Kadir van Lohuizen: Being witness for bearing witness

Its more then a year ago since Israel attacked Gaza. I have been there just after the war and met the Abed Raboo family, they lost everything. Now I am back more then a year later, I am very happy to see them and they are happy to see me. But their situation is the same; they still live next to the rubble of their former house.

There is no aid and Israel doesn't allow building materials to enter Gaza. The water is being cut, so the family receives water from a truck. Where I am is so close, that I see in the near distance the Israeli villages, surrounded with green land, which is being irrigated.
March 2010

Drowned land, its cold, very cold in Bangladesh, especially if you only wear a Sari. I am arriving with a small boat in the early morning, I feel lost in this world at the same time it reminds me so much of Holland; flat, everywhere water. I am climbing the embankment, it is very slippery with the wet riverclay. I don't have boots and almost lose my shoes.

Till two years ago this was all agricultural land, then cyclone Aila arrived, unannounced. There was hardly any wind, just a big wave. Cyclones are nothing new for bangladesh. What is new is that the water doesn't recede, the sea is rising, so are the rivers due to the fast melting of the glaciers in the Himalaya's.
Now mother and son live on a small island, surrounded by water. They are two of the millions of climate refugees in Bangladesh.
January 2011

At 3am at night a hundred Iraqi and American special forces attack the house in Tal Afar, a city in the north of Iraq not far from Mosul. Its pitch dark, no streetlights, no moon. I borrowed a night vision binocular from one of the soldiers. I need it to find my way and I need it to shot pictures through it. It looks graphic.

The forces are looking for a man they suspect to produce carbombs and IED's (improvised explosive devices). I am embedded with the special forces, it feels like being in a cocoon. My only contact with ordinary Iraqi's is that night. Children cry, women scream, I feel uncomfortable, I am being seen as part of the enemy. The man is arrested and taken, he will probably won't come home for a long time.
February 2011

How to imagine the end of the world? Where the land ends and the seas continue, where the weather is rough and getting colder and colder. There is this last village in the southern hemisphere. They call it Puerto Toro, the port of the bull. To get there is not easy; only once a month a ferry serves the town and of course the departure that just passed.

For once the navy is my savior, they take me on their routine visit to the area. Walking to the pier its cold and the first snow has painted the hills white, but otherwise its sunny and no wind, not what I imagined being just north of Cape Horn. After a few hours I see red roofs and a few houses painted in different colors. The navy ship is too big to dock at the pier, so they have to anchor and drop me with the dingy at the pier. A constant noise of an engine fills my ears, the generator provides electricity to the sixteen families who live here: some fishermen and some police. Once it was the lands of the indigenous Yagan, but very few remain and none in Puerto Toro.
On my way out is to my surprise the pier full of boats, they are from the region and came to rest for a few hours. With ropes around their bodies they walk towards me, they look rougher then the weather today.

A bus is something weird. Its intimate because you travel, often for a long time with strangers, you see their habits, you have eye contact, or you get annoyed by someone. You are locked in this container with windows for hours.

You watch and observe and that is definitely what I do as a photographer. Sometimes I ask permission sometimes I don’t. Usually I feel if someone agrees or not. My camera is rarely hidden so it doesn’t take people by surprise’. Eye contact often does the trick. This time my subjects are sleeping and I figure that is okay to take their image.
The sun is just rising over the mountains and the air is thin; I am approaching the Chilean - Bolivian border, which is at 4200 metres. Its rare that you can take an image where you see the landscape and the people in the bus. Usually its bright outside and dark inside.
It is a decisive moment which shows the silence and the tranquility in the bus. Passengers with their own thoughts. Where are they going? To another country, just to visit or are they leaving for good and thinking who they left behind.

Where am I? It looks like Siberia, everything is white, no it must be the Carribean, colors ranging from deep blue to green. Often the landscape fits where you are or think you are. This time I am confused.

My breath is going fast, the air is thin, so I must be at a very high altitude. The sun burns, but in the shade its cold.
Sometimes you think you are a witness because you are there and then you doubt what you witness is real...… Human intervention can make you confused.
I am on the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt lake in the world, but the opening of the first lithium mine, changed the landscape.

How must it be when your mum tells you that they she has to move to another country to work and earn money. You ask: ‘why you leave me? You don’t love me anymore? Who can I tell my secrets to?
She replies: ‘of course I love you, but I have to earn money so you can study and that you will have a future.’
She really left, all the way from our small village Chiquitoy in Northern Peru, to Santiago to works as a maid in a Chilean household.

There she stands, a lonely tree in a forest of concrete. She seems healthy though, full of leaves. Its surprising because the greater urban area of Bogota, Colombia, is known for its pollution. Actually the tree is officially not in Bogota, but in the city of Soacha, which is another department. For me its Bogota, I just see an endless sprawling city.

Although the conflict in Colombia maybe less intense than a few years back, Colombia still hosts world’s largest (internal) refugee population. No one knows how many, but its millions.
People who witnessed atrocities, witnessed losing their belongings and have to deal with a situation where they have to rebuild their lives in another place, unknown to them.
The tree has witnessed it all; it witnessed violence and people coming and going, but it is called the tree of love. ‘Because so many children have been produced under it’, tells a ‘local’ refugee me, who has been living there for years now. Still hoping to witness the day that peace arrives to Colombia.