The opening of the exhibition at Nobel Peace Center. Pictures by Tim Hetherington and Lynsey Addario takes us on a journey to the most intimate and vulnerable situations of two normally very closed groups of people. American soldiers and Afghan women, they are wildly different. But they share one thing: they don't easily let their guard -or veil - down in front of the camera.
No wonder it is packed inside the gallery. It is an opportunity to see great photjournalism and get a peek into lives - and deaths - so far removed from ours. We see the bare, dying body of 15 year old Zahra. We see the America soldiers reactions as they find they comrades killed in an ambush. We come to see this. To learn, to be informed, to be shocked, and to enjoy the art. Yes, to take pleasure in the craftmanship of the work in front of us.
I grab my camera. I see a girl straining to hear the Linsey Addario talk, she leans into a crack between the pictures to hear, but to me it look almost as she is looking closely into the eyes of a soldier's portrait. But I don't get the picture, she sees me, she turns away. She is too quick. She is too damn Norwegian! Then she leaves, the camera obviously to discomforting. She isn't going to let a stranger capture a moment without her say-so, however trivial. She came to see people at their most exposed, vulnerable, compromising and horrific times. Yet, as most Norwegians, she doesn't want share even an uncontroversial moment in a public place with someone with a camera.
It is symptomatic for Norway. Every day a bureaucrat will make a new regulation restricting access. Every day another security guards is added to the army of ignorance that is patroling shopping centers and subway stations. Every day a policeman will act outside the law to stop a picture being taken. Every day he will get away with it. Every day a politican hide an uncomfortable truth in a stack of papers. Every day money wins over nature.Every day someone will refer to other peoples privacy and security to protect their own.
But is OK. For we are Norwegians.
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