Mats Svensson is a photographer who took 60,000 photos in the occupied Palestinian territories over several years and winnowed them down to the 92 perceptive, nuanced, and ultimately heart-rending images in this volume. Svenssons photos are accompanied by pithy and surprising commentary from a wide variety of Palestinian and Israeli figures as well as international voices from Barack Obama and George W Bush to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Svensson documents Palestinian street scenes, conveying the mannerisms and customs of daily life, as did the humanist photographer Cartier Bresson. Svensson does not display the blood and gore of conflict, yet he shows its precursors and its aftermath in photos that, taken together, are as charged as the war photos of Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan. Svensson shows us occupation, expropriation, arrest, and immense concrete barriers encroaching on daily life and asks us to come to our own conclusions. Americans will recognize this use of photos and words in the long tradition of politically committed photojournalists such as Walker Evans and James Agee who depicted the dispossessed of the earth in the American south at the depths of the Great Depression in their classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
"Mats Svensson is a Swedish author, photographer, diplomat, and teacher, who has a masters degree in Social Sciences and has been a development worker since 1974. Between 1974 and 1988 he worked for several NGOs and international consultancies, and since 1988 for the Swedish Government. He has worked for longer periods in CongoBrazzaville, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the occupied Palestinian territory, and Zambia, as well as shorter periods in Malawi, South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. Mats Svenssons book, Crimes, Victims and WitnessesApartheid in Palestine, was published in South Africa in 2012. Mats Svensson has held eight solo photo exhibitions of his photos in Israel, Palestine, Sweden, and Zambia."
"It is difficult to imagine that humans can treat others with such savage brutality, but the pictures dont lie, and the suffering seen on the faces of so many people, guilty of nothing but being Palestinian, must touch even the most hardened heart. Apartheid is a Crime: Portraits of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is a book to be read and studied over and over, so that we never forget the suffering it depicts, and never waver in our efforts to end it. - Robert Fantina"
