Reseña del libro "Apartheid is a Crime: Portraits of the Israeli Occupation (en Inglés)"
Mats Svensson is a Swedish photographer, diplomat, and teacher, who has a masters degree in Social Sciences. Since 1974 he has been a development worker and also has served with the Swedish government. He has worked in CongoBrazzaville, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Zambia, as well as working for shorter periods in Malawi, South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. Mats Svensson took 60,000 photos in the occupied Palestinian territories from which he selected the 92 perceptive, nuanced, and ultimately heart-rending images in this volume.Svenssons photos are accompanied by pithy and surprising commentary from a wide variety of Palestinian and Israeli figures as well as international voices from Barack Obama and George W. Bush to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.Svensson documents Palestinian street scenes, conveying the mannerisms and customs of daily life, as did the humanist photographer Cartier Bressonthe difference being that the society Svennson documents is under military occupation. Apartheid Is a Crime shows the precursors and aftermath of violence in photos that, taken together, are as charged as the war photos of David Douglas Duncan.Svensson shows us occupation, expropriation, arrest, and immense concrete barriers encroaching on daily life. Americans will recognize this use of images and words in the long tradition of protest and politically committed photojournalism. Apartheid is a Crime is a cry for social justice that recalls the effort of Walker Evans and James Agee to depict the plight of the rural south at the height of the Depression in their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
