A POWERFUL photographic exhibition by a former Andersonstown News photographer documenting protests in Belfast against the genocide in Gaza has opened in the city centre.
Irish News photographer Mal McCann covered the first protest in Belfast on October 8 2023 as Israel pounded civilians in Gaza, 24 hours after the Hamas attack on southern Israel.
The exhibition initially premiered at Féile an Phobail last month, however, the award-winning photographer has added recent photographs to the current exhibition. The compelling images in This Is Not A War give voice to the besieged people of Gaza who have endured unimaginable suffering over the past 22 months.
It's obvious that the exhibition has been a very personal journey for Mal, who is eager to point out that any donations raised during the exhibition will go towards Gaels Against Genocide who are fundraising for a mobile maternity unit for Gaza.
“Obviously, I’ve known about the conflict going on in Palestine from when I was young. I always knew what was happening there," he said. "After October 7th, the next day was the first protest outside the City Hall and I went along, I don’t even think I was working. From then, when things got so bad so quick and seeing the devastation and the buildings being flattened which were full of people, I knew that I had to document anything that was relevant that was happening in my own city and so it just continued on from there and unfortunately, it’s still going on.”
Mal says that some of the images that make the biggest impact in the exhibition are those featuring children at the protests.
“Sometimes you’d look at the kids and think they’d been dragged along by their parents but the kids knew what was going on because they were watching it at home, they were seeing it and a lot of these children were from Palestinian families. You were looking into the kids’ eyes and you just saw the sadness, it was just really emotional and it just really stuck with me. We can watch 30 seconds of a news clip on TV but people are going home and they are living with it and they’ll be trying to find out how their relatives are. They’re in relative safety but they are still living a nightmare.”
Having covered the protests for the best part of two years, Mal had the difficult decision of choosing which photographs to use for the exhibition.
“I always wanted to do an exhibition in the Féile," he said. "So, I was looking through my images and it started to stand out to me that there were some newsworthy images and it became to me like a timeline of events from October 8th 2023 to the present day and I just kind of knew that I had to do something with them. Initially I made the decision to do 20 photographs and I ended up with 60 to 70, plus 100 on a slideshow. There were literally hundreds that I could choose from but I wanted to make it a timeline of all the different protests, the different people involved in them, the different groups.”
The exhibition has developed, he says, since first showing at Féile.
“That’s the sad thing about it. There are actually new images that weren’t part of Féile. Two years ago I didn’t think this was going to end up as a exhibition because I didn’t think it was going to go on that long, but unfortunately now I’m still adding to it.”
This Is Not A War is taking place at Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast, BT1 2FF until September 10.
