In any war there are casualties, some of them civilian. When we start talking about war in the Levant and the Middle East, street-level military maneuvers are an everyday occurrence, and ordinary citizens are often lost in the clashes. There exists a subset of journalists who are compelled to cover the battles and the tragedy of their aftermath. Reuters visual journalist Issam Abdallah was one of these.
An exhibit of Abdallah’s work is being shown by The Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton. Exposed Transmissions: A Photographic Memoir From Issam Abdallah’s Lens, a collection of his images, opened Friday, August 2, and continues through August 17.
Abdallah began covering events in Lebanon in 2007, while he was still a university student. Initially employed as a freelancer by Reuters, he went on to fearlessly cover the civil war in Syria, the explosion at the harbor in Beirut, other conflicts across the region, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Abdallah was killed and several other journalists were severely wounded by Israeli Defense Forces tank-fire in southern Lebanon on October 13, 2023.
Chris Ayzoukian, executive director of The Reser, and Karen De Benedetti, the arts center’s programs manager and curator, brought this exhibit to Beaverton to show the breadth of Abdallah’s work.
“We’ve known about Issam’s work for a long time, and an opportunity came up through Reuters to license the images to bring them to life here,” said Ayzoukian. “Our mission is to always bring understanding and a deeper connection to the world through the arts. We saw this as a way to showcase humanity in distress and to show the resilience of humanity.
“We also wanted to align this with our mission and combine it with our extremely popular International Night Market event that is going to happen on August 17th. We thought this was an opportune time to present his work and this commentary on how we are all one. You look at these images, they are all people in their everyday lives, just trying to make some joy happen in the face of some disastrous circumstances.”
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While Abdallah was primarily a visual journalist covering conflicts all over the world, including the perpetual conflicts in his home region, the images chosen for this showing were far more joyous than one would expect, and the decidedly apolitical nature of content and context of the images was the result of much thought by The Reser’s curator.
“I think it was a very conscious choice,” De Benedetti said. “His work was about so much more than just what he covered predominantly in his career. His talent was really about capturing that human spirit.” She pointed out some very specific photos: “In this one, it is just him and his cat. I hear he was such an animal person that when he was on assignment, he would actually carry dog and cat food in the pouch on his motorcycle, because he wanted to make sure that the animals were fed.”
De Benedetti elaborated further:
“There is joy in these pictures. There are challenges as well, to be sure. It’s not a show about a war or a continuing war, it is about showing a very small selection of his short life and his work.”
Abdallah’s work was licensed to The Reser with the expectation that no image would be explicitly reproduced, so while it is possible to show them on the gallery walls and to describe them with some detail, you will have to go see them to feel the impact yourself.
Here goes nothing.
— In one photo a Lebanese couple, whose daughter was killed in the 2020 Beirut Harbor explosion, held up their index fingers, covered in ink. In Lebanon, voting is done by fingerprint, so everyone leaving the polling places looks like this. This image, full of hope, the symbolism of their darkened fingers letting their fellow citizens know that they had done their duty to make their country a better place, was juxtaposed with the next images: the flames of the explosion and the aftermath of the catastrophe that killed their child. Wrecked concrete silos and port buildings, crumbling into the Levantine Sea.
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— A mother cradling her newborn child.
— Women and children, scrambling up a rocky slope, the families of ISIS fighters getting ready to surrender near the border of Iraq and Syria, discarded belongings covering the mountain path behind them.
— An exhausted man, asleep on an antique Ottoman-era sofa on some Lebanese side street mid-quarantine, is a reminder of the fatigue we all felt during the COVID 19 epidemic.
— Children in Syria, fingers clutching a chain link fence.
— A Lebanese soldier, giving first aid to a preteen child tear-gassed during economic protests in Beirut.
— The lush green fields of the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, an ancient agricultural region rimmed by snow-capped mountains. The pastoral nature of the area seems far removed from the conflicts to the west.
— Two sisters, one partially paralyzed by the explosion at the harbor, holding hands in a hospital room.
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So many mixed emotions come into play while viewing images like these. If you see them and experience anger, you would be right. Some sadness — correct again. A sudden burst of happiness while looking at Abdallah with his favorite kitten — bingo. Do you need to see them to feel this way? No, but the full impact of the imagery is not available to those who do not.
“This is not a commentary on war, and we were very conscious of that,” Ayzoukian said. “When we look at our role as an art center, I like to think of us as an inlet into connection and understanding. We are here to soften things up, so people really see each other’s humanity. We are perpetual optimists. The world is so polarized right now, and we see this world in a positive way and really hope that no one is so fixed in their positions.”
Oregon ArtsWatch photographer and writer Joe Cantrell spent decades abroad, first as a soldier and then as a foreign correspondent. The first paragraph of this piece mentioned a specific subset of journalists who are compelled to cover this material. Cantrell is one of them.
“My two tours in Vietnam, for which I volunteered out of what I quickly came to realize was deluded idealistic patriotism, left me an emotional total wreck,” he said. “There was no home to return to, but I had 10 years’ experience in photography, I tried to make up for some of what I had done, what my country continued (and continues) to do. Industrial war from which corporations profit and humans pay the ultimate price.
“I spent the next 15 years across Asia, trying to make right as I could. ‘Don’t tell me this doesn’t exist, I put the pictures in the world’s top news publications. Look! It is your responsibility to LOOK!’
“I became more familiar with the cultures I was among than most foreigners; did not live like an expatriate. I humbly asked my host cultures to teach me how it was that they had so little material wealth, but interpersonal relationships sustained them, buoyed them, brought laughter in situations where I had been conditioned to feel negativity. It was a perspective I dearly wish more Americans could or would share.”
Cantrell continued, sharing his very personal reaction to the exhibit:
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“The opening at the gallery Friday night was existential testament to The Reser’s mission as a cultural pillar, not always showing aesthetically pleasing art, although beauty abounds, but this time, profound communication about Issam Abdallah, a good man, a dedicated, talented, humanistic photojournalist choosing to cover war and its attendant trauma in his home, Lebanon. His compassion and concern manifest in all the work shown; his courage was the plasma that carried it.”
Having someone present whose lived experience parallels that of Abdallah gave valuable insight into the mindset of those who choose to spend their professional lives covering the entire range of human interaction. Whether good or bad, these events must be covered, and we should hope that the people taking these timeless photographs choose to see the beauty, resilience and commonality of the human experience in the manner Abdallah did.
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Exposed Transmissions: A Photographic Memoir From Issam Abdallah’s Lens runs through August 17 at 12695 SW Crescent St. Ste. 120, Beaverton, next door to the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.
