Continuing its battle against violation of human rights across the globe, the Indian chapter of Amnesty International India (AII) has come out with a book ‘Art as Witness' (Tulika Books/Rs.950) jointly edited by Parthiv Shah and Sana Das. Since its part of AII's ‘Art for Activism' project, the creative tools of photography and writing come to AII's aid and cast a gaze at the blatant abuse of human rights taking place in India and its neighbouring countries. The result is more than 100 photographs and articles contributed by photographers and writers/activists/lawyers from Bangladesh, India, Iran, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan and the U.S.
Parthiv, who has co-edited the book with Sana, has selected some telling images captured by Sonia Jabbar, Daniel Pepper, Sara Rahbar, Shahidul Alam, Harikrishna Katragadda, Suvendu Chatterjee and others. The photographer's own work, ‘Barbed Wires and Beautiful Skies' from his series on Kashmir also figures in the book and on its cover. “My work in the book is about our landscape getting violated by things like barbed wire, ubiquitous security personnel, bunkers, policemen,” says Parthiv adding that the idea was not to sensationalise the issue by including disturbing images. “Nobody likes to see gory pictures. The aim was to elicit a response from say a person who is hardly concerned about human rights or a college going boy or girl.”
He points out the similarities in the concerns reflected in the photographs. The photographers are reacting to the issues of child labour, death penalty, rape, custodial killings that are not confined to one society or a country alone any longer. Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul's work on the life of Nurjahan done in the mid-90s stands out in this context. Nurjahan, belonging to a peasant family in the village of Chattokchara, Bangladesh, killed herself after being condemned to stoning because she remarried a man after her husband left her. His photographs of Nurjahan's old father standing right at the place where he found her dead body, appear in the book.
“While Alam is a photo-journalist who follows a particular story, there are those as well who work in the realm of constructed photography like Iranian photographer Sara Rahbar,” tells Parthiv. American photographer Daniel Pepper presents vignettes of life from Myanmar, the country which has been under military rule since 1962, whereas Shahzad Noorani's picture of small kids “completely black but smiling” draws attention to the burning issue of child labour in Bangladesh. “They are black because they work in a coal mine,” says Parthiv.
