The CNN Photoblog has just done a lovely feature on Ali Arkady’s work on their website. Check it out.

“By the end of this month, or at any rate in the first days of October, Iraq will have been elected a member of the League of Nations and the British mandatory regime in that country will have come to an end.

To the mass of the British people this consummation seems to have been too long in materializing. For the opinion, derived in the main from the ‘popular’ Press, still prevails that in Mesopotamia we have spent millions of pounds and have sacrificed hundreds of lives–and all to no purpose. The feeling is that we ought to have concentrated on interests nearer to the heart of the Empire and to have evacuated Iraq once we had beaten the Ottoman Empire there, years and years ago.”

Almost exactly 80 years later America is pulling its troops out of Iraq. In the last 8 years the US has spent billions (if not trillions) of dollars and sacrificed thousands of lives. Many Americans are asking, “To what purpose?” With a crippling financial crisis at home, many also feel it would have been better to “concentrate on interests near to the heart” of America.

Reading this clipping sends shivers down my spine because it holds up the mirror of history. We see that we are living out George Stanayana’s terrifying prediction: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

By the end of December the US will have withdrawn its military from Iraq, but who is to say that in 2090 they won’t be doing the same again?

In June he wrote to tell me that one of his brothers was killed by pro-Gaddafi forces on the outskirts of the city:

“My brother get killed at the southern front of the city 22 days back, after that event, suddenly I started to look to these things differently, now I can feel the exact pain the every family in Libya has felt. But even though, I have another 2 brothers also at the southern front, I hope they stay safe.”

I was really moved by his email; not only because my friend had just lost his brother, but because his reaction to the pain was not to turn inwards, but instead to reach out and empathize with others around him who had also lost family.

In the most recent email, 3 months later, Mahmud tells me how he and his family are coping with his brother’s death:

“Thank you, me and my family are fine. Although we still can’t accept the idea that our family has lost one member…. For instance, I cant delete my brother’s phone number, also if we all at home and my mother prepares a meal for us, she makes a meal for him too, and then she says, I forgut. but I know she didn’t. She just feels that she betray him, like he was nothing but a guest for a while, and then he left. I feel the same way when I attempt to delete his number.”

There’s been surprisingly little coverage of the human side of the Libyan conflict as journalists chase the ever-fluctuating front lines or pack into press conferences in luxury hotels.  Let us not forget that war, whether it is sectarian or revolutionary, is vile and nasty and indiscriminate in who it kills.  We’d all do well to follow Mahmud’s example and take a moment to turn outwards and empathize with those around us.

The British Journal of Photography recently published a very interesting article about mixing audio and stills, something I’m getting more and more passionate about.

In the article I talk a little about the moment this bomb was dropped from a pro-Gaddafi plane.  You can find the article here

Also, you can find my original blog post here.

It’s still at the same place www.sebmeyer.com, but now it includes this blog AND my archive!

I hope you enjoy and as always, please send any feedback you have.

I’ll be frank.  I normally don’t like poetry, but the poems in this book are so moving and poignant, that I found myself reading and rereading them.

Here’s one of the poems.  After reading it, though, go out and buy the book because the other 8 poems are equally brilliant:

The Not Dead

We are the not dead.
In battle, life would not say goodbye to us.
And crack-shot snipers seemed to turn a blind eye to us.
And even though guns and grenades let fly at us
we somehow survived.

We are the not dead.
When we were young and fully alive for her,
we worshipped Britannia.
We the undersigned
put our names on the line for her.
From the day we were born we were loaded and primed for her.
Prepared as we were, though, to lie down and die for her,
we somehow survived.

So why did she cheat on us?
Didn’t we come running when she most needed us?
When tub-thumping preachers
and bullet-brained leaders
gave solemn oaths and stirring speeches
then fisted the air and pointed eastwards,
didn’t we turn our backs on our nearest and dearest?
From runways and slipways Britannia cheered us,
but returning home refused to meet us,
sent out a crowd of back-biting jeerers
and mealy-mouthed sneerers.
Two-timing, two-faced Britannia deceived us.

We are morbidly ill.
Soldiers with nothing but time to kill,
we idle now in everyday clothes and ordinary towns,
blowing up, breaking down.
If we dive for cover or wake in a heap,
Britannia, from horseback, now crosses the street
or looks right through us.
We seem changed and ghostly to those who knew us.
The country which flew the red white and blue for us
now shows her true colours.
We are the not dead.
Neither happy and proud
with a bar-code of medals across the heart
nor laid in a box and draped in a flag,
we wander this no man’s land instead,
creatures of a different stripe – the awkward, unwanted, unlovable type –
haunted with fears and guilt,
wounded in spirit and mind.

So what shall we do with the not dead and all of his kind?