OPENING UP THE CLOSED SOCIETIES
Bern to Algiers, throught a photographer's lens
By Laura Colby
International Herald Tribune
August 5, 1995 |
PARIS - Michael von Graffenried is discussing one of his favorite subjects : the closed society, and in particular the one from which he came - Switzerland.
" We don't want to know about outside world, " he says. " We don't like the outside world. Can you believe that Switzerland is still not a member if the United Nations ? Three times we voted against it. "
Von Graffenried, who at 38 has traveled the globe as a photojournalist, hardly fits thr Swiss mold - he even shows up late for an appointment. But he has made his specielity taking pictures of closed societies - be they in his native Bern, or in Havana or Algiers.
His latest venture was to Sudan, where he photographed the warring factions - Christian versus Muslim - in the national civil war. The result was a book, " Sudan, " published this spring by Edition Falguière in Paris and Benteli Verlag in Switzerland, and an exhibition that is on view until Aug. 28 at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and will be traveling to the FNAC book-shops in Paris and elsewhere in France starting in September.
In the Islamic north, young women in ankle-length robes train to use assault rifles, then are sent into combat in front of the male government troops, and are promised a life in Paradise if they are struck down by a mine or a enemy bullet.
Von Graffenried captures their youthful determination, and the tragic incongruity of their exercises ; they look like uniformed schoolgirls rather than soldiers.
In the Christian and animistic south, youth is similary wasted. Young boy who once got a cow for their 13th birthdays now receive rifles and are sent to fight government troops. Von Graffenried captures them brandishing their guns in a war-like parade, then juxtaposes the picture with one of men from the same tribe in traditional garb, brandishing spears in a traditional dance.
Since early in his career, such juxtapositions earned him praise - and more than a handful of destractors who disliked seeing their national icons made fun of.
" I don't like landscape without people, or at least signs of people in them, " he says. " My ideal Swiss landscape would be one with the mountains and also a nuclear-power plant."
Born in Bern to a well to do family of lawyers, von Graffenried hated school. He took up photography, in part, he says, because it allowed him to remain outdoors rather than be cooped up in a schoolroom. He skipped art school and taught himself photographic technique. His first book was a collection of portraits of shopkeepers and other denizens of Bern.
Next von Graffenried tackled his country's Parliament, with a series of less than flattering pictures that earned the ire of his colleagues. His books "Swiss People" and "Swiss Images" document with often comic overtones the antics of his countrymen. At a nudist colony, an aged man plays the alpenhorn; at a Swiss dairy farm, a cow peers into an ultramodern computer room; solars cars race race past a horse-drawn cart in an Alpine village.
The photos began to earn him notoriety outside Switzerland; he had shows in New York, Paris and Cologne, and traveled to india, the Baltic states, Asia and Latin America.
He hesitated between New York and Paris when seeking a base from which to work. He chose Paris, in part, because of its proximity to Switzerland and his family and in part because "Paris is very good for disorganized people, like me. There's a real laissez-faire attitude. It's also the world capital of photojournalisme."
Although von Graffenried steers clear of the heavily covered news events - "in Rwanda a few months ago there was nothing but dead bodies and photographers" - he still considers himself a photojournalist, rather than an artist in the mold of Robert Frank, a fellow Swiss.
Von Graffenried became interested in Algeria after being invited to show his photographs in an exhibition organized by the Swiss Embassy there. Von Graffenried arranged to have Algerian photographers show their work at the same time, and held workshops for some of them. As a result, he forged friendships that allowed him to view a side of Algerian society rarely seen outside the country. A book of photos, called "The Broken Dream of Democracy," was published and an exhibit of his pictures from Algeria recently closed at the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum.
These shows lovers stealing a moment of privacy on the beach, she in head scarf, he stripped to the waist, a toddler swathed in a black chador; the lines of sober-looking young men lined up for bread at an Algiers bakery; the funeral of President Mohammed Boudiaf, assassinated in 1992.
"We know communism doesn't work. And sometimes democracy is too sophisticated," he says. The Islamic fundamentalists think they have found a third way to Utopia, he says. "I think this will be one of the big themes in the future, the creation of Islamic republics," he says.
Fascinated in particular by many Algerians' dream of creating an Islamic republic, he visited other Middle Eastern countries, including Syria and Lebanon.
Von Graffenried was particulary interested in Sudan, however, because it is often cited by pro-Islamic Algerians as a model of a fully operative Islamic state.
What he found was less than Utopian, however. His book filled with portraits of holloweyed child soldiers, is a moving testament to the tragedy of a country wracked by civil war. |
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