Around Liverpool (47)
Nativity 2023
Today more than half a million people in Gaza, a quarter of the population, are starving, according to a report on Thursday by the United Nations and other agencies. The finding highlights the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s bombardment and siege on the territory in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack. This comes as the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that the Palestinian death toll had now topped 20,000 people. The extent of the population’s hunger eclipsed even the near-famines in Afghanistan and Yemen of recent years, according to figures in the report. The report warned that the risk of famine is “increasing each day,” blaming the hunger on insufficient aid entering Gaza. “It doesn’t get any worse’,” said Arif Husain, chief economist for the UN’s World Food Programme. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.” Thursday’s report on the staggering scale of hunger in Gaza underscored the failure of the United States, one of the few remaining allies of Israel, to insist on a ceasefire. The world is watching genocide in real time on an unspeakable scale.
‘Nativity 2023’ is a photomontage of a traditional nativity scene where baby Jesus has been replaced by a dead baby wrapped in a bloodied white shroud. The backdrop is a bombed city in Gaza. There are no stars – just a threatening drone reaping destruction. From the river to the sea one day Palestine will be free.
World Streets (27)
Man With A Pram
In the early 1960s I remember using the wheels from old prams and push chairs to make a ‘trolley.’ All you needed was two sets of wheels nailed to a plank of wood. The front wheels were connected to a seperate piece of wood which steered the trolley (in theory) in the direction you wanted to go. There were no breaks and motion was secured by pulling your trolley up a pavement on an incline and letting gravity do it’s work at the top of the incline. Trolleys were a health and safety nightmare but great fun.
I remember thinking of my days on a trolley as I observed old men wandering around the East End with a battered trolley collecting useful scrap that had been discarded.
‘Man with a pram’ (mixed media on paper) is based on a photograph I took of one such man in Toynbee Street in the East End (see below).
Around East London (20)
