Bureaucrats - israeli, palestinian and foreign officials in peacemaking

The actors

> Photo & slideshow: Alban Biaussat
> Support: London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London

Expectations

A series of 35 photographs portraying mostly government staff members, taken on location in their respective office and involved daily in administering concrete conflict-related issues.

Presentation / analysis
Visual production
Diffusion

The context

In most instances, images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have depicted destructions, political activities, and violent human relationships, focusing on news or documenting anecdotic situations. Media coverage and analyses often respond to the problematic of the moment, and consider how macro-political entities and individual leaders interact.

Series of 35 photo portraits of Israeli, Palestinian and foreign officials involved in managing the peace process in Israel-Palestine, edited as a slideshow with recorded audio interviews. A document that testifies about personal motivations of these expert staff, beyond the usual diplomatic and media representations of a conflict entrenched in the contradictions of its actors.

This project, produced in 2007, focuses on civil servants, as well as some military personnel and civil activists, on the Israeli and Palestinian sides, as well as among the international community operating locally. As such, it depicts the more realistic, less glamorous, drier and more concrete professional aspects of the conflict, mitigated by these people’s individuality and demonstrates a reality usually not seen. Indirectly, it looks at the local heavy administrative machinery tasked to implement official policies.

Available as a multimedia piece, mixing still portraits and edited audio from recorded interviews, this work can be shown on a computer screen or projected on a wall, although the main concept is to organise an installation reproducing an office in a gallery context. The idea is to build a space where the viewers could consult the work sitting at a desk with various elements of stationary onto it. They could thus look at the prints organized in separate binders by nationality, and watch the slideshow on a computer while listening to the audio using an old telephone linked to the computer like a headphone.

Bureaucrats: Israeli, Palestinian & foreign officials in peacemaking from Collateral Creations on Vimeo.

Shot in the summer 2007 over two months, and based on the photographer’s expertise in the region and facilitated access to key players, this project presents 35 portraits of peace officials and ancillaries in their workplace.