Exhibition journal

For this immersive installation the artist Alfredo Jaar invited twenty reportage photographers from across the world to each choose two photographs: the most distressing one they have ever taken and the one that offers the most joy and hope.

Inferno & Paradiso challenges the idea that we have become numb to the many images of suffering we see. Instead, it suggests that the bigger problem is that we often see too many anonymous bodies—people who cannot look back at us or tell us their own story.

The exhibition also asks what we, as viewers, take from these images.

It is often said that the continuous bombardment of images of human suffering in the media, has an anesthetizing effect on us, making us emotionally immune to what we see. The exhibition Inferno & Paradiso examines, questions, and finally overturns this notion. As the philosopher Jacques Rancière (The Emancipated Spectator, 2009) stated, there is no excess of images, but a staging of the relationship between those producing the images and what they select for us, because they decide what matters. And the real problem is rather that we see “too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them.”

Alfredo Jaar has invited twenty contem-porary reportage photographers to each select two photographs: the most distressing they have ever taken, and the most hopeful – the image that gave them the most joy. The photographs are presented as analog slide projections in an immersive, enveloping, and unique installation.

These photographers – originating from Ukraine to Argentina, from Gaza to New York, from the Congo to the Philippines – who witness humanitarian and ecological crises, small family joys and immense collective happiness, will guide us like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to introduce us to both hell and heaven. How does the photographer face this task? What do we, observers of the joy and pain of others, get from these images? Why can’t we remain immune to the power of photography and the whole spectrum of emotions it conveys?

This work aligns seamlessly with Alfredo Jaar’s multidisciplinary practice, which critically examines the imbalances of power and the sociopolitical divide brought about by globalization and capitalism. Inferno & Paradiso offers a precise and poignant reflection on the role of photographic imagery and the media in today’s society, emphasizing the responsibility of those who work with this medium.

My entire life in the city of Gaza has truly been both an inferno and a para-dise. Following the invitation to take part in this project, I began to think about the images I would choose from an archive that spans over 14 years, filled with contradic-tions and emotional depth. Between the extremes of suffering and beauty, I chose these two images that, to me, express life and survival, darkness and light.

The image of young Mahmoud Ajjour embodies the true inferno of our time, and particularly the inferno that Gaza lives through every day. He once lived the simple paradise of having two function-ing arms, he felt their blessing, their use-fulness, and now he is deprived of them, trapped in darkness, searching for a way to live again, to one day wear prosthetic limbs. The second image is of Rawan Qudeih, a girl who is not just harvesting wheat; she’s harvesting our collective memory. Today, in the midst of famine affecting the entire population of Gaza, a single wheat stalk has become a dream, a paradise, that keeps people alive.

The contrast between the two images reminds us that life is always full of contradictions, and that images, no matter how straightforward they may appear, often carry within them deep layers of meaning.

At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I was on assignment photographing a civilian evacuation route outside Kyiv. Mortar fire drew increas-ingly close, and then one struck about 30 feet from where I stood, killing a mother, Tetiana Perebyinis, and her two children, aged 9 and 18, as they fled. I had just been sprayed with gravel—close enough to be killed. As a mother myself, I try to stay focused while working, but when I saw the small moon boots and puffy coat, I thought of my own children. I had to take this photo. This is a war crime.

Differently, I’ve chosen to show a pho-tograph taken in Baghdad in October 2010, during the wedding of the young couple Heelan Muhammad and Husham Raad. The joyful two-day celebration sharply contrasted my 2004 visit, when Iraq was overwhelmed by violence—daily explosions, killings, and kidnappings (I, myself, was kidnapped near Fallujah that year). By 2010, hope had returned; people were out and about again, weddings were common, and young Iraqis felt safe enough to plan for the future.

As I wandered through the crowd on the first day of Eid Al-Fitr, I came across a beautiful little girl in her traditional Palestinian dress. Her smile, the colors, and the good light every photographer needs made the moment feel like paradise. This photo is more than a memory—it holds joy, love, tradition, and the warmth of Eid in a single frame. It reminds me of how full of life and happiness my homeland once was. It captures a glimpse of a morning when hope lived, and laughter filled the streets. Even in the hardest circumstances, beauty still finds a way to shine. Gaza, despite everything, holds the spirit of life deep in its heart.

But everything changes when a geno-cide occurs. Documenting Nada while she was still under the rubble is haunting. The weight of seeing her trapped, of capturing her destroyed home, leaves a scar that may never heal. I wish I had photographed her smiling, full of life. Instead, I took a photo darker than words can describe, a reflec-tion of our pain in an inhumane world.

In the narrow alleyways of Rio de Janeiro, masked men bearing rifles stand over a child during Carnival—a twisted dance between festivity and fear.

Thousands of miles away, on a dusty Afghan road to Jalalabad, a balloon vendor pedals through the morning light, his fragile bicycle overflowing with bursts of color. These two moments, though worlds apart, echo the paradox of human existence. One scene reveals a hell masked as celebration; the other, a fleeting paradise carved out of hardship. Both speak to survival, contrast, and the human spirit’s search for dignity amid chaos. This is “hell/ paradise” where innocence and menace coexist, and where joy floats, even if only temporarily, through shadows.

These two images are reflections of inner states I have lived through and witnessed. The first—a woman mourning her husband, killed by a missile near a metro station—is inferno. Not only for its violence, but for how the desire for power, dominance, and land turns into destruction and death.

The second photo, from my long-term Chernobyl project, shows a landscape emptied of people, where nature slowly reclaims what was lost. Here, I find paradiso—not in joy, but in stillness, where the mind is no longer ruled by craving. In this quiet, there is no struggle, no desire to possess. After years spent witnessing suffering, I’ve come to understand: inferno is attachment, paradiso is letting go. Peace is found not in pleasure or pain, but in a balance where the mind is free from craving.

These images come from different projects, but together they form a single meditation—on time, loss, and the possibility of inner peace.

Heaven and hell on this earth are not always distinct opposites. Often, they intertwine in the details of the events we live through.

Hell reveals itself in moments like the one when the Abbas family lost most of its members—killed in a bombing by the regime forces of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Yet even in the heart of devastation, a glimmer of life persists—perhaps a trace of heaven. The two sisters who survived that bombing carry the scars of fear on their bodies, but in their eyes shines a strange determination to hold on to life.

In contrast to this scene of death, another image emerges—this time in the heart of African nature: a Sudanese child leaps from a tree into the waters of the Nile, laughing, savoring the heat of the day, as if momentarily escaping the harshness of daily life. But behind that smile lies another tragedy. The same waters that offer joy and relief have forced dozens of families to flee their homes, swallowed by the floods.

Endings and beginnings, death and survival, memory and wonder—all coexist.

In the first picture, there is a woman in her own home, trapped in domestic vio-lence. Across the world, women are not safe, even in the spaces meant to shelter them. The home, once a sanctuary, has become a site of violence for countless women and girls. Beaten, strangled, raped by husbands, boyfriends, or family members, these crimes go unacknowledged and unpunished. In the U.S. in 2025, terminat-ing a pregnancy can carry harsher penalties than the rape that caused it. This is hell: a world where gender-based violence is protected, even legislated.

In the second picture, a woman gives birth. It’s my daughter in labor at home, as she births her child in her own time, her own way. Her husband is beside her, not controlling, simply present. This is not performance. This is trust. The pain is real, but so is the ecstasy. This is heaven, not per-fection, but freedom. This is what becomes possible when women are safe enough to be powerful.

These photographs are not opposites. They are part of the same world. One reveals the violence that persists when power is abused. The other, the beauty that emerges when power is returned. Between them lies a choice: What kind of world do we want to create?

For me, these two images stand as opposites of human experience.

In Bucha, residents lived through over 30 days of horror. We arrived on the day of liberation. Bodies lay scattered on the streets, in different stages of decay. In base-ments, we found tortured and executed civilians. Bullet holes marked walls under which people were shot. Cars with “children” written on them stood burned and riddled with bullets. Gardens held no flow-ers, only graves. That was the inferno.

In contrast, Bernadette bathing in the lake feels like a moment of pure paradise. Her body floats in soft water, surrounded by light and silence. It is not about escape, but about the possibility of peace.

In 2004, I took the migration route alongside Kingsley, a 22-year-old from Cameroon. His journey to Europe stretched over 10,000 kilometers, through seven countries, and lasted nine grueling months. Along the way, Kingsley endured both physical and psychological hardship. He crossed the Sahara Desert, suffering from extreme hunger and thirst. Smugglers threatened him, stole from him, and treated him with cruelty. In Morocco, things wors-ened—he was arrested, beaten, and sub-jected to inhumane conditions in deten-tion. His clandestine journey became a brutal odyssey in search of what he hoped would be a better life.

When Kingsley finally reached the border between Morocco and Melilla, he saw European soil for the first time. The “promised land” was right there—close, yet unreachable. Towering barriers marked the edge of Europe, turning the continent into a fortress. With no way through, Kingsley made the desperate decision to attempt the crossing by sea, hoping to reach Spanish territory. To chase his “paradise,” he had to pass through a living hell.

Shortly before I took the explosion photo, I learned that a strategic hill on the Turkish-Syrian border had been taken from Kurdish fighters by Islamic State militants. We positioned ourselves right across from this hill, and I remember saying to my cameraman friend, “Just think about what if the coalition air force hit the hill right now.” Yes, a few seconds after I said that a fighter jet from the American air force hit the very hill. You decide whether this photo is heaven or hell. The fact that the militants of an organization that killed thousands of people, kidnapped women, and committed great crimes against humanity were hit with a mini atomic bomb, left my emotions in limbo.

Kurdish villagers who call themselves Savaks, go up into the Munzur Mountains in the spring and make a living by selling the cheese they produce. Sometimes floods come, sometimes bears enter the cheese warehouses. It takes 15 days for them to return from the plateau to their villages; they live high up all summer long.

Life is an endless thing and we are actually right in the middle of it, in fact there is heaven and hell in this world, turning it into heaven sometimes depends on our per-spective. Most of the time it is not in our hands.

What can be more brutal than war, a campaign of relentless violence and suffering entirely orchestrated by humankind? There is nothing natural about it, and yet it seems to be an inextricable part of our existence in the world as we know it. What motivates those in power may differ vastly from what motivates the foot soldiers on the ground, and to each conflict there’s a unique set of circumstances. But what all wars have in common is that they bring out the very worst in humanity. In spite of that, the thing that surprised me at first, and the thing that allows me to retain a sense of hope and relief amid the horrors I witness as a photojournalist reporting on war, is that they also bring out the best in humanity. There isn’t much in between—war is a realm of extremes.

In the image of the Iraqi man standing listless amid broken tombstones under a black sky, the bleakness of it all represents hopelessness under man-made dark clouds and the desecration of the place where the deceased were laid for their final rest.

In the image of the rebel commander gently holding a newborn who was rescued from certain death after being abandoned under the blazing summer sun, a reminder of the preciousness and fragility of life left the armed men in the room stunned and in awe.

Extract from a letter to Alfredo Jaar: “What is this Hell and Paradise? My images cannot illustrate my hell or my paradise; rather, they stand as anomalies within a binary structure of representation, which I question.

The body of a jihadist killed in battle: paradise for him, hell for the viewer?

A landscape as a threshold—closed, unreachable. Like Virgil, we remain on the edge, unable to cross into what we call divine.

In a world that simplifies and polarizes, refusing clear-cut answers is not a form of evasion, but a form of honesty. For this reason, I do not present icons of salvation or pain, but images that resist univocal interpretations. Hell and paradise are not here—not in my photographs, nor in history.”

While covering an Ebola outbreak in Congo in 2019, I stumbled across the kind of scene that can momentarily catch you off guard—four teenage girls playing trumpets and trombones in a dirt yard adjacent to a half-built church. There was something haunting about that sound in that place. I knew the scene had no direct link to the Ebola story I was reporting, but I shot it anyway. Despite all the conflict and tragedy associated with Congo, life goes on in the same small and mundane ways that it does anywhere else.

In 2021, while covering a civil war in Ethiopia, rebels in the northern Tigray region had gone on the offensive and delivered a series of stinging defeats to government forces. Tigray had been cut off from the rest of the country by the war—no phone lines, internet, flights or road travel—and virtually no information was available. There, I found a scene I had last witnessed during the Bosnian war. Thousands of people caged and held prisoner by an opposing force, their fate yet to be determined by the warring sides.

While the Ebola image shows a glimmer of hope during desperate times, the prisoners of war in Ethiopia reflect some-thing else—the tragic nature of conflict, and the ways it shatters lives.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s, the Ambassador Hotel helped San Francisco’s overcrowded hospi-tals. It housed the poor, those with nowhere to go and for whom nothing more could be done but daily doses of morphine.

During this project, I met Steven before his lover, Roger, died of AIDS. Steven’s greatest fear was that he would die alone. “I’ll probably die in some stranger’s care,” he wrote in a letter to an aunt that he never mailed. “Without family and friends. Sad.” The photograph is from that time. I remember feeling his sadness, the empty room, the clock on the wall. Steven nodded toward my camera, then stared at me, naked.

In the lobby, I met Julie, 19, HIV-positive, holding her 8-day-old baby, who she said gave her a reason to live. I documented Julie’s family story for over two decades. A couple of years before she died, I was in the delivery room with her. I heard the doctor say her (last) baby was coming. I stopped down for the brightest part of the frame. Elyssa came out, hands open—beau-tiful. I saw her first breath: free, innocent.

Hell and paradise are united and separated by a line. All opposites fit into a single breath.

Millaray Huichalaf dreams of a transparent snake biting her, and when she wakes up, she realizes that she herself is the river. Since then, Machi Millaray has led the resistance against Statkraft, a Norwegian state-owned company building two hydro-electric dams that could destroy the delicate ecosystem of the Pilmaiken, a river that is sacred to her culture. Millaray can read water. She reads her patients’ urine to detect illness, intervene, and cure.

Fabián Tomasi never wanted to go to sleep at night for fear of never waking up again. In Argentina, more than 500 million liters/kilos of pesticides are used each year. Fabián was diagnosed with severe toxic polyneuropathy, and the progression of his disease prevented him from eating solid food, walking easily, or using his hands. Until his last breath, he fought to make his voice known, becoming the most powerful symbol of resistance against agrochemicals in Latin America.

Growing up, I thought heaven was in the sky somewhere, and hell in the fiery netherworld. On earth, we wait. To photograph is to be painfully aware that both heaven and hell are just here, coexisting in the world, in our shared spaces. As I move through my practice this coexistence and contradiction becomes increasingly difficult to carry, and I feel at times I am unable and too overwhelmed to hold these truths side by side: to witness immense suffering, and to go home, and be delighted by my baby.

We often talk about photography in terms of capturing, taking, and possession. But over time I’ve come to understand it differently. To photograph, perhaps, is to endure the weight of all we see. With our attention, however small this offering may be, we accompany those in front of us in the unbearable and beautiful alike.

Lockdown in South Africa was a descent into uncertainty, and, in the town-ships, a near collapse. Amid economic hardship, escalating unemployment, prolonged power outages, and mounting civil unrest, daily life became a battleground of survival and resistance. Residents were pushed to the brink, taking to the streets to demand accountability as social restric-tions deepened longstanding inequalities. As a counterpoint, the image of Sanele resting in the field offers a quiet, introspective moment that holds the weight of com-munal experience. Here, I capture not only Sanele’s vulnerability and exhaustion but also a rare instance of stillness. The open field becomes both a physical and metaphorical space, one of fragile reprieve from the turbulence of township life. Rather than focus solely on visible struggle, I draw attention to what often goes unseen: the emotional landscape of young people living through layers of systemic trauma. The image stands as a portrait of survival, not through action, but through rest, reflec-tion, and the radical act of simply existing amid crisis.

The image of the dead gorilla is hell for me because it is an utterly senseless and selfish killing of a unique and sentient animal. There are so many of us and so few of them, we kill them before we even begin to understand them. Humanity continues to devastate the natural world and in doing so, we show our worst selves and condemn the future for ourselves and our children.

In the image of the two trans women in the pool, I see a momentary glimpse of love and the comfort and peace that brings to all of us fortunate enough to experience it. There is no difference to me between that occurring with a trans couple or any other kind of couple, it’s simply a sublime display of humanity’s deepest need being fulfilled. Surely this is a moment in paradise.

The 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia lasted for six weeks and ended on November 10 with a Russian-mediated peace deal that left Azerbaijan retaining territory gained during that war and regaining control of districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that Armenia had captured in the 1990s.

War and peace often exist simultaneously in the civilian experience of daily life and moments of normality that take place in close proximity to frontlines. War is not binary, or linear, but rather a structure that is built around family life. I had photographed both the Hakobyan family and the Republican Medical Centre in Stepanakert in 2011 on a reporting trip that focused on the effects of war during a ceasefire period that had been in place since 1994. Azerbaijan regained full control of Nagorno-Karabakh after a blockade and subsequent military offensive in 2023. Most ethnic Armenians fled and Nagorno-Karabakh was formally dissolved on January 1, 2024.

These two photographs hold in them the extremes of what I’ve witnessed: stillness and rupture, harmony and heartbreak. Paradiso revealed itself by sur-prise, a fleeting, luminous moment where nature and humanity seemed to breathe in sync. It reminded me that peace is not always grand, but often quiet, hidden, and fragile. Inferno, on the other hand, I saw in Kyiv, not just in the sky breaking open above us, but in the weight of grief carried by one young woman walking into the storm. Nastasia’s gesture, raw and brave, etched into me a different kind of truth: hell is not fire, but absence, memory, and love interrupted.

Together, these images are not oppo-sites but part of the same human spectrum: how we seek meaning, how we endure, and how beauty and sorrow so often walk side by side.