I saw this drawing on a friend's Facebook page, and was immediately arrested by its almost Goya-like power to capture a moment of indelible horror in simple black and white lines on a page.
The executioners and the executed lined up in a row, and so close to each other you almost feel the gun barrels will touch their victims before the bullets do.
What fearful imagination guided this artist's hand to conjure such a timeless vision?
Linked to the drawing was an almost identical image, made by a man we must also consider an artist, using not pen and paper but the documentary tool of a camera to record photographically a real life firing squad in an act of mass execution, perhaps the inspiration for the sketch.
The story behind the photo is quite interesting.
Jahangir Razmi was an Iranian who bore witness to a massacre of Kurdish militants in Iran in 1979. His photo was published locally and then republished around the world, but the identity of the photographer was kept anonymous for fear of reprisal.
The picture went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the only time the award was ever bestowed on an anonymous source. It was not until 2006 that Razmi felt free to come forward and claim credit for the shot.
Think about today and the thousands of anonymous cell phone photographers whose images documented the recent violence in Iran, and the fear of reprisal that continues to drive witnesses underground.
What's past is prologue, and the Tempest still rages.
william
That photograph is extremely socking to me.
It shows you the darkest side of human nature.
I didn't understand it when I was little and I still can't understand it now as an adult: How can a human being kill another human being?
Really socking and sad, but that has been the history of human race.
I wish I could change the way we are sometimes but it's beyond control.
Posted by: Elsita :) | June 02, 2011 at 08:25 PM
Sorry, I meant shocking...
Posted by: Elsita :) | June 02, 2011 at 08:26 PM
When I first saw the drawing, I wondered how the artist could have imagined such an impossible concept. When the photo followed, my heart sank. I would have preferred to think this was only the product of a far reaching, nightmarish imagination.
The photo both confirms the phenomenon of the depths to which human nature can sink, especially when hastened by the momentum of a group, and yet still begs my capacity to imagine how such a thing could be possible, how such a thing could have happened.
Terrible.
Posted by: kirsten | June 06, 2011 at 03:13 PM