“Untold Stories” in Brescia
November 2021
by: Jessica Montella
On the 12th of November, the fourth edition of the Peace Festival was inaugurated in the Italian city of Brescia. An initiative promoted by the Municipality and the Province, carried out by Roberto Cammarata, the President of the City Council since 2018. The Peace Festival is a series of meetings and cultural events of great importance that are taking place until the 28th of November.
On the evening of November 13, the official opening of the photo exhibition “Untold Stories” by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and National Geographic photographer Muhammed Muheisen took place.
The idea of the exhibition came to life from a group of young people from Miso Association, who managed to bring a photographer of the caliber of Muheisen to Italy for the first time.
The evening began with his opening speech at the San Carlino Theater where, in front of a really excited audience, he talked about his passion, photography, which became his work, which became a bridge connecting one world with another.
Muheisen is a Jordanian national who has been documenting conflicts and the daily life and the challenges of the ones caught in the middle of it, in particular, the living conditions of refugees. Over the years he has worked in many areas plagued by difficult situations such as: the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia, showing the world what is often censored by most of the media.
Through his photographs and with a disarming sensitivity and delicacy, Muheisen says that even in the midst of conflict, life goes on.
I am not a photography enthusiast, I must admit, and I have never followed a photographer closely but the photographs of this man have moved something inside me. I still remember one of the first photographs of him that I saw, by chance, scrolling on Instagram. He literally shocked me and I felt the need to look for something else and to become more and more interested in his work that I would not define only as “work” but as real messages.
During his speech, a sentence struck me a lot: “If something happened and was never documented, it is like it never occurred”. And it is true. Especially for those who, like me, like you, live on the lucky side of the globe.
We need images to believe. We need a certain amount of information to realize what is happening not so far away from us. We need people like Muheisen to break down the indifference that reigns supreme in our society. And it is also for this reason that his “clicks” focus more on children who, as the photographer himself says, cannot choose where to be born or the context in which to grow up and whose sufferings are inexcusable.
It is the looks of these children that strike us deeply. They have an overwhelming emotional power. They destabilize and destabilizing is precisely what these photographs should do to induce us to have a deeper look at fundamental issues such as those on human rights.
Muheisen not only has the merit of having an indisputable photographic sensitivity but also that of having an undeniable nobility of soul, in fact he is the founder of Everyday Refugees Foundation, which is responsible for documenting, educating and helping refugees, local communities and people affected by wars, poverty, natural disasters and discrimination. Here we no longer speak of “simple photography” but of finding, through a medium such as photography, reasons for existence and resistance in contexts of negativity.
Each photograph can cost him his life and each service inevitably changes his existence but the reason that drives him to pursue his mission is stronger and thanks to his photography, the reason has also reached many of us who, through his example, can be encouraged to be better people.
Maybe a photo is just a photo or maybe it is something more.
