Last Friday
night several friends and I went to First Friday in downtown Raleigh. It’s
amazing to me that I can have lived in Raleigh for twelve years and still not
know half of the events that go on in this city- but apparently on the first
Friday of every month all the museums and restaurants stay open late. There are
art galleries to walk through, live music to enjoy, free food to taste, and for
us there was a good bit of running through the rain between shops trying not to
get soaked. In the course of the evening we spent some time in Art Space where many
local artists display their work and have their studios. One of the galleries
displayed the photography of Chris Hondros. I expected the mood-setting
lighting, and the quiet hush that pervaded in the room as the guests viewed the images in respectful silence. However, I did not anticipate that some of the pictures would move me to the point of tears, forcing an inner monologue in which I quickly talked myself out of deeper emotion to save face- I don’t think that crying in an art gallery on a Friday night is typical behavior for a college student. (You MIGHT want to argue here that it’s not typical behavior for a college student to be in an art gallery on a Friday night at all…haha but that’s an entirely different discussion).
The first picture that I saw was
the black and white of the mother cradling her baby. At first all I saw was the baby, the intimacy
that the embrace represented was sweet and beautiful. And then I saw the mother’s hands. Or rather,
her lack of hands. She is a victim of the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s; the
rebels considered it their trademark to hack off the limbs of their victims. As
I looked at the photographs I saw the pattern. They were all images of war, pain,
and unimaginable conflict. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the West Bank, Iraq,
Afghanistan……the list goes on.
By the
time I had gotten all the way around the room and looked at all the pictures, blinking
back tears from my eyes and making excuses about the room being dusty, I had
two questions. “Who took these pictures?
And were they mentally insane!?!?”
How could a photographer be close enough to capture the look of hatred
on the face of the child soldier in Nigeria, for example, without being within
shooting range? Simple. He couldn’t.
At the end of the gallery I found the story of the photographer. Chris Hondros is from North Carolina, he went
to NC State and he’s been covering the most brutal wars and
conflicts around the world since the 1990s, going into the heart of the conflict
to bring back these images. In April of
2011 he was in Libya documenting the Civil War that started revolutions across
the Middle East when he was killed on assignment. So I was right, he was
crazy. And it killed him. He was so passionate about capturing the evil
in the world that he got too close, and that last time, for that last click of
his camera, he didn’t make it out. I
wonder what the final pictures on his camera were, if anyone knows, or if it
was all lost in the ashes of war.
War is an ugly thing. And I think for that reason images like this make us uncomfortable. But at the same time, I think we have
to see them sometimes. In the world that we live in there ARE women cradling
their new born babies in arms without hands, there are young boys throwing rocks at
their father’s murderers, there are child soldiers whose
brains are so seared by violence that they have almost ceased to be human, and
there are mercenaries entrenched in warfare to the point that the explosion of
a bomb and the death of another is better than Christmas morning. Many people would probably look at these images
and say, “All this pain and suffering is evidence that there is no God.” Sometimes I understand that sentiment. As I looked
at some of these I was shaken to the core by their stark and blatant
presentation of evil. I wanted to reach through the pictures and rescue the people frozen in their suffering. But at the same
time, I am grateful for the reminder. As
Christians we can look at such reminders and say, “This is evil. This is
sin. This is why Jesus died. This is why we need a Savior.”
A good friend and I
were recently talking about the ugly parts of the Gospel. Everyone loves talking about the love and
sacrifice of Christ, but why is it that we need Him in the first place? We need the salvation of Christ because we are
a lost, broken, and sinful people who make up a world that is ultimately
deserving of the righteous wrath of God.
Not a popular idea. Not something
that’s easy to talk about. But if you
leave that part out, then the sacrifice of Jesus was not really necessary, and
the crucifixion was the greatest oversight in history. I desperately need a Savior. This world desperately needs a Savior. In the end I can either let the evil in the world drive me to despair or I can grapple with my responsibility of what living in such a world as a follower of Christ really looks like. I can ask, how do I combat evil with the love of Christ? How can I be the hands and feet of Jesus to a world so in need of His grace and forgiveness? I don’t know that Chris Hondros meant for his pictures to spark that sort of response, but regardless I am grateful to him for
reminding me. I am grateful that he went
where no one else would go to capture what many of us would like to ignore. I think that every once
and a while, we all need the reminder. Here is Chris's website if you want to take a minute and check out his gallery of photographs online, and
remember that, in a way, he died to bring you those images.
http://www.chrishondros.com/
Last Friday
night several friends and I went to First Friday in downtown Raleigh. It’s
amazing to me that I can have lived in Raleigh for twelve years and still not
know half of the events that go on in this city- but apparently on the first
Friday of every month all the museums and restaurants stay open late. There are
art galleries to walk through, live music to enjoy, free food to taste, and for
us there was a good bit of running through the rain between shops trying not to
get soaked. In the course of the evening we spent some time in Art Space where many
local artists display their work and have their studios. One of the galleries
displayed the photography of Chris Hondros. I expected the mood-setting
lighting, and the quiet hush that pervaded in the room as the guests viewed the images in respectful silence. However, I did not anticipate that some of the pictures would move me to the point of tears, forcing an inner monologue in which I quickly talked myself out of deeper emotion to save face- I don’t think that crying in an art gallery on a Friday night is typical behavior for a college student. (You MIGHT want to argue here that it’s not typical behavior for a college student to be in an art gallery on a Friday night at all…haha but that’s an entirely different discussion). 
The first picture that I saw was
the black and white of the mother cradling her baby. At first all I saw was the baby, the intimacy
that the embrace represented was sweet and beautiful. And then I saw the mother’s hands. Or rather,
her lack of hands. She is a victim of the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s; the
rebels considered it their trademark to hack off the limbs of their victims. As
I looked at the photographs I saw the pattern. They were all images of war, pain,
and unimaginable conflict. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the West Bank, Iraq,
Afghanistan……the list goes on.
War is an ugly thing. And I think for that reason images like this make us uncomfortable. But at the same time, I think we have
to see them sometimes. In the world that we live in there ARE women cradling
their new born babies in arms without hands, there are young boys throwing rocks at
their father’s murderers, there are child soldiers whose
brains are so seared by violence that they have almost ceased to be human, and
there are mercenaries entrenched in warfare to the point that the explosion of
a bomb and the death of another is better than Christmas morning. Many people would probably look at these images
and say, “All this pain and suffering is evidence that there is no God.” Sometimes I understand that sentiment. As I looked
at some of these I was shaken to the core by their stark and blatant
presentation of evil. I wanted to reach through the pictures and rescue the people frozen in their suffering. But at the same
time, I am grateful for the reminder. As
Christians we can look at such reminders and say, “This is evil. This is
sin. This is why Jesus died. This is why we need a Savior.”
