…Cody and I set off to southern Lebanon over smashed bridges, round vast bomb craters, beating the earth down to allow Hassan’s “Death Car” to drive over them, trying to avoid the thousands of unexploded shells lying in the fields. So many bombs on the Litani that the river has partly changed its course and we walk into the water. We drive to Srifa, a village which clearly was – heaven preserve us from these clichés – a Hizbollah “stronghold”, but whose ruins now cover dozens of civilian dead. I am photographing the wreckage – using real film because I still feel that digital cameras lose definition – and I find that I see through the lens more pain than I see with my own eyes. I think this is because the sheer extent of the bomb damage is focused in a frame. Later, I look at my developed pictures in Beirut and am appalled by the level of destruction. Some of my pictures look like the photographs of French villages after German bombardment during my dad’s First World War. They will find 36 bodies under the Srifa rubble upon which I have walked.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14624.htm“>independent.co.uk

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