A new exhibition, being hosted throughout October at Gallery 200 in Central Milton Keynes showcases the photographs of Milton Keynes-based photographer, David Tunnicliffe.
His 2016 exhibition focused on Palmyra, known as the Venice of the Sands, which suffered at the hands of Daesh in 2015.
While the damage is now not thought to be as extensive as first feared, after 10 months of destruction, it certainly doesn’t resemble the pictures taken by David when he visited the region in 1993.
This time around, the show will feature Craq de Chevalier and Aleppo, which have been devastated since 2016.
UNICEF have endorsed the work, and monies raised from the show will go to support children in Syria and Yemen.
Ian Biggs, Australian Ambassador to Iran, and sometime Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, Charge d’Affaires in Baghdad, and Special Assistant to the IAEA Director General explains more about the provoking, revealing images that are open to view...
"The wars of contemporary Syria are saturated with photographic imagery – the news-cycle footage of scores of local and international cable channels, the jumpy mobile-phone clips of civilian bystanders, the silent, black-and-white targeting shots from UAVs, the documentation presented by humanitarian agencies, multilateral and non-government… And, most mesmerising of all, the sickening snuff videos broadcast by the terrorists, most notoriously Daesh, reeking of blood-lust and malevolence.
"Which is why it is more important than ever to spend some time contemplating the luminous photographs by David Tunnicliffe – of the same locations, but of another and more gracious world, where the standard complaint about the region by foreign strategists was that it was stagnant – that Middle Eastern leaders had been in place for 40 years or more.
"David’s photographs do not wallow in nostalgia – they are too honest for that – but they unintentionally inspire some pretty serious nostalgia in me, for a society in which he and I encountered only kindness, and traditional courtesy, and unthreatening sincerity.
"So look, and think about a region that could be traversed, from Turkey to Afghanistan, by young people in campervans; that hosted scores of foreign universities’ archaeological expeditions, honouring millennia of high civilisation; that still had thriving communities of ethnic and religious minorities.
"I have known David, a former British diplomat, for more than 30 years, since we both served in Cairo, and later travelled together through Syria. His record of the damaged world will be a vital element of rebuilding, when at last the time for homecomings and reconstruction and reconciliation arrives.
"As someone who has spent a career in the Middle East, I could succumb to rage at its destruction; but the better emotion is determination, to celebrate what was, and to restore what can be retrieved."
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