Shoot # 60

• Welcome to shoot – a gateway to the art world
• Aleppo, Syria – documenting incomprehensible violence and suffering
• Giving war victims a face
• The little girl from Aleppo
• Art photos from Syria
• Media
• New editions, including photo paintings
• GlobalArt Magazine
• Instagram – let’s follow each other!
• Three books

Jan Oberg – Oberg PhotoGraphics – Click

Welcome to shoot # 60
The photo above is a digital gift – a moment for reflection – to you from Oberg PhotoGraphics.

Welcome to new recipients. Here is the preceding shoot. 

The image above was shot in Eastern Aleppo, Syria, when it had just been liberated in mid-December last year.

• stimulates your art curiosity and shares positive stuff from the global art world
• is a gateway to the online “flip” GlobalArt Magazine and to
• the blog I write as an art recommender, not an art critic 
• wings into your mailbox now and then
• tells you what Oberg PhotoGraphics does
• invites you to share your news with me in the field of art.Sometimes I shoot just a single image your way. Exclusively for shoot recipients.I believe in global networking, sharing and in positive energy. Please share with me if you have photo and other art news and views.

 

Aleppo, Syria
It’s more than two months since last. And this shoot is very different from what I normally send you.

In December I went to Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, to do fact-finding and develop thoughts about peace.

Syria is now the largest humanitarian crisis on earth since 1945: Today 13 million, over 50% of the Syrians, are in urgent need of humanitarian support because of everybody else’s use of violence.

As you may know I’m a peace and conflict researcher with the Transnational Foundation that promotes the UN goal of making “peace by peaceful means”. Not bombs.

I’ve been working on these hugely complex issues since then.

My moral support goes to one side: the innocent civilian victims who never touched a gun and who get no media attention.

Giving war victims a face
It changed my priorities to be among the first few to get into Eastern Aleppo when it was liberated after 4,5 years of occupation hell. Incomprehensible physical destruction and endless human suffering.

This drove me to use my camera in a way new to me.

Not as a war photographer for there is enough war pornography. Instead I’m trying to tell human stories and give the voiceless war victims a face.

So far I’ve created five photo stories on my Exposure site now seen by well over 100.000 people. Yes, I’m proud of that and the many more who have read about them on social media and alternative media sites.

These photos are unique and historic.

The little girl from Aleppo
Here a photo that I believe is one of the most important I have ever taken. Here’s why.
But there are many children and adults like her in my documentary photography.

Girl From Eastern Aleppo, Syria © Jan Oberg 2016

Art photos from Syria
These photo stories are documentary. But I am also working on a few images to appear on my art photo homepage.

See the first 24 very different images from Aleppo here. More to come because:

I’m soon going back to Syria – re-visiting Damascus and Aleppo but also seeing other places, interview people, take photos and – no less – contribute to an absolutely necessary dialogue about how to find peace in this war-torn land.

Women Sharing Bread in Eastern Aleppo, Syria © Jan Oberg 2016

Media
A French student at Lund University, Héloïse Dumont, has been working over several months on creating a website devoted to my work as photographer and peace researcher; images, interviews and videos. It’s been an exciting process and it is now in its final stage…

And the editors of the Swedish site, Tasting Life – the focus of which is art, culture, food, human relations and traveling – have featured my works twice – here and here (in English). I’m very grateful to them both!

New editions
Oberg PhotoGraphics’ homepage has become more easy to navigate.
Several new works uploaded see Recent Editions. And there’s the new Aleppo section.

GlobalArt Magazine
Inspiration guaranteed – quality works, articles and video.
Selected by Oberg PhotoGraphics for the searching and discerning art soul.
At one place. At your fingertips!

Instagram – let’s follow each other!
On Instagram – @obergphotographics is now a business account. Great diversity and a new photo almost every day, can be spontaneous but always carefully processed. Let’s follow each other!

Books
At the moment I’m reading three books – later to be reviewed but let me alert you to them already because they are treasures:

Marwa Al-Sabouni, The Battle For Home. The Memoir of a Syrian Architect – beautifully written analysis of the Syrian society and the causes of the war as seen through architecture and city planning. Highly creative with lovely drawings too. Here she gives a TED Talk on her thoughts.

Secondly, John B. Ravenal Jasper Johns and Edward Munch which I am particularly interested in because of my own work from 2011 in which I linked the two.

And, finally, David Hockney and Martin Gayford A History of pictures – which is roughly 350 eye-openers over as many pages. It’s not a boring history of art but a creative dialogue about essential features of all types of pictures in our world and how we create and perceive them. From the cave to the various screens. Wow!