Pietà

I really like this photograph. It's so full of emotion -- the daughter's hurt and pain, the mother's relief, their faces pressed close together reminiscent of those twin Greek theatre masks, one happy, one sad. I think the Guardian picked this photo to illustrate the headline, this horrifyingly surreal thing that feels so much like the wheels of history grinding themselves against a dirt road that the paragraph in a 2050 textbook subtitled "FACTORS LEADING TO ______" is almost tangible, because of its inadvertent allusion to the Pietà.

From top to bottom: Michelangelo 1498, Van Gogh (after Delacroix) 1889, Delacroix 1850, Bouguereau 1876.

The photograph, taken spontaneously of course, that decisive moment as Cartier-Bresson called it, evokes every Pietà and evokes the intensity of that Biblical moment. The two bodies are entwined, cradled together, the composition forming a softly triangular amorphous idea of pain. Yet whilst the Pietà, which depicts Mary holding Jesus' dead body, is the ultimate expression of grief and suffering, Kelly's photograph is one of ultimate joy and happiness –– after grief and suffering, and in defiance of grief and suffering. As the mother and daughter greet one another, so countless other families remain separated by the ban. And yet, an image of hope under a headline of despair. 

And of course there is irony in this. A classic icon of Christianity reincarnated in two Muslim women, in the context of a ban on all entry from certain Muslim countries except for minority Christians being persecuted, by executive order of a disgusting Islamophobe (amongst other things) who is now the head of a country that prints IN GOD WE TRUST on their money, their sacred money that they worship like God, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, remembering Jews killed over God (and Rroma and gays and disabled people and communists and everyone seen as an enemy to the purity of the "aryan race"). This new Pietà is defiant because it dares to emulate Christ and the Virgin Mary, Christ who is a prophet in Islam -- Islam, which has since its inception been despised by Christianity, the religion seen as one of doom, hatred, and destruction, for little reason other than having been created and knocking at Christianity's doorstep, the religion whose simple existence strikes fear in Christianity's heart and is construed as its opposite, mighty yet savage, a bloodthirsty monster. Kelly's picture shows beauty, tenderness, nobility, elegance, a wry tableau that speaks out against hatred. In the photograph, it is the child holding the mother, who is in a wheelchair. Make of it what you will. 

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Oh, and, some more Kenneth Chan: