Capturing the reality of war from behind the front lines
- Text by Eva Clifford
- Photography by Meinrad Schade
Started in 2003, War Without War is an ongoing project by Swiss photographer Meinrad Schade exploring war behind the front lines. So far, the project has taken him to places such as Nagorno Karabakh, Chechnya and Ukraine, where the traces of war still pervade daily life. Unresolved is just one of many chapters of the larger project, and focuses on Israel/Palestine – but through “new eyes”.
“In contrast to classical war photography, I am concerned with sites that are at various distances from war, both temporally and geographically,” says Schade. “Rather than focusing on the actual events of war, I am interested in how a conflict becomes visible in everyday life.”
“It’s about before, after and besides the war,” he adds. “What’s interesting here, is that every two to three years there’s an eruption, like the Gaza war, so it’s always either ‘before’ or ‘after’. You can say these pictures are after the 2014 war, but they are also before the next war starts.”
When asked what it is about the sidelines that interests him, Schade says: “I think it’s a problem of journalism sometimes where people think they have to be there because there’s something happening, while we often don’t know what’s happening in the background.”
In one photo we see a mass of black military boots at an abandoned army base; in another, two coffins of suicide bombers sit side by side in a funeral ceremony held 12 years after they detonated themselves; another image shows a man sitting on the remains of war-torn buildings in Gaza harbour on a warm evening.
“The most challenging part was to find new pictures,” says Schade. “It’s one of most photographed conflicts in the world, so to find and figure out what kind of pictures to take was hard.”
For the photographer, it was also important to show both sides. “There was always this change because I was based in Bethlehem in Palestine, very close to Jerusalem,” he says, “and then one day I went to Israel, for example, to shoot army training tests. Afterwards, I returned to Palestine and read in the news that a Palestinian was shot during demonstrations. And so there was always this switch between the two realities, which was a difficult adjustment.”
The book Unresolved is available now. For more of Meinrad Schade’s work check out his official website.
Schade was one of the exhibiting photographers at Kolga Tbilisi Photo Week, which takes place each May in the Georgian capital.
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