By Antonio La Cava
India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan. Four countries, millions of stories, faces of men, women and children. The images shot by Torsello go under your skin, they are beams of lights catching the soul of the portrayed people: the wrinkled face of an old man, the smile of a child, the gloominess in the eyes of a wounded woman, a cemetery, a river. And afterwards many images of hands: some wrinkled hands, some joined hands, furrowed by sores, hands that light fires, hands praying, begging for good deeds.
Italian Nights organised on Friday 23rd March a meeting-debate with the famous Italian photoreporter Gabriele Torsello. During the event it was presented a series of videos with photos taken by himself. “I want to capture reality through images” Torsello says, known to the most since he was kidnapped on 12th October 2006, while he was travelling by bus from Helmand to Kandhahar, in southern Afghanistan – a zone controlled by the Talibans and infested by criminal gangs – and was then released 23 days after, thanks to the mediation of both the Italian government and Emergency.
The freelancer, born in Alessano near Lecce, has been living for some years in south-eastern London, with his wife and his son, even though he often travels around the world, portraying life in the troubled regions.
“It is difficult to work in Afghanistan for foreign reporters, but mostly for the local journalists”, Torsello said. The journalist from Puglia told the audience about his captivity, too: “The kidnappers kept moving me to different locations, I was kept in chains and in windowless rooms, living on a diet of potatoes and Afghan bread dipped in soup”.
During the captivity, some different calls were made even by representatives of the Islamic world, among them the first Islamic Member of the Parliament and Torsello’s friend Lord Nazir Ahmed, and by the famous Islamic Egyptian intellectual Tariq Ramadan. Torsello, converted to Islam twelve years ago, uses the pseudonym “Kash” to sign his photographs.
One of his most famous works is the photobook The Heart of Kashmir, published with Amnesty International in 2002, in which he tells, in black and white, the long war that bothers Kashmir, the region at the core of the conflicts between Pakistan and India. “Kashmir is a beautiful place, full of energy. There are different styles of life, but those people deserve to live in their country”. Kashmir, which is a region of the Indian subcontinent, has been fighting for about fourteen years against the Indian troops of occupation, which exercise control over two third of the region, also contended by Pakistan.
Torsello is inspired, for his work, “by documenting the everyday life of those people who fight to be free: free from war, free from poverty, free from discrimination and fear”. He worked in Nepal too, living alongside the Maoist guerrillas.
The freelancer boasts collaborations with some ONU agencies and Italian and international newspapers, among which English, French, American, Indian and Japanese media. He won, too, the Dialogue of Cultures Award at the Foreign Press Association 2006 Media Awards.
During the screening of Torsello’s photos, a panel of specialists gave their comments on the challenge and the effects of complex reality in countries like India, Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Present at the meeting were Daniela Bezzi, an Italian freelance journalist who lived and worked for many years in Japan, the UK and India, and won the Premio Guido Carletti ed Enzo Baldoni for a feature article published in December 2004, titled Ritorno a Bhopal – Back to Bhopal, Victoria Schofield, journalist specialised in the Indo-Pakistan relations, and Kim Sengupta, correspondent of The Independent.
Among the numerous questions asked by the audience maybe the most interesting was about what a journalist operating in war zones feels, especially when he observes problems and life conditions of the poorest populations in the world; Daniela Bezzi answered that the aim of a journalist is also, through his photos and writings, to sensitise the public opinion.
The photographs of the event are available on our website www.giorgiostudio.co.uk.
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