I am shooting a ballet rehearsal at LINES. Beautiful people doing beautiful things. It’s all very controlled, very precise. Art with a capital A.
Then I walk outside.
City Hall steps are packed. West Coast March for Gaza. Thousands of people, and they’re pissed. Not the polite, NPR-liberal kind of protest. This is urgent. Raw. The kind of anger that shuts down ports at 5 a.m., which is exactly what happened the day before in Oakland, longshore workers honoring picket lines, refusing to load weapons bound for Israel.
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The whiplash is immediate and uncomfortable. Five minutes ago I’m documenting dancers perfecting their craft in the Old Fellows Building. Now I’m in the middle of people screaming about genocide. Day 100 of the assault. Twenty-four thousand dead. The numbers don’t lie, even when we wish they would.
You can’t ignore the contrast. The aesthetics of ballet, all that refinement, that pursuit of perfection, and then this messy, necessary chaos of democracy. Both are performance, in a way. Both demand to be seen.
The light was perfect, which feels almost obscene to mention. The light doesn’t care about your moral crisis or your complicity or the fact that you’re standing there trying to figure out how to photograph grief without exploiting it.
I was in that studio because someone was paying me. I was on those steps because I couldn’t walk away. That’s not Nobel. It’s just paying attention. Barely.
You document what’s in front of you. Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s rage. Sometimes it’s both, and you don’t get to choose.
It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don’t remember marvelling at sunset or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival does not allow time for poetic reflection.
Izzeldin Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
West Coast March for Gaza
Sunday, January 14
San Francisco Civic Center Plaza