Leila Alaoui
Leila Alaoui, a French-Moroccan photographer whose hauntingly beautiful photographs explored themes of migration, cultural identity and displacement, died on Monday night from injuries sustained during a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. She was 33.
The French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, confirmed her death on Twitter.
Ms. Alaoui, whose work has been displayed around the world, was described as one of the most promising photographers of her generation by Jean-Luc Monterosso, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.
God-lovers who hate humans destroy as many good people and things as they can reach.
The North African affiliate of Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility forthe rampage, which killed at least 30 people and wounded dozens more.
Ms. Alaoui had been on assignment in Burkina Faso for Amnesty for less than a week, working on a series of photographs focused on women’s rights.
So the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda will be hugging itself in joy.
In a joint statement, Mr. Monterosso and Jack Lang, a former French minister of culture who is now president of the Institut du Monde Arabe, hailed Ms. Alaoui as a champion of the downtrodden and the dispossessed.
“She was fighting to give life to those forgotten by society, to homeless people, to migrants, deploying one weapon: photography,” they said.
Samira Daoud, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for west and central Africa, said Amnesty had chosen Ms. Alaoui to create portraits in Burkina Faso because of her ability to make “faces talk” without turning those subjects into victims.
Damn it damn it damn it.
H/t Meredith Tax
I’d never heard of her so I went off to look at some of her photos after reading this.
What a talent.
Now gone.
Another tragedy, another person exposing the reality of the world’s oppressed people with respect for her subjects, silenced forever. And much, much too young, too.
What happened to ‘God is Love’?
Tigger – (sorry , my tablet absolutely will not let me write your nym correctly ) – God is love, but he only loves certain people – those with the right belief system .
6 Québecois were also killed in those attacks. 4 of the 6 were from the same family. They were in the country to help build and repair some elementary schools.
PM Justin Trudeau then visited a mosque known to harbor some radical fundies, fundies who’d be quite at odds with Ms Alaoui’s assignment, and gave a speech expressing how sad he was and warning against any ‘islamophobic’ backlash.
@4
This is the Imam that Justin (“Trudeau” is a name that I still reserve for his dad; he clearly hasn’t earned it) visited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y34jEDDUS4
The perpetrators of the Burkina Faso massacre would have nodded in approval.
I agree, iknklast, that people behave as if no god loves anyone who differs in any way from any particular believer, which is why it is so infuriating when apologists smugly assert that atheists are wrong about any other attributes assigned to their god.
Don’t worry about calling me Tigger – that has been my actual, IRL, nickname for decades. I only took to using ‘Tigger the Wing’ because other forms of ‘Tigger’ had already been taken when I wanted an online alias, and that became ‘Tigger_the_Wing’ wherever spaces weren’t allowed. Then WordPress wouldn’t let me write it that way either, or even without spaces but capitalising the first letters of each word, so my ‘nym here ended up a string of letters.
I hate machines programmed by people that think they know better than I do what it is I wish to write. I disable automatic spelling as the second thing I do on any device I own (after disabling keytones).
Have some back story, for those who may not have come across it before.
After a few years of falling off solo bikes on ice and snow, the first sidecar outfit I owned was an old Watsonian Monza attached to a 1978 Suzuki GS400 (bought new), which had been nicknamed ‘Tigger’ for its ability to creep up quietly behind my friends and then give a full-throated roar when I opened up to overtake.
My last sidecar outfit* is a Squire QM1 attached to a 1988 GoldWing 1500 (bought over ten years old on the day of the solar eclipse in 1999), which immediately inherited the Tigger title on first sight; the UK numberplate it had at the time had ‘WWW’ as the letters. Obviously standing for ‘WorraWorraWorra’, yes?
*I stopped riding after my last heart attack in Australia. It still gets ridden, by my son-out-law, and will become my daughter’s when she finishes her motorcycle training.
I’m seeing some of her work. What a pointless, infuriating death, and one that diminishes the world indeed.
(On a different note: Tigger, I love so much reading you about whatever topic.)
@5 Yes, I know a bit about this guy and his associates. It’s unbelievable such misogynistic horseshit can be freely disseminated in a country like ours. Here’s hoping someone will confront little Justin with all of this…after his wife stops singing. Didn’t this mosque report an arson attack last year? I can find no followups anywhere in the news. Was it a fake case of arson?