(157) Marcus Bleasdale ~ Child Soldier. Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2003, (8 September 2010).
I usually do not comment on installments to The Guardian's "Best Shot" series. But this week there is a short, very insightful and intriguing video interview with Bleasdale that I recommend to you - click on the date above. Here are two remarks he makes that are incredibly telling.
"I don't want you to see one child, carrying one Kalashnikov, riding one bike there. I want you to kind of see all of them. I want you to kind of extrapolate to 30,000. There are thirty thousand of these kids out there. This is just one of them. I think that is why I find this image so important."This central problem - of capturing large numbers, of conveying "statistics" - is what I find so interesting.
"The driving force behind this work is the statistics ... It's five point four million people who've died in Congo since 1998. That's the largest death toll in the world since the Second World War. ... Ummm ... That's what drives me ..."
Notice too - that Bleasdale, denies he's an artist and that he expresses, indeed embraces, a deep anger about the indifference the rest of the world displays toward disasters in Congo and elsewhere.
