6 year old view of Baghdad
Dima is a 6-year-old Iraqi girl living in Baghdad who was given a camera by
Index on Censorship to take pictures of her life in Baghdad.
See her pictures here
It is now 70 years since Picasso painted La femme qui pleure (Weeping Woman). The picture hangs in the Scottish Museum of Modern Art and the blurb on it states:
"This is one of Picasso’s most iconic images. It was created as one of the main studies for a huge mural commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. Picasso chose to focus on the horror of the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica, bombed at General Franco’s request. Some 1700 people were killed or wounded. The study of a weeping woman, her mouth fixed in a silent scream of pain, is a motif to convey the plight of the Spanish people of the Basque region."
See it here
It strikes me that nothing much has changed in these 70 years - womem still have their mouths fixed in silent screams of pain. No that's not true, actually their screams are very audible, it's just that those in power and those with the guns and the bombs and the fixed ideas of what is right and what is wrong - mostly men - choose to have selective deafness over their suffering.
So this is how I feel about the endless images of suffering of women:
The Weeping Woman: Picasso, 1937
She’s wept for seventy years.
And with good cause, as nothing
has changed. Please, no more pictures
of howling women, iconic or otherwise!
Paint men instead, compassionate men,
and then she might just dry her eyes.
Index on Censorship to take pictures of her life in Baghdad.
See her pictures here
It is now 70 years since Picasso painted La femme qui pleure (Weeping Woman). The picture hangs in the Scottish Museum of Modern Art and the blurb on it states:
"This is one of Picasso’s most iconic images. It was created as one of the main studies for a huge mural commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. Picasso chose to focus on the horror of the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica, bombed at General Franco’s request. Some 1700 people were killed or wounded. The study of a weeping woman, her mouth fixed in a silent scream of pain, is a motif to convey the plight of the Spanish people of the Basque region."
See it here
It strikes me that nothing much has changed in these 70 years - womem still have their mouths fixed in silent screams of pain. No that's not true, actually their screams are very audible, it's just that those in power and those with the guns and the bombs and the fixed ideas of what is right and what is wrong - mostly men - choose to have selective deafness over their suffering.
So this is how I feel about the endless images of suffering of women:
The Weeping Woman: Picasso, 1937
She’s wept for seventy years.
And with good cause, as nothing
has changed. Please, no more pictures
of howling women, iconic or otherwise!
Paint men instead, compassionate men,
and then she might just dry her eyes.
posted by apprentice at
2:02 pm
3 Comments:
Well said.
Thanks for this post. Your quiet insistence against injustice is very effective.
Oh I'm just so mad at so many things right now. If you listen to the BBC World Service at the moment it makes you want to weep. The injustice in the world just now is awful, and set to get worse if we don't start looking for real solutions. Dafur and Zimbabwe in particular.
Bravo, Apprentice, and thank you for sharing Dima's pictures, they were so moving and remarkable, and sad and infuriating. So much to weep for.
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