrine, living water is their closest connection to the world of light. But the water that runs through the Karun is also heavily polluted. (Photograph by Solmaz Daryani)

***

A Sacred, Sullied Space  was written by Sasha von Oldershausen as part of a collaboration with photographer Solmaz Daryani with support from the Magnum Foundation‘s “On Religion” project.

***

Sasha von Oldershausen is an Iranian-American freelance journalist, based out of Far West Texas. She has reported for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, NBC News and the Guardian, among others. 

Solmaz Daryani (born 1985in Tabriz, Iran) is a self-taught photographer. She developed a passion for this visual language to understand the people and life around in 2012. She has received the IdeasTap and Magnum Photos Grant in 2015 while working on the long-term project The Eyes of Earth, an investigation into the environmental and human impact of the drying of Lake Urmia in Iran. Her work has been published in Foreign Policy magazine, Emerge magazine and Kel Magazine.

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In the of Tlapa community of Guerrero, Mexico they sacrifice two goats at the top of the mountain to make an offering for the rain petition. (Intervened photograph by Yael Martinez & Orlando Velazquez)

By Yael Martinez

In Guerrero, Mexico there are communities which still perform pre-hispanic ceremonies. They are ancestral Meso-Americans who see both blood and rain as sacred. Our project, The blood and the rain, sought a way to document the rain petition rituals and sacrifices which they perform, but do not allow to be photographed. By combining photography with drawing, we found a way to explore the layers of the physical and metaphysical in these rituals without exposing or violating them.

For us it is very important to represent, in a symbolic way, the relationship that exists between people, their gods, and nature. We wanted to talk about the close bond that is maintained between them and how the rain ritual is more than an event or a performance, it is a philosophy of life that holds in balance the cycles of sacred forces such as wind, sun, rain, earth. Where, through sacrifice and pain, blood is gratefully given to the earth – the generator of life.

When we visited this sacred place, we thought about faith and what might drive a person to climb a mountain, to cross it regardless of the weather, pain, or fatigue. And we thought about what makes some members of the community of Zitlala offer their pain and their blood to give something back to the earth: the immense sacred being.

The Blood and the Rain: Peticion de Lluvias was written by Yael Martinez as part of a collaboration with artist Orlando Velazquez with support from the Magnum Foundation’s “On Religion” project. 

To read more about this project see “Work, Spirits, and Rain” by Julio Glockner.

***

Yael Martinez explores the connections between poverty and organized crime in his community of Guerrero in Southern Mexico. He often works symbolically to evoke a sense of emptiness, absence, and pain suffered by those affected by narcotrafficking in the region. Martinez is a grantee of the Magnum Foundation, and was named one of PDN’s 30 new and emerging photographers to watch in 2017. In 2015 he was selected for the Joop Swart Master Class of Latin America. He was a finalist for the Eugene Smith memorial grant in 2015 and 2016, and was nominated to the Paul Huf Award, the Prix Pictet, and the ICP Infinity Awards.

Orlando Velazquez has a Bachelor’s degree in Arts (Centro Morelense de las Artes del estado de Morelos 2010-2014) Diploma in Visual Arts (Centro Morelense de las Artes) Diploma in painting from The National School of Plastic Arts (ENAP). He has received the Fonca’s Jóvenes Creadores Grant in Grafic Art 2016 – 2017 Aquisition Prize in XXXIV Encuentro Nacional de Arte Jóven 2014 Aguascalientes, México, honorable Mention at the 9th Biennial of painting and engraving Paul Gauguin 2015 and was selected in the II International Biennial of Engraving Jose Guadalupe Posada and the fifth-national biennial Shinzaburo Takeda. His work has participated in group exhibitions in Mexico, Chicago and Canada ; He has exhibited individually at the Institute of Fine Arts Potosino, San Luis Potosi Mexico; and the Gallery of Centro Morelense de las Artes Cuernavaca Morelos.

The post The Blood and the Rain: Peticion de Lluvias appeared first on The Revealer.

A procession of people on the night of 1st of May on the Cruzco hill in the community of Zitlala, Guerrero. They climb the Cruzco to bring the crosses to the river to perform a ritual beside the river with the community. (Intervened photograph by Yael Martinez & Orlando Velazquez)

By Julio Glockner with photographs and captions by  Yael Martinez and Orlando Velazquez

Everything is Full of Spirits

In 1629 Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a theologian born in Taxco in the Guerrero region of Mexico, wrote a Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain. The text was meant to combat what the clergy had deemed idolatry inspired by the devil. In it, the author describes a religious mindset and ritualistic practices that constitute a cosmovision that has, despite the Church’s efforts, endured into the present among the indigenous and farming communities of Guerrero.

In his Treatise Ruiz de Alarcòn wrote:

… because of their ignorance they had and have so many different gods and modes of worship, that coming to ascertain the foundation and what they all are, we find so little of what to lay hands on, as if we wanted to squeeze smoke or wind in our fist .

The truth is that almost all current forms of worship … and from what we can gather they are the same as what their ancestors took part in, have their root and foundation in the belief that clouds are angels and gods, capable of worship, and they surmise the same about the wind, thus believing that the spirits inhabit all parts of the earth, such as hills, mountains, valleys and ravines. They believe the same about rivers, lagoons and springs, as they offer wax and incense to all of the aforementioned. And what is revered the most, and almost all consider a god, is fire.

“As if we wanted to squeeze smoke or wind in our fist,” he says, surprised. It is clear that his Christian belief in one god already detached from the world prevented Ruiz de Alarcón from understanding the significance of the tradition’s attitude toward nature as it manifested in their indigenous rituals.

In large part, such customs have endured because people were able to adapt them to the Catholicism that had reached the region with the Spanish conquest. For example, some Christian saints were adopted and induced to fulfill the functions that ancient deities, nature spirits, and ancestral spirits fulfilled and still fulfill in the agricultural cycle. Their traditions continue to be practiced in many Mixteca, Nahua, and Tlapaneca communities of Guerrero.
In these communities Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Michael the Archangel, St. Mark, St. Roch, St. John and St. Luke, among others, appear and work alongside nature spirits and the dead to seek good rains, abundant harvests, good health, and well-being in the villages. The celebration dates of Catholic saints are aligned with the agricultural work and the annual rainfall cycle of the different regions.

The Sacred Duality and the Saints

The old Mesoamerican cosmovision, which still nourishes the religious thought of the people today, holds that one principle governs the life of the universe and is at the origin of all things. That principle is Ometéotl, the sacred duality.

The world exists as a sort of unfolding of this primordial duality in which a masculine principle is recognized, Ometecuhtli, the Lord-two, and another, female, Omecíhuatl, the Lady-two. Ometecuhtli and Omecíhuatl were responsible for creating the other gods, mainly Quetzalcoatl “Feathered Serpent” and Tezcatlipoca “Smoky Mirror,” who were then in charge of creating the world where humans live.

The Nahua communities of Guerrero have an origin myth that explains how the earth was conceived like an immense monster, Tlaltecuhtli. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, in the form of cosmic serpents, caught the body of Tlaltecuhtli and split it in half, thus creating heaven and earth, which was to be fed with offerings and sacrifices in order to obtain from it everything necessary for human life. From the terrestrial body of Tlaltecuhtli came all the food; Her hair became trees and weeds; An infinite number of vegetables and flowers sprouted from her skin; From her eyes springs, fountains, and small caves arose; From her mouth rivers were born and the great caves; The great mountains and the valleys came from her nose. The myth also says that the goddess asked for hearts to feed upon and refused to bear fruit if they were not provided.

From the first moment of creation there has been a reciprocal relationship between the earth as a generator of life and the meteorological phenomena associated with the agricultural cycle. These phenomena are thought of not only in their natural form as winds, clouds, rays, springs, and rivers but also as forces inhabited by spiritual beings with whom it is possible to establish a ritual relationship. Believers obtain life sustaining material and spiritual goods from them using dreams, invocations, offerings, and prayers.

Landscape with feathers, men, musicians and roots of trees. This image is a representation of the the connection between humans and earth earth in the Nahua tradition of rain petitions that take place during the first week of May in Zitlala, Guerrero. In the image you can see how a group of men become one with the roots of the earth; Is an act of offering to ask for a good rainy season. (Intervened photograph by Yael Martinez & Orlando Velazquez)

Anthropologist Catharine Good has written about the Nahua community’s concept of Chicahualiztli, which refers to the reciprocal force that circulates between humans, nature, and spirits.[1] Chicahualiztli generates life and gives it to each person according to what one has contributed to the creation of material goods and to the vital energy that sustains the human, natural and spiritual worlds. “We eat the land and the land eats us,” the farmers in the region told Good. They explained that the land produces the Chicahualiztli force that nourishes both the maize and, thus, the animals that feed on it, so sustaining the humans who eat both the animals and the grain. Likewise, when humans and animals die, the earth feeds on their bodies, nourishing itself with that force and transforming it into plant food to start the cycle again. We see, therefore, a vision of humans relating to the world in terms of an holistic economy in which everything obtained from nature has to be ritually restored to it in order to maintain a beneficial balance for the humans, plants, and animals that live there.

Both Chicahualiztli’s balancing force and Ometéotl’s sacred duality are fundamental to the two seasons of patron saint festivities held in Guerrero each year. Generally speaking, the first great period of festivities takes place to propitiate, receive, and control the rains that descend on fields of crops planted for millennia with corn, squash and beans. During this period the male saints predominate: St. Mark (April 25); San Miguel (May 8); Saint Joseph (May 19); Saint John (June 24); Santiago (July 25); St. Michael (September 27-30) and St. Luke (October 18). On the other hand, during the dry season, different devotions of the Virgin Mary are worshiped: Virgin of the Nativity (September 8); Virgen del Rosario (October 6-7); Virgen de la Concepción (December 8) and Virgin of Guadalupe (the 12^th of October, November, December, January, and February).

The alternation between the rains and the sun is the central axis for both the agricultural practices and the religious syncretism that has been grown over centuries in Guerrero’s indigenous and farming communities. As a result, the people there have formed a sacred geography around themselves. The places traditionally chosen to perform their religious rituals include caves, wells and springs (which refer to the underworld because of their connection with the underground dimension), the summits of hills and mountains (where there is evidence of a direct relationship with the sky, its astrological and meteorological conditions), as well as rivers, springs, plateaus, canyons, fields, crossroads, rocks, and significant trees, among other such landforms. All this is what the anthropologist Johanna Broda has called “the ritual landscape.” Within their ritual landscapes, each community goes to worship their deities and spirits according to their own mythology and their own local tradition. Taken together as a whole these myths and traditions form a complex framework which regulates communities’ relationships with each other, within themselves, and with the world as a whole.

Giving to the Deities

Ritual practices (such as smoking copal and offering food, drinks, music, dances, aromatic flowers, prayers, and songs) are intended to encourage, thank, and ensure the arrival, permanence, and return of the rains which sustain people.

Social and cosmic functions are fulfilled by placing offerings inside of churches and caves, or at springs, on top of hills, or at family altars. These acts set in motion, to greater and lesser extents, complex relationships that involve relatives, godparents, compadres, mayordomos, prosecutors, priests, prayers, singers, companions and guests, in a system of reciprocities that strengthen the bonds of different groups and the community. At the same time, they activate the forces and supernatural powers needed to satisfy the their requests, thereby reaffirming the mystical ties between individuals performing the offering in particular and the demanding community in general.

The recipients of the offerings, generally composed of tamales, tortillas, local stews, mezcal or aguardiente, coffee, bread, flowers, candles, and incense burned in copal, are both saints of the Catholic pantheon and “owners” of the places and the auxiliary spirits who work with the ritual specialists.

For example, in Zitlala an arch is constructed where the viscera of sacrificed animals are placed as an offering to the buzzards, because they are thought to carry the clouds.

Meanwhile, San Agustín Oapan is also a site of offerings because it is thought to be the place which feeds the wind which pushes the clouds towards the fields where corn grows in the shape of a vulture.

For the indigenous communities of Guerrero, the Holy Cross is invoked as our most holy mother, conceptions that have no relation to the Christian cross, to the dead, or to the crucifixion. It is a cross of water, that is why they dress it and decorate it blue, feed it to bring rain and protect crops.(Intervened photograph by Yael Martinez & Orlando Velazquez)

And in the Tlapaneca region, mice (inebriated with mezcal so that they don’t destroy the harvest) are offered and they paint painted a blue Water Cross which is, is fed “to bring rain and protect crops.”

In addition, according to anthropologist Samuel Villela, several communities perform ritual combats in accordance with a maize origin myth.[2] They fight either hand-to-hand or with weapons, but always dressed as tigers, offering their pain and blood to the deities in order to bring good rains and good harvests.

According to the myth, in a situation of hunger and helplessness, Acatl and Cihuatzin breed a green and a yellow tiger, respectively. These tigers would be their nahuales (i.e., their animal alter egos). Determined to help these men, the tigers tried to enter the Tonacatépetl (a mythical hill that contains food, mainly maize) but it was guarded by the Tzicatanas (big ants). Using trickery, the green tiger distracted them while the yellow one removed the seeds from the food. But Tlalloc discovered them and sent them lightning, wind, and rain. The tigers rolled downhill to flee, but along the way they lost the seeds. The yellow tiger blamed the green and started a fight which lasted for several days. Meanwhile the people of the town realized that the seeds were germinating, so the gods forgave the men.

Every 5th of May the tigers of Zitlala fight to each other to perform an ancestral ritual. This ritual is a rain petition. They believe that hey offer their blood to the gods to obtain rain; a drop of blood it´s equal to a drop of water. (Intervened photograph by Yael Martinez & Orlando Velazquez)

We can learn a lot from this myth. First, we see how the eternal persistence of duality represented in the green and yellow tigers, whose colors evoke vegetation and aridity in the fields. But the story also accounts for the imbalance caused by the theft of seeds, since all appropriation must be accompanied by a payment that maintains the balance and harmony of the holistic economy, based on reciprocity, as I mentioned at the outset.
Tláloc, the god of rain, punishes this robbery and sends lightning bolts, winds and rain which trigger a favorable season for agriculture by sowing field such than they can then grow the food they need to repay the gods. Consequently the deities forgive the men. But this cycle would not have been carried out without the tigers’ fight, which caused them to fall and drop the seeds that would ultimately redeem them. The ritual combat is, therefore, of prime importance in the rituals of requesting rains in the Mountain of Guerrero.

Through these rituals, people stage and update a set of myths that give them a complete and complex view of the world they live in. The environment so many call “natural” and consider uninhabited, devoid of intelligence and intentionality, for them is populated with beings with whom they can establish links and foster personal and collective well-being for their traditional cultures. Even four hundred years after Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise, what vanished like smoke in the wind was not the native deities but the failed idea that they were evil demons.

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[1] Good, Catharine “La vida ceremonial en la construcción de la cultura: procesos de identidad entre los nahuas de Guerrero” in Historia y vida ceremonial en las comunidades mesoamericanas and “La circulación de la fuerza en el ritual: las ofrendas nahuas y sus implicaciones para analizar las prácticas religiosas mesoamericanas” Convocar a las dioses: Ofrendas mesoamericanas, 2013.

[2] Samuel Villela “Ídolos en los altares. La religiosidad indígena en la Montaña de Guerrero,” Arqueología Mexicana, Vol. XIV, Número 82, Noviembre-diciembre-2006 and “El culto a las deidades de la lluvia en la Montaña de Guerrero,” Arqueología Mexicana, Vol. XVI, Número 96, marzo-abril-2009.

***

Work, Spirits, and Rain was written by Julio Glockner as part of a collaboration with photographer Yael Martinez and artist Orlando Velazquez with support from the Magnum Foundation’s “On Religion” project. 

To read more about this project see “The Blood and The Rain” by Yael Martinez. 

***

Julio Glockner es antropólogo egresado de la enah. Co-fundador del Colegio de Antropología Social de la uap. Autor de Los volcanes sagrados, Mitos y rituales en el Popocatépetl y la Iztaccíhuatl: Así en la tierra como en el cielo, Pedidores de lluvia del volcán, Mirando el paraíso y La realidad alterada, Drogas enteógenos y cultura. Investigador del Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la uap.

Yael Martinez explores the connections between poverty and organized crime in his community of Guerrero in Southern Mexico. He often works symbolically to evoke a sense of emptiness, absence, and pain suffered by those affected by narcotrafficking in the region. Martinez is a grantee of the Magnum Foundation, and was named one of PDN’s 30 new and emerging photographers to watch in 2017. In 2015 he was selected for the Joop Swart Master Class of Latin America. He was a finalist for the Eugene Smith memorial grant in 2015 and 2016, and was nominated to the Paul Huf Award, the Prix Pictet, and the ICP Infinity Awards.

Orlando Velazquez has a Bachelor’s degree in Arts (Centro Morelense de las Artes del estado de Morelos 2010-2014) Diploma in Visual Arts (Centro Morelense de las Artes) Diploma in painting from The National School of Plastic Arts (ENAP). He has received the Fonca’s Jóvenes Creadores Grant in Grafic Art 2016 – 2017 Aquisition Prize in XXXIV Encuentro Nacional de Arte Jóven 2014 Aguascalientes, México, honorable Mention at the 9th Biennial of painting and engraving Paul Gauguin 2015 and was selected in the II International Biennial of Engraving Jose Guadalupe Posada and the fifth-national biennial Shinzaburo Takeda. His work has participated in group exhibitions in Mexico, Chicago and Canada ; He has exhibited individually at the Institute of Fine Arts Potosino, San Luis Potosi Mexico; and the Gallery of Centro Morelense de las Artes Cuernavaca Morelos.

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View of a French flag over the City Hall of Le Havre in northwest France where a rally took place demanding justice for the death of Abdoulaye Camara who was killed by ten bullets at the hands of police on December 16th, 2014. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

A conversation between Kali Handelman, editor of The Revealer, and photographer Oscar B. Castillo about his project “The Crescent, The Cross, The Star, The Void” created in collaboration with journalist Karim Baouz. 

“The Crescent, The Cross, the Star, the Void” aims to be a journey inside the world of Islam in France and the many faces that compose this complex, multilayered reality built by long years of racial, political, cultural, and event spiritual issues. This project is a representation of the many paths followed by different sectors of the population and their intersections. It looks to better understand the relationships between the different actors in today’s fractured France. Through audiovisual mixed media documentation made of traditional photojournalism, still lifes, intervened images, portraits, and some other documentary approaches, the project looks to put together, in a personal way and in an interactive website, lives and stories many times seen as parallel, in order to contribute to the construction of a more auto-critical, inclusive, and self-aware society. – Oscar B. Castillo

Revealer: How did issues such stigmatization, stereotypes, immigration, marginalization, secularism, Islamophobia, radicalization figure into how you conceived of this project. 

Castillo: It is exactly a mix of those issues that drew me to this project. But I think I have a special interest in how society deals with youth from underprivileged communities, mostly because they are immigrants. The marginalization they sometimes endure feeds into all kinds of social ruptures that may result in internal and external conflicts that are not always religious, but that have, as in the French case, an important religious aspect.

Revealer: What is that “religious aspect” in the French case?

Castillo: France’s colonialist past continues to affect its current relationships with many of its former colonies; it is hard to overcome and forget that kind of exploitative dominance. And some of these countries are also where generations of Muslim immigrants have come from. This mix of factors: Colonialism, immigration, race, and religion has created a French society with many sharp edges. Social acceptance is now is like a scale, and being a Muslim in France will weigh heavily on the possibilities for integration.

Revealer: How did you find your subjects for this project? What did they think about being a part of it? Was it different in any ways from finding subjects for past projects? Does explicitly focusing on religion change the feeling of things?

Being an outsider in some way was helpful. There was a mutual interest as they were generally curious about me as someone who was not linked to the Muslim community or a religious movement but was looking for a better understanding of their lives, their particular situations, and how they are coping. Some of them were open and glad to collaborate with me on the project, but were limited by some religious precepts and interpretations. It is also a sensitive topic that can make discussion and the exchange of ideas difficult, as some dogmatic visions may not accommodate questioning where the mere insinuation of a doubt could be taken as an offense.

Young members of Muslim and Jewish communities light candles and sing typical Jewish songs of celebration to close an inter-religions meeting to discuss cultural and religious aspects and facilitate better understanding and dialogue between the two communities. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

Revealer: Who or what were some of the most interesting subjects to photograph?

Castillo: I was trying to move towards subjects who were interesting to me in all kinds of ways, so the photographic side of it, in general, was secondary. Of course, I love and look for visually interesting scenes, but it is not my main motivation. I go to see, hear, smell, feel, know, talk, understand, and then, sometimes, the pictures come. For example, I loved participating in inter-religious activities with Jewish and Muslim kids. Getting to see them learning about each other and their different cultures and their many similarities was an important experience. Similarly, getting to know a young Muslim woman and hearing her speak about feminism, education, liberation as well as spirituality and beliefs was a very good learning experience.

Revealer: What are some of the techniques that worked well?

While always respecting the dignity of the subjects sometimes I like to confront them and discuss their contradictions (or mine). For example, a member of the Salafi community told me that, religiously speaking, videos were allowed but not the photography so then I started to wonder about animated GIFs. Are there some precepts or some interdictions about GIFs?

In this work I’m trying to use both the technical and aesthetic approaches to work in relation to those kinds of questions, doubts, and feelings. Some may come out of fun and some from more difficult moments like when some subjects asked me to delete photos I had made of them off of my camera. In response, I recovered the files, which had become corrupted, and distorted them further. I included those images in order to talk about fear and about how distorted representations can disrupt the conversations we use them to guide.

Intervened file recovered after being forced to delete the picture by a group of men at the Mosque in the Genevilliers area of Paris, France. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

Revealer: Where did the project name come from? What is “the Void”?

Castillo: The name is a reference to the symbols that represent the largest monotheistic religions. Each can be used to celebrate diversity or create division. “The Void” is that place in the middle that is unknown, rarely discussed, and is under-appreciated. It could be a neutral zone or, even better, an area of convergence and respect, but it is instead a place where we throw our fear, intolerance, and ignorance.

Revealer: How has the project evolved as you have been working on it?

Castillo: As the project grew, we were able to narrow down our focus. This is not to say that all the subjects we worked on are equally relevant or that we included all the leading actors, but as we went deeper into the issues and the work on the ground, we were able to identify these characters, where their actions were taking place, and their influence on and relation to other characters in the story. Each person led to a new set of characters and situations, creating new links with other elements of the story that were not evident since the beginning.

Revealer: How have you structured the final project to reflect those connections? Is that part of the organization of the website?

Castillo: The project is a journey inside those connections, and how these different characters and their particular stories interact and build together the bigger frame. We want the website to be an interactive place where the reader can take a trip inside these stories. I don’t want to dictate one singular way to connect the links between them. Instead, my version is just one of multiple possible ways to connect them and is based on my own experience travelling inside this specific universe. It is not the whole experience but aims to be as vast as possible and aims as well to continue growing.

Revealer: What was it like collaborating with your writing partner for this project, Karim Baouz?

Castillo: It was an interesting experience as I was collaborating with somebody that knows the subject personally and has experienced this story in his own life, not just from his years of studying it. His experience as an underprivileged youth, his familial background, and his work as legal assistant, among many other personal intersections, allowed him to be more than a spectator and relate to the subjects in our story on a different, and more intimate level along with his expertise.

A french woman covers her face at the commemoration of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13th, 2015. The woman was having a discussion with Karim Baouz, my collaborator, about the war in Algeria and was not listening to any of Karim’s opinions because of his Algerian origins. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

Revealer: What did it feel like to be working on this project as the elections in the US and France were happening?

Castillo: It is important and illuminating because working during this specific time gives you a temporal and historical framework for relating seemingly isolated issues to a more collective behavior. Some actions or ideas (perceived as positive or negative) may seem like just the position of a particular individual, but they take on a whole new meaning when they supported and shared by millions of people.

When those ideas are extreme and move towards separation, confrontation and hatred, when they are blindly supported by brainwashed parts of society, it benefits only a small group, and it is important to think about them as part the bigger picture. This work aims to show that there are no simple connections, there are more than just cause and effect relationships, and that this is all happening in the context of racial, religious, political and socio-economic issues part of a cycle of decisions made by local powers that have global repercussions.

Revealer: Can you tell me about how this project is personally relevant for you? What does it mean to you to engage with these issues?

Castillo: There are two levels of the personal implications of this project that are completely intertwined, to say the least. On one side there is this curiosity about how social fabric is built, or destroyed in many cases, and how societal relations function differently depending on social class, national origins, religious practices, or political affiliations. On the other side, there is this sense of belonging, in some weird but concrete way, to French society. I have lived in France intermittently for years and have family connections there, so I have been witnessing and feeling the increasing gap within their society and the fast and aggressive ways it is disrupting everyday life. At this point, the fear that my son will live in a very fragmented place pushes me to try and portray honest and useful reflections about how these issues are happening and how they may be improved or, at least, better understood.

Portrait of an unknown man on his way to assist for the Friday prayers at the Great Mosque of Paris. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

Revealer: How has being a parent in France influenced your perspective? Are there images you made from that point of view?

Castillo: Many times we as photojournalists or documentary photographers work on subjects and stories that are not linked to our lives in ways that touch us beyond our curiosity or some general interests. By that I’m not talking about lack of implication with the subject (that is another very important discussion too). What I mean is that it is very different to work on subjects that you feel are affecting your life and lives of your personal circle in a more direct way. There are some images that didn’t make it into the final edit of this project which were related to a well known Christmas market in Alsace. I made them when the mother of my son told me they were going to visit that market on the same day that the attack on Berlin’s market took place. Those kinds of situations bring together your personal life and circle, your reflections about a context, your work and how all that become a whole have a very important influence on my approach to this project; I’m seeing and reflecting on this situation but my son is living it and growing inside of it. 

Revealer: Who do you hope will see this work? What would you like them to take away from it?

Castillo: I think this project may be useful for people who would like to read about France’s socio-political panorama and the religious views that are part of it through a freer lens that mixes a serious and respectful analysis with a more ludic and personal approach. An array of people would be able to find some points of reference or similarities to their own environment and relate to the interesting details about the subjects of this project, their interrelations and how they are affecting the collective life of France today.

I would like readers to understand that questioning the norm is important, that doubts are natural and necessary and that the discussion of every topic is paramount for understanding each aspect of society. The only sacred things should be the freedom of choice and the respect for one another. I hope this work contributes to that discussion.

***

This conversation was part of a collaboration between photographer Oscar B. Castillo and journalist Karim Baouz with support from the Magnum Foundation‘s “On Religion” project.

For more of this project, see “Debate and Turmoil within the ‘French Muslim Community’” by Karim Baouz and “Images of the Void” by Elayne Oliphant.

***

Oscar B. Castillo was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1981. After studying psychology at Venezuelan Central University the thirst for adventures put him early on the road, meandering for years through many streets all over Europe until photography took him back to formal education in Barcelona – Spain. His professional work as photographer has been geared towards social subjects that promote ideas of solidarity, tolerance and respect and at the time question both the structures of economic and political power and himself as photographer and as part of this society. In his words “I’m not looking to carry on with a militant work, I just aim for the camera to be a coherent extension of my vision of humanity out of photography.” 

Oscar has been working for the last years on a long term project about the causes and consequences of violence in his home country and its relationship to the political fracture Venezuela currently endures. His work has been published in TIME Magazine, the New York Times, International New York Times The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, L’Internazionale, LFI Leica Magazine, La Vie Magazine, Days Japan and other different major international publications and exhibited in France, Germany, Italy, USA, Spain, Cambodia, Lithuania, Colombia. He is a 2016 Magnum Foundation Grantee for his work about the situation of Islam in France as well as a 2016 winner of Eugene Smith Fellowship. Parallel to his photographic work Oscar developed a passion for teaching, being photography as well an important tool for education, inclusion and social improvement. As instructor and teacher he has been sharing his photographic and social points of view in participatory photographic workshops with kids from excluded communities in Mexico, youngsters in IDPs camps in post-earthquake Haiti or inmates inside Venezuelan prisons. He has also taught in formal educational programs in Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela and elsewhere. Oscar has been participating regularly at Foundry Photo Workshops, first as student in Mexico and India, later as assistant in Argentina and Bosnia, and finally as an instructor in Guatemala.

The post The Crescent, The Cross, The Star, The Void appeared first on The Revealer.

View of a torn up French flag that was one of the objects left by visitors to the memorial for the victims of terrorist attacks in Nice. On July 15th 2016 Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a extra heavy weight truck through a crowded public event in Nice, a popular tourist destination in the French Riviera. The attack killed 86 people from 19 different countries. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

By Karim Baouz  translated by Patrick Blanchfield with photographs and captions by Oscar B. Castillo. Original French below. 

Having spent many long weeks crisscrossing working-class regions of France together with my indefatigable friend Oscar, we have reached the conclusion that French society is fractured. The Muslim community is in turmoil, and I have the feeling that it is bit-by-bit dislocating itself from the rest of the nation.

Movements and currents are confronting each other trying to understand whether Islam is compatible with the Republic, or, if not, whether a rupture is inevitable. The question is very complicated, since it sits at the crossroads of numerous issues (fear, integration, discrimination, etcetera). If one doesn’t explain these ambiguous points, one cannot understand what’s happening in France, or the trends that may carry it away going forward.

It’s fundamental to stipulate that French society is traversed by various fears – globalization, unemployment, terrorism, the visibility of minorities, more. Everyone is afraid, and glares daggers at everyone else. The schizophrenia of the French opens a door to all kinds of populisms.

And this is the paradox of France, an old country, withdrawing into itself when once it pretended to speak to all humankind. In France, there is no longer any common narrative that transcends social divisions. Different cultural forces pull bit-by-bit on metropolitan France amidst generally reprehensible indifference. Even previously common touchstones are gone. It used to be that many Muslim families would put up Christmas trees and then celebrate the holiday as a kind of festival for children; now, a hardening of attitudes makes this impossible.

If fundamentalist religious discourse has been able to so easily permeate France’s banlieues, it is because an institutional emptiness reigns in these regions forgotten by the Republic. This decline of political ideas has occurred in a context in which there is no longer any social advancement for the lower classes, who have been reduced to economic and social exclusion. Insofar as their dignity has been taken from them, these populations feel humiliated. The only thing that can help a young person in a French ghetto get by: rancor and resentment. You learn to live with hatred, through and through. You are neither Arab, nor black, nor French. You suffer the pain of a double lack of belonging. Any national feeling is very fragile among this generation, which endures segregation and rejection by French society.

Portrait of Mohamed, a 27 year-old refugee from Sudan. When asked to write what The Republic is for him he wrote “The Republic is a good square where people can come to manifest and demonstrate” (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

France is an idea. And it is because I believe in this idea that I became a journalist. The French dream is real. In order to realize it – to avoid the storm that is coming – we have to believe in it and we must embrace the collective history of the country.

The traditional French story must be modified. Millions of French people have another national story beyond that of Asterix the Gaul. One can take start from a different place and yet wind up in the same place. The story of France is Joan of Arc, sure, but it’s not just that. It’s also the story of the integration of immigrants who have given so much to France. You can be named Oscar and come from Venezuela, or Karim and come from Algeria, and be happy and proud to be French. What matters is that the state shows care for you.

Millions of French people have come from elsewhere, but nobody remarks on the fact. Worse, these people are essentialized, shackled to their religion alone. Yet, there is a paradox: The state cannot simultaneously demand laïcité (French secularism) of these people while, at the same time, only seeing them through the lens of religion.

The world has changed, and if France wants to remain France, it must open itself up to the stories of others. The Republic must open its generous arms and adapt to the personal stories of its citizens. French people who come from elsewhere invoke a multiplicity of belonging that is not irreconcilable with the republic. They advocate a multiculturalism “Made in France” and call upon French society to reform itself in the name of its own core values.

***

Débats et effervescence au sein de « la communauté musulmane française. »

Apres avoir sillonnés pendant de longues semaines les quartiers populaires de France, avec mon indéfectible ami Oscar, nous avons constaté que la société française est fracturée. La communauté musulmane est en ébullition et j’ai le sentiment qu’elle se disloque peu à peu du reste de la nation.

Des mouvements, des forces, se confrontent pour savoir si l’Islam est compatible avec la République ou si au contraire la rupture est inévitable. La question est très complexe car elle est au carrefour de nombreuses problématiques.(Peur, intégration, discrimination, etc). Si on n’explique pas ces points équivoques on ne peux pas comprendre ce qui se passe en France et quelles sont les tendances qui l’emporteront.

D’une part, il est fondamental de préciser que la société française est traversée par des peurs. (Mondialisation, chômage, terrorisme, visibilité des minorités etc).Tous le monde a peur et se regarde en chien de faïence. La schizophrénie des français est la porte ouverte à tous les populismes. Même les pierres de touche précédemment communes ont disparu. D’habitude, de nombreuses familles musulmanes installaient des arbres de Noël et célébraient les vacances comme une sorte de festival pour enfants; Maintenant, un durcissement des attitudes rend cela impossible.

Si le discours religieux fondamentaliste à pu imprégner si facilement les banlieues française c’est parce que règne dans ces territoires oubliée par la république un vide institutionnel. Le déclin des idées politiques s’est produit dans un contexte ou il n’y a plus de promotion sociale possible pour une partie importante des classes inferieurs, réduites à l’exclusion économique et sociale. Puisque on leurs ôtent leurs dignités ces populations se sentent humiliés. La seule chose qui aide à vivre un jeune du ghetto français : c’est la rancœur et le ressentiment. Tu apprends à vivre avec la haine chevillé au corps. Tu es ni arabe, ni noir, ni français. Tu souffres du mal de la double désappartenance. Le sentiment national est très fragile chez cette génération qui vit très mal sa ségrégation et son rejet par la société française.

La France c’est une idée. C’est parce que je crois à cette idée que je suis devenu un journaliste reconnue. Le rêve français cela existe. Pour le réaliser – pour éviter la tempête qui vient – nous devons y croire et nous devons embrasser l’histoire collective du pays.

Des millions de français ont une autre histoire nationale que celle d’ Astérix le gaulois. Le roman traditionnel français doit être modifié On peut partir de chemin diffèrent et se retrouver dans un même endroit. L’histoire de France, c’est Jeanne d’arc mais pas seulement. C’est aussi celle de l’intégration des immigrés qui ont tant donné à la France. Tu peux t’appeler Oscar et venir du Venezuela ou Karim et venir d’Algérie et te sentir heureux et fier d’être français. Encore faut il que l’Etat s’intéresse à toi.

Ces millions de français venu d’ailleurs, personne n’en parle. Pire on essentialise ces populations en les enchainant uniquement à leurs religiosités. On ne peut pas à la fois faire des injonctions de laïcité à ces populations et ne les voir que sur le prisme religieux.

Le monde a changé et si la France veut rester la France elle doit s’ouvrir à l’histoire des autres .La république doit ouvrir ses bras généreux et s’adapter aux histoires personnelles des citoyens. Ces français qui viennent d’ailleurs invoquent la multiplicité d’appartenance culturelle qui n’est pas inconciliable avec la république. Ils prônent un multiculturalisme made in France et appelle la société française à se reformer au nom de ses propres valeurs. 

***

Debate and Turmoil within the “French Muslim Community” was written by Karim Baouz as part of a collaboration with photographer Oscar B. Castillo and with support from the Magnum Foundation’s “On Religion” project.

For more of this project, see “The Crescent, the Cross, the Star, the Void” by Oscar B. Castillo and “Images of the Void” by Elayne Oliphant. 

***

Karim Baouz was born in Paris in one of the many forgotten ghettos were immigrants have coexisted with — and been excluded by — native French citizens for decades. First a jurist and legal assistant on criminal cases, he turned to journalism and is now a writer and producer of audiovisual content for different a variety of outlets. Baouz’s work is mainly related to the topics of segregation, crime, and extremism where he comes from. His book Plongée au coeur de la fabrique djihadiste analyzes the paths followed by the two young Koachi brothers as they passed from a precarious childhood of abandonment and crime to jail and Islamic radicalization, ending up as the terrorist attackers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Oscar B. Castillo was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1981. After studying psychology at Venezuelan Central University the thirst for adventures put him early on the road, meandering for years through many streets all over Europe until photography took him back to formal education in Barcelona – Spain. His professional work as photographer has been geared towards social subjects that promote ideas of solidarity, tolerance and respect and at the time question both the structures of economic and political power and himself as photographer and as part of this society. In his words “I’m not looking to carry on with a militant work, I just aim for the camera to be a coherent extension of my vision of humanity out of photography.” 

Oscar has been working for the last years on a long term project about the causes and consequences of violence in his home country and its relationship to the political fracture Venezuela currently endures. His work has been published in TIME Magazine, the New York Times, International New York Times The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, L’Internazionale, LFI Leica Magazine, La Vie Magazine, Days Japan and other different major international publications and exhibited in France, Germany, Italy, USA, Spain, Cambodia, Lithuania, Colombia. He is a 2016 Magnum Foundation Grantee for his work about the situation of Islam in France as well as a 2016 winner of Eugene Smith Fellowship. Parallel to his photographic work Oscar developed a passion for teaching, being photography as well an important tool for education, inclusion and social improvement. As instructor and teacher he has been sharing his photographic and social points of view in participatory photographic workshops with kids from excluded communities in Mexico, youngsters in IDPs camps in post-earthquake Haiti or inmates inside Venezuelan prisons. He has also taught in formal educational programs in Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela and elsewhere. Oscar has been participating regularly at Foundry Photo Workshops, first as student in Mexico and India, later as assistant in Argentina and Bosnia, and finally as an instructor in Guatemala.

The post Debate and Turmoil within the “French Muslim Community” appeared first on The Revealer.

View of the minaret of the Great Mosque of Paris in France. France has the largest muslim population in Western Europe as well as the highest percentage of Muslims. Their origins vary, but the majority are from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and other former french colonies such as Mali. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

By Elayne Oliphant

The first thing I noticed about Oscar Castillo’s project “The Crescent, The Cross, The Star, The Void” was that it is almost impossible to discern that his photographs were taken in Paris. This takes some doing. Paris is one of the world’s most visited, photographed, and recognizable cities. Yet, while the minaret of the city’s central mosque may be recognizable to some viewers, it’s unlikely that many would connect an image of its Moroccan inspired architecture with the city of light. It is a picture of Muslim French Paris, and thus, not part of the city’s standard image lexicon.

In her book The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism Mayanthi Fernando uses the two terms – Muslim French – as a single phrase in part to demonstrate just how odd the connection still sounds to our ears. While built in 1926, the mosque (see Naomi Davidson’s remarkable history of the space) is difficult to place in the city in part because it is located in a valley. In contrast to the city’s churches, which can easily be spotted across the cityscape, I was always struck by how hard the mosque was to find, its stunning minaret only coming into view in the final steps as one approaches the building.

For Castillo, this moving photo-essay project was precisely such an experiment in re-imagining the French nation. In one of the city’s quieter train stations, “Nation,” Castillo depicts the nation and its people, the people with no nation, and the nation without people. The latter reminded me of Eugène Atget’s photographs of an emptied Paris, its famous streets and passages standing vacant, refusing the imposition of time and context inevitably offered by human subjects. Castillo embarks on this notion of absence in a very different way, however.

View of the Nation metro station in Paris, France. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

The final term he uses to describe his project – the void – is, for Castillo, “that place in the middle that is unknown, rarely discussed, and is under-appreciated. It could be a neutral zone or, even better, an area of convergence and respect, but it is instead a place where we have thrown our fear, intolerance, and ignorance.” He doesn’t use the word “secular,” but coming as it does after the cross, the star, and the crescent, “the void” evokes France’s passionate attachment to the notion of laïcité – a term many insist represents something so wholly non-religious that it cannot be acquainted with others’ mere “secularisms.” Moreover, with these brief sentences, Castillo manages to capture so many of the nuances, critiques, hopes, and failures that accompany the term. By describing the void as that a “neutral zone,” he addresses the secular’s self image, its claims of the “absence” that remains once religion’s intruding influence is removed. By noting, however, that the void is “rarely discussed” and “under-appreciated,” Castillo touches on its normative power, the manner in which its claims to absence may scaffold over the various local idioms, signs, and semiotic ideologies that do what Talal Asad has described as the work of “encouragement” in the reproduction of local norms. And by lamenting how the void has the potential to be “an area of convergence and respect” but remains – ever so stubbornly – “a place where we throw our fear, intolerance, and ignorance” Castillo both recognizes the powerful critiques made against the secular’s insinuative power around the globe, while also holding on to the possibility that it could be something closer to the desires that motivate many of its defenders: that space of “tolerance” where various signs encounter one another on equal ground.

One image I keep returning to is of two women debating. Onlookers surround them; their exaggerated smiles seem to attest to the tension in the space. Is this an image of that abstract public sphere: the space of rational debate and discussion that supposedly sits at the foundation of Enlightened Europe? Passionate advocates of France’s laïcité would insist that young woman’s headscarf disrupts this space, transforming it from a neutral sphere into one of “communalist” tension. Nilüfer Göle, in contrast, would insists that the attempt to create spaces emptied of Islamic signs precisely misunderstands this tradition of abstraction, worrying that the public sphere is at risk of “becoming a place of common sense, of the sacralization of public opinion, and of the contagion of the sensational and the scandalous.”

Nour Boudnaidja, 23 years-old, has a discussion with another woman about the meanings and visions of women emancipation and her idea of freedom and respect as a young French Muslim woman. (Photograph by Oscar B. Castillo)

By attempting to pluralize the French public sphere, Castillo works toward the expansion of the void, without having to efface the subjects who populate it. And yet, as his project continued, some of those subjects requested such an effacement, deciding it was too fraught to include their faces among the tapestry of an increasingly worn and troubled French public sphere. His aspirations for “an area of convergence and respect” seem to vanish as he undoes the photos he had taken. And yet, this re-imaging of a seemingly unfamiliar Paris attests to how, to borrow Göle’s words once again, “the public visibility of religious and cultural signs of Islam expresses the presence of Muslim actors in European countries.” It would be difficult, today, to reproduce Atget’s empty photographs, as a variety of signs push in on the French public sphere. Despite the protests of the Front National, these signs – as Castillo’s photographs demonstrate – populate the nation in ways that cannot be fully undone. Castillo’s “unsettling” (to borrow another phrase from Fernando) project explores, in his words, “how the social fabric is built or destroyed.” And so in them we can see a France in process. We see people the nation has in many ways refused to include within the bounds of Frenchness continuing the painful and incomplete work of imagining themselves within and of it.

***

“Images of the Void” was written by Elayne Oliphant as part of a collaboration between photographer Oscar B. Castillo and journalist Karim Baouz with support from the Magnum Foundation’s “On Religion” project.

For more of this project, see “The Crescent, the Cross, the Star, the Void” by Oscar B. Castillo and “Debate and Turmoil within the ‘French Muslim Community’” by Karim Baouz. 

***

Elayne Oliphant’s scholarship explores the privilege of Christianity in France and Europe. She rethinks the evolutionary tale of religious to secular by examining the ongoing (and ever-transforming) dominance of Christian signs and symbols in the public sphere. She has published essays exploring the privileged circulation of Christian signs in contemporary art exhibits, museum displays, and European Court of Human Rights rulings. She is currently completing her first book entitled Signs of an Unmarked Faith: Contemporary Art and Secular Catholicism in 21st Century Paris. Her current research projects include: an examination of the significant role played by real estate, insurance, and financial industries in maintaining the power and privilege of Christian heritage spaces throughout France; and a study of effects of the closure of nine Catholic churches in Manhattan, both on the cityscape and for the city’s Catholic population.

Oscar B. Castillo was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1981. After studying psychology at Venezuelan Central University the thirst for adventures put him early on the road, meandering for years through many streets all over Europe until photography took him back to formal education in Barcelona – Spain. His professional work as photographer has been geared towards social subjects that promote ideas of solidarity, tolerance and respect and at the time question both the structures of economic and political power and himself as photographer and as part of this society. In his words “I’m not looking to carry on with a militant work, I just aim for the camera to be a coherent extension of my vision of humanity out of photography.” 

Oscar has been working for the last years on a long term project about the causes and consequences of violence in his home country and its relationship to the political fracture Venezuela currently endures. His work has been published in TIME Magazine, the New York Times, International New York Times The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, L’Internazionale, LFI Leica Magazine, La Vie Magazine, Days Japan and other different major international publications and exhibited in France, Germany, Italy, USA, Spain, Cambodia, Lithuania, Colombia. He is a 2016 Magnum Foundation Grantee for his work about the situation of Islam in France as well as a 2016 winner of Eugene Smith Fellowship. Parallel to his photographic work Oscar developed a passion for teaching, being photography as well an important tool for education, inclusion and social improvement. As instructor and teacher he has been sharing his photographic and social points of view in participatory photographic workshops with kids from excluded communities in Mexico, youngsters in IDPs camps in post-earthquake Haiti or inmates inside Venezuelan prisons. He has also taught in formal educational programs in Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela and elsewhere. Oscar has been participating regularly at Foundry Photo Workshops, first as student in Mexico and India, later as assistant in Argentina and Bosnia, and finally as an instructor in Guatemala.

Karim Baouz was born in Paris in one of the many forgotten ghettos were immigrants have coexisted with — and been excluded by — native French citizens for decades. First a jurist and legal assistant on criminal cases, he turned to journalism and is now a writer and producer of audiovisual content for different a variety of outlets. Baouz’s work is mainly related to the topics of segregation, crime, and extremism where he comes from. His book Plongée au coeur de la fabrique djihadiste analyzes the paths followed by the two young Koachi brothers as they passed from a precarious childhood of abandonment and crime to jail and Islamic radicalization, ending up as the terrorist attackers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

The post Images of the Void appeared first on The Revealer.