Pilger Pics

It’s Monday night/Tuesday morning and it’s a regular school night for me, watching the best Australian television has to offer: John Saffran, Media Watch, Queer As Folk and now Ricki Lake.

Yesterday, I had lunch with Damien and visited the exhibition, ‘Reporting the World: John Pilger’s Great Eyewitness Photographers’, an exhibition of about 200 photographs at Sydney’s Museum Of Contemporary Art. Although I’ve been a long-time fan of Pilger’s work, I’ve found it a little bit predictable. And there were aspects of predictability in this exhibition.

It was interesting, however, to consider some of the issues of modern day Anglo-American capitalism – the civil rights struggle, the miner’s strike etc – in the light of other civil rights breaches. As I said to Damien, “the miner’s strike seems pretty insignificant compared with what happened in Bangladesh”. Some of the photographs were too distressing to look at. Others, like the American and English ones, seemed so minor in comparison. As important as those struggles were, they don’t really compare, in my view, to the thousands of people shot dead or tortured. It was a wonderful wakeup call.