One image by Nina Strand:

There is a face, I can see the eyes. The green and fragmented screenshot is divided into five. At the top I see a light switch. Then there is a green stripe covering the top of the face. Then I see the eyes looking back at me, before another green stripe. The bottom of the photograph shows the shoulders of the person the photographer is talking to. It looks like a woman in a halter top; it could be summer. Taysir Batniji’s book Disruptions shows screenshots of video calls with his loved ones in Gaza, taken between 2015 and 2017.

The light switch has such a prominent role in this picture. We never really see or notice it in real life. We just touch it, absentmindedly. I wonder if it is still there, if the house where this person lived is still there. In other pictures in the book there are streets, houses, more people, more life. There is probably nothing left. The word 'noise' is used in the press release about the images. It is true: they are noisy. Even more so – in some ways – than the images of Gaza shared daily on social media. We do what we can. We share. We watch it live. We cry with the parents holding the impossibly small white body bags.

At dinner last night a friend said that nothing can be saved at this point. We watched the reel of the doctor risking her life, running across a road to help a man who's been hit by a car. Another of a mother and child in the street. The mother is still. Hit by a sniper. The child is alive, and so there is a rescue. The child is carried to a doctor who runs with him to a hospital. We all know that the child isn’t safe, not even there, since the hospital might be hit next. There are no rules anymore. The Israeli politicians just carry on. I think of my friend from Tel Aviv who posts about the Israeli hostages. I think about them too, but this was never about what happened that October day.

The blurriness of Batniji’s images from Gaza came to mind when I saw the work of Mame-Diarra Niang at the Cape Town Art Fair this weekend. A work from the series Morphologie du songe (Morphology of Dreams) was on display at the Stevenson’s stand. Something Niang said in an interview about the series echoes the distorted screenshots: ‘This series feels like the abstract idea I have of myself, the acceptance that forgetting is also a starting point and a fleeting, necessary memory.’ I struggle with the idea of how to go on after seeing what is happening in Palestine, but I find comfort in reading these words in a country once torn by violence that now seems to be on the right side of history.

From the dedication on the first page of Batniji's book, we learn that he lost his mother in 2017. Since the beginning of the Israeli bombardment in 2023, he has lost 52 further members of his family. Tell me, what do we do now? We continue protesting, watching, sharing these disrupted images that haunt us. As Taous R. Dahmani writes in her essay at the end of the book: ‘Photography’s (absurd) quest to “tell the truth” might actually lie in fables, not realism. The abstract value of the glitch establishes a new type of document: evidence of the instability that rules over the Palestinian people, and of the survival of images, despite it all.’

Taysir Batniji, Disruptions, 2024. With the essay On What Subsists and What Persists, in French, Arabic and English, by Taous R. Dahmani. Designed & Published by Loose Joints. All profits go to NGO Medical Aid Palestine.