Palestinian war photographer Motaz Azaiza said he had gone from “beauty maker to taking picture of destruction” in a tearful speech in London at an event marking the 1948 Nakba.

“I used to be the photographer of the beauty of Gaza,” Azaiza told a packed hall on Wednesday.

“I was always fighting to make beautiful pictures of my home town.”

He became known on social media for his daily reporting of the war, and left Gaza in February for treatment.

“I lost the people that I captured in my pictures, lots of places I used to hang out there and take pictures there, I lost my access to my city, I lost the days I spent in my home,” Azaiza said.

He recalled how, before the war, he would gather stories of the Nakba from those in Gaza’s refugee camps who remembered it, and wish he’d been there at the time to photograph it.

‘“The second Nakba I’ve been old enough to witness. There are times I wish I didn’t,” Azaiza said of the war in Gaza.

“I was a beauty maker, and now I’m a photographer of destruction. I thank God for one thing, that he used me in a good way, to serve my home and my country.

“I wish the day will come to reach a free Palestine.”

Hundreds had gathered at Westminster Central Hall, outside the Houses of Parliament, to hear stories from poets and writers about the 1948 Nakba – in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out after the establishment of the state of Israel – and voices from the war in Gaza.

Many in the audience were British Palestinians, descendants of those displaced in 1948, who came wearing traditional embroidered fabrics and their keffiyehs across their shoulders.

They were joined by Arab diplomats and UK politicians at the event, which was hosted by the Palestinian Mission to the UK and the Council of Arab Ambassadors.

Singer Rola Azar sang songs in a code language that mothers created to communicate with their sons outside Israeli prisons.

Writers gave readings on Gaza written by Palestinians who currently live there. Oud player Adnan Joubran described Palestinians as “survivors” and played music for “healing.”

Aymen Odeh, the Israeli politician of Palestinian origin, praised the large turnout at the event.

Mr Odeh said it was a call to the British government to recognise its historical responsibility for the Nakba and bring an end to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, and make the two-state solution a reality.

“It is a resounding ethical declaration against the war on Gaza, and for the end of injustice against the Palestinian people and the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he said.

“There is only one way to achieve democracy and security and justice and live in peace.

“Every child, including Palestinian children, has the right to live in safety of peace within a sovereign, democratic state.

“The only solution is to respect the national rights of both peoples and to live in peace, stability and security.

“Some are stuck in a culture of death, but we insist on promoting a culture of dignified life for all brothers and sisters … standing on the right side of history.”

The Israeli government knew of the awakening “conscience” of younger generations of Jewish Israelis, and sought to suppress lessons of the Nakba for that reason.

Yet the stories of the Nakba had lived on among Palestinians, who would continue to tell them over generations.

“We know all the stories of the Nakba against our people from our parents,” Mr Odeh said.

Israel was revealing its true intentions behind the 1948 Nakba with the Gaza war, said Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Secretary General of the Arab League, which he described as “ethnic cleansing”.

Dr Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s envoy to the UK, recalled his childhood in a refugee camp in Gaza, and how he quarrelled with his grandfather, who escaped the Nakba.

“I always questioned my grandfather’s decision to leave in 1948,” Dr Zomlot said.

“‘Why?’ I would ask him angrily at times. We had homes, we had farms. Life was different.

“I was resentful for years, but now seven months into a genocide that has killed and maimed more than 100,000 Palestinian people so far, and as Israeli tanks roll into Rafah, the city of my birth, I not only understand my late grandfather, I ask his forgiveness for not realising soon enough.”

Sir Alan Duncan, a former Conservative MP, condemned the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and called on the UN to recognise the state of Palestine.

“International law is international law, you cannot just pick and choose the rules you wish to obey and ignore the ones you don’t,” Sir Alan said.

“Israel cannot call itself a democracy unless it behaves like one. Democracy is not just about elections, it’s about everything else that goes with them.

“Democracy does not permit a majority group to systematically oppress a minority.”

Another witness to the war in Gaza was British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, who spent the first two months of the war there treating the injured,.

Dr Abu Sitta received a standing ovation as he came on stage to talk about Israeli attacks on the Palestinian healthcare system.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society, he said, was one of the first medical organisations to become part of a liberation movement, thanks to the resilience of its Palestinian doctors.

“People identified the provision of health, the provision of life, as part of their resistance to the world of death, that Zionism and its erasure of the Palestinians wanted,” Dr Abu Sittah said.

Updated: May 16, 2024, 6:25 AM

Jacob H. Ford of Monongahela will exhibit his photographs this weekend at the Frank L. Melega Art Museum in Brownsville.

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This show of official royal portrait photography – the first exhibition at the newly renamed King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace – could have been so stilted, yet isn’t. The secret of its success? It takes the photographers as seriously as their high-born sitters, and traces the trajectory of a medium over the past century, as immaculate soft-focus effects, achieved within the studio by practitioners with first names such as Bertram and Olive, gave way to something more intimate and informal.

Of course, Royal Portraits – which includes, among 160 vintage prints, several unseen images – is awash with glamour and familiar faces: how could an exhibition containing dozens of shots by Cecil Beaton be anything but? Its early sections are a numinous, natty haze of tulle and taffeta gowns, fur stoles, and peaked lapels; later, Princess Margaret – sometimes bare-shouldered, always brilliant-eyed – displays a film star’s smouldering poise. Likewise, Princess Diana, who appears three times: once, in playful maternal mode; twice, flirtatiously close-up. (Queen Camilla pops up in four photographs.)

It takes the King a little longer to demonstrate such ease in front of the camera. A double portrait by Beaton captures him as a chubby boy sitting beneath his angular father, who dwarfs him; delicately, a label refers to the “paternal dynamic”. Nearby, in a portrait released to mark his 18th birthday, he comes across as sweet but gawky.

Nadav Kander’s monumental headshot, though, commissioned by Time in 2013, and prominently displayed against a cardinal-red wall in the final room, is a persuasive vision of modern monarchy. In it, Charles (then still the Prince of Wales) appears considerably brisker and more at ease than he does in Jonathan Yeo’s painted likeness of him as a doddery regimental colonel drenched by a tropical crimson storm, unveiled earlier this week. Deftly, Kander ensures that his subject’s shirt, tie, buttonhole, and silvery hair all echo, and so enhance, his glittery grey-blue gaze.

Yet, the exhibition’s interest in photographers and their craft – its art-historical chops, in other words – also deserves respect. The curator, Alessandro Nasini, is mindful that photographs are objects with tangible properties, and finds room for unusual exhibits, such as a touched-up dry plate negative or a solarised print of Princess Elizabeth. Labels are rarely sycophantic, but point out subtle material details, such as the way that textured paper can give a print a “velvet-like quality”, or the fact that the “diamond dust” supposedly embellishing Andy Warhol’s screenprint of Elizabeth II is really “fine particles of crushed glass”. Blue squiggles overlaying the Queen’s face in Warhol’s image recall red annotations by Lord Snowdon indicating areas for retouching on a nearby proof of Princess Margaret. Celebrity is an artful construction.

By Connie Rusk For Mailonline

Published: 18:56 EDT, 15 May 2024 | Updated: 18:57 EDT, 15 May 2024

The McCartneys gathered to support Elton John and his husband David Furnish at the launch of their photography exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

It was a family affair as Sir Paul, 81, and daughters Stella, 52, and Mary, 54, gathered on Tuesday to take a look at the singer’s impressive collection at the private viewing and VIP dinner. 

The exhibition, named Fragile Beauty, includes more than 300 pieces by 140 photographers selected from their vast library of photographs. 

Elton, 77, put on an animated display as he posed for a photo with Sir Paul, Stella and Mary. 

Having earlier worn a bright pink suit and jazzy shades, the Your Song hitmaker changed into a burgundy suit. 

Sir Paul proudly posed with four portrait photos of The Beatles, with the photograph of him taken decades ago at the band’s height of fame. 

Other stars taking a look at the exhibition included Nick Grimshaw, actor Russell Tovey and Simon Cowell’s ex Jackie St Clair. 

Covering the period from 1950 to the present day, they include iconic fashion shots by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Herb Ritts, portraits of stars including The Beatles, Frank Sinatra Marilyn Monroe and Chet Baker. 

There is also photojournalism capturing moments in history, from the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s to 1980s AIDS activism and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Newell Harbin, director of the couple´s collection, agreed that the sheer scale of the show is ‘a lot.’

‘It´s a little bit overwhelming sometimes, but it´s just wonderful,’ she said at the preview on Wednesday.

The exhibition is entitled Fragile Beauty, a name chosen by Elton that reflects his ethos, said curator Duncan Forbes, the museum´s head of photography.

The exhibition opens with elegant fashion photos from the 1950s, then gets into edgier territory with work by chroniclers of outcasts and rebels such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, both artists John has collected extensively.

Many of the greats from seven decades of photography are represented, from Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson and Robert Franck to Wolfgang Tillmans, Cindy Sherman and Ai Weiwei.

Elton began collecting photographs after getting sober in the 1990s – he later said he replaced alcohol with “a much healthier addiction.” 

The singer and David, 61, have assembled one of the largest photo collections in private hands, amounting to more than 7,000 works.

They frequently loan photos for exhibitions, including some 200 for a Tate Modern show in 2016 that focused on black-and-white photographs from the early decades of the medium.

Fragile Beauty runs at the V&A from Saturday until January 5, 2025.  

After midnight, when the streets are empty and the houses dark, even the softest of rustles can seem unbearably intense. That is the feeling conveyed by the beautiful exhibition of photography at Luhring Augustine gallery, on view until June 8. It encompasses the work of seven artists, who span generations, genders, and ethnicities, each in their own way reticent and inscrutable, some stirringly so. Unlike many recent shows, in Tiptoeing Through the Kitchen, no intellectual scaffolding demands dismantling, and it leaves the omnipresence of digital technology out of discussion. Instead, it focuses on intimate personal revelations, but only in bits and pieces—the sort of wounded, whispered half-words that simmer with tension.

The young Brooklyn-based photographer Shaun Pierson emerges as the star of the group. His most potent portraits involve men old enough to be his grandfather. In this show, a work features one of them kneeling down and turning the camera back on Pierson, who reclines nude on a draped table. Propped up on his right elbow, he echoes a bushy-browed, mustachioed Olympia. A few test shots line the wall behind him, each pointing to a different part of his body. The work, like Manet’s 1863 masterpiece, straddles a divide between explicit eroticism and a kind of raunchy sexlessness. The result is striking if uneasy.

Left: Shaun Pierson, Untitled (Model), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Right: Sheida Soleimani, Remorse, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Edel Assanti, London, and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Equally weird, but more kitschy, is the work of the Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani. Her abundant use of toy-like sceneries and props gives her tableaux a comically deadpan drama. A tremendous portrait shows two elders whose faces are obscured by paper cutouts, one playing the role of patient, the other her doctor. Then there is a zany shot of three baby birds trampling one another for a single berry fed from a tweezer, followed by a picture of a raven lying stiffly on its back, a walnut in its beak. A possible paradox unfolds about old age as a second childhood, but also the infantilizing nature of elderly care.

Much of the work grapples with photography’s possibilities for ambiguity and obfuscation. To that end, there is no escaping the names Wolfgang Tillmans, Adrienne Salinger, and Collier Schorr, whose influences loom large in this show. They popularized, if not pioneered, a resistance to narrative, evading our attempts to make sense where there is none. Less obviously, but just as radically, they rejected and subverted obvious beauty. To most eyes their work has turned prettier over time, as with the bulk of left-field ideas that are now part of mainstream aesthetics. Their images give the appearance of rawness, but they impart very little personally and emotionally, often teetering on the edge of disclosure and yet, in the end, withholding. Tiptoeing sees a continuation of that style, but not without plenty of the idiosyncrasies necessary to make such desolation sing.

Kevin Landers, a veteran photographer in New York City, captures moments that are so apparently banal they become invisible to most of us. Here are loosened cobwebs, crochet blankets hanging out to dry on a clothesline, shopping carts filled with blow molds of animals and saints. We’re never sure what we’re looking at because the photos are, on the one hand, stirring in their quietness; on the other, they feel strange, distant, and out of context. That sense of displacement, physical and psychological, also drives a group of collages by the Mexican artist Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez. For the show he cuts out rectangles from the middle of his own seemingly random snapshots and then fills in the gaps with photographs he purchased from a bookshop in Mexico City, creating a portal to the world of another man. Somewhere in between a kind of wistful longing arises.

Left: Sophia Chai, ㅗ(0927-01), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Right: Brittany Nelson, Face on Mars, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, PATRON, Chicago, and Luhring Augustine, New York.

The exhibition also looks at photography that involves some degree of abstraction. Take, for example, the work of Sophia Chai, a Rochester-based artist who was born in South Korea but immigrated to New York City at the age of 14. What appear to us as no more than thin wobbly stripes are actually closeups of letters from the Korean alphabet that she has painted on the walls and floor of her studio. In that process, the characters drift in and out of meaning. Part remembered, part forgotten, they are beautiful.

Memory also inflects the great work of William Eric Brown, who was born in Argentina and lives in New York City. A series of intersecting lines in graphite, like a murmur, run through pictures of calving icebergs and glaciers that the artist’s father took in Antarctica while serving in the U.S. Navy in the 1950s. Similarly, Brittany Nelson turns found or archival images into something more brooding and more of a mystery. Like much else in the show, the appeal of her grainy, black-and-white prints lies in their obscurity. We see a mask, dry, dusty lands, lights that pulse and flutter like the fins of a goldfish. And we hear silences sizzle and lead their refrains down dead ends.

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