Artruism: The Art of Altruism

As we come closer to entering the full on political season, the media has already bombarded us with wannabe presidents readjusting their historical decisions to go to war in Iraq and creating addendums to previous statements captured in the media, all the while “youtube” creates a cyberspace “gothcha” reality show of the ‘08 presidential campaign. Does anyone else feel as though we should probably be voting for our next president with a cell phone rather than going to a poll?

Nevertheless, as the presidential contenders carefully parse their words now in an effort to position themselves in concert with current public opinion about the war with all of their carefully constructed media sound bytes, I am reminded just how refreshing it is to be engaged with the artistic community rather than the political one. For example, Tina Schelhorn maintains the very strong opinion about the war that she articulated back in 2003 and she has never apologized for it or repositioned it in anyway, but rather created a larger forum through photography to help others express their opinions too. One of the most compelling anti-war photo exhibitions that I have viewed is Ms Schelhorn’s “images against war” .

The exhibition was inspired by Ms. Schelhorn’s participation in anti-war protests in Germany before the invasion of Iraq. After attending several such protests, she concluded that the anti-war message was not effectively being heard and perhaps it would be best conveyed visually. As an artist and an owner of the Gallery Lichtblick in Cologne, she committed to creating visual protests against war and consequently submitted a call to artists to join her. More than 600 photographers from around the world submitted their own visual statements against war to be displayed in “images against war”. Ms. Schelhorn was overwhelmed by the strong response and particularly that the photographs included images from World War I to the most recent conflict in Lebanon. This exhibition that Ms. Schelhorn created has become one of the most democratic of demonstrations that I have ever experienced. The exhibition is about the collective strong opinion of artists who feel it is their responsibility to reflect upon the state of our global society through their camera lenses. The most refreshing part of the exhibition is the way in which Ms. Schelhorn chose to display the images. She deliberately separated the photo credits from the images and simply listed them together on large text panels and in doing so, she also separated the ego from the exhibition which was particularly significant since the contributors are well known international photojournalists, fine art photographers and commercial photographers. Perhaps this is the most altruistic photo exhibition one could hope to view.