image by
Donald Weber
Donald Weber didn´t help
the people being tortured
just right in front of him.
He was merely an observer.
He didn´t change the course of action.
He didn´t make things worse.
He didn´t make them better.
Neither will these photographs change anything.
They seldom do.
His project is nothing but an attempt to communicate
about what is happening
somewhere,
everywhere.
His photographs depict,
various victims,
and sometimes a part of the torturer:
a mouth shouting,
a hand prepared to beat,
and sometimes a gun threatening to be triggered.
Looking at the photographs,
I sense that I know this situation,
or a situation,
similar to the one in front of me.
As a child,
I was sometimes interrogated
by my parents
being known or suspected
of some culprit
mostly because of lying or
having pinched something.
Though my parents
didn´t fake an execution,
it still was sort of an execution.
And my memories come back,
of the terror I sensed.
My parents weren´t monsters.
They just didn´t know better.
It´s only a detail
of what they had learned about parenting.
I believe,
that there is an intuitive knowledge
in every human being
about the fundamentals of dealing with his fellows.
But the frames set by the groups we are part of,
the rules society is imposing on us,
are stronger
than this intuitive knowledge.
So we become heroes, and go off to wars,
trying to kill people we have never seen before.
And we
hit our children
because that is what we learned to do,
and we rip off our fellows
because money is what life is all about.
Those policemen
in Russia
and the Ukraine
are just doing their job
as they are expected to.
And they still do.
