Author Description

The posters in this issue of "Useful Photography" were photographed by Ad van Denderen in the refugee camps of the West Bank, in the Middle East. In these Palestinian refugee camps, "useful" is a relative word. "Normal" is a relative word, too. Portraits of soldiers, suicide bombers, militants, and Intifada fighters are glued to the walls of the camps' temporary structures, sometimes multiple layers thick, as new posters find themselves plastered on top of older ones. The purpose of these images is propaganda: all the faces shown are of the dead, the martyred. They are for emulating, for celebrating those who've given their lives to the Intifada. To the rest of the world they tell a very different story, one of the terror and desperation that continue relentlessly in this battered region.