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WELCOME ... to Timor-Leste (East Timor) by Ian Provest.
Essay by Nicholas Tsoutos.
Artistic Director, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney Australia. 2008
These days, not only the world we look out upon, but the human eye itself seems at
times occluded, as if a cataract has thickened over it from within. We have become
used to what we live with, calloused (perhaps in self-protection) to what is happening
to the world outside our door, and how we accept its worsening ... Eudora Welty.
WELCOME is not your everyday photojournalist essay of the East Timor crisis as a zone of conflict.
Ian Provest's camera is not focussed on the immediate acts of the violence that seduces the media
in its representation of war and political conflict. More often than not, media agencies sensationalise
the conflict as they capture the typical and actual images that conform to the expectations and format
of the 6pm news. Ian Provest's lens is drawn to what is left out of official histories of political change,
to what is excluded from the photojournalism approach of the media. Official histories only record the
uninterrupted progression of the events themselves constituted as history. This is its definition but
it is precisely in its lack of definition that we discover the inherent significance in Provest's
photographs. Provest however, sees the crisis very differently as he invests his images with a
political poetic of hope and in his cameras ability to represent everything more equally and more democratically.
By directing his camera to an exploration of the deeply personal human impact that is the result of the crisis,
to the fugitive detail that is excluded, Provest takes us astonishingly close into the familiar details of everyday life and struggle in East Timor.
Provest's photographs remind us that humanity is not an external contingent limit of the social
political processes of East Timor but an implicit inseparable and necessary condition of history
and change? after all humanity does not sit outside conflict. Provest's poetic images are sustained
by his belief that the human beings and their survival remains the very reason for the photographs,
which express an unyielding commitment to self determination and a free will that is crucial in the
self preservation of the East Timorese identity in their ongoing struggle for democracy and freedom.
Provest's images articulate a profound lyrical vision of human nature as his camera finds, apprehends
and responds sensitively to the affects of crisis and trauma in the most likely and unlikely places.
Humanity informs his photographs of the essential matter of human presence and human absence.
WELCOME is a compelling honest exhibition that re-assembles the real world, as a counter to the real
of the subjective short media grabs of the culture of newsworthiness. Provest reminds us what is in
fact real in this world, as his photographs realise and provide meaning to what is sometimes taken
for granted, or what slips between the cracks of history or what provides and works as background
for the subject of conflict. WELCOME recognises a real existence that despite its representation
as a photograph is neither a copy nor an illusion, but an actual reality that serves to explain a
crisis in more complete human terms. By imitating nothing, by recognising and valuing the humanity
trapped by crisis, Provest's photographs doubles the meaning of what is real by suggesting that the
difference can realise itself in peace outside the trauma of violence. This gives the people themselves
the power to radically alter the way we see the world.
Provest provides us with a view that is clear, articulating a clarity with a sincere strength of
intention that allows us to clarify our own. Timor is a new troubled nation on the brink of a
different future. Provest's photographs recognise the hope in this potential.
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