Jean Mohr knows the regional problems only too well. In 1949 and 1950, he worked in the refugee camps in Jericho and Hebron as an ICRC delegate. It was when he began taking photographs to depict what was going on in the conflict zone. Then he worked at the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees for a year, continuing to take photographs. He visited Israel and Palestinian lands many times afterwards as a professional reporter. He was, for example, there during the six-day war in July 1967. Mr Mohr last came to the region in October 2002 to make a photo essay about the ICRC's activities.
What impresses in Jean Mohr's photographs is their utter simplicity and prosiness, and the absence of hostilities or even weapons in them. None of his photos dated 1949, or 1967, 1972 or even modern photographs depict war. They only show the faces of elderly people, women, kids, young boys and girls, city and village life, picturesque oriental bazaars, a soapery, and rocky, almost lifeless but beautiful Mediterranean scenery, the distribution of humanitarian aid brought by Palestine's Red Crescent Society, blood transfusion centres employing staffers of Israel's Red Shield of David organisation.
His photographs do not portray killings and war. They are politically correct and detached, which is, probably, the right approach to take for a neutral party that does not side with any of the warring countries. Such a neutral party is the ICRC. The exhibition was also entitled neutrally - Israelis and Palestinians Side by Side. It is up to visitors to decide whether there is more opposition and hatred or co-existence, unshared or undivided destiny and common thirst for happiness.
However, a photo reporter cannot escape real life completely. Here is a bed of a married couple in one of the pictures. It is covered with shattered glass of the window that was either broken with a rock or by grenade blast. There is also the face of an old Palestinian. The glasses on his nose are cracked but he is smiling as he has survived a terrorist attack. There are steel anti-mechanised defences, armed men patrolling a road linking one area to another, an Arab boy throwing a rock towards the reporter whom he took for an Israeli. "It is by mere chance that the rock did not hit me and my camera. The car went by too fast," Mr Mohr told RIA Novosti. "I am afraid this boy has grown up and is carrying an automatic rifle instead of rocks today, and his aims are more certain."
There is something else that strikes in Jean Mohr's photographs. There is practically no difference between the photographs of 1949, 1967, 1972 and 2002, which makes, probably, the deepest impression. The same faces, the same expression in people's eyes, the same scenery and ruined buildings. Nothing seems to have changed there over more than 50 years. The reporter's cameras only became more sophisticated. He used increasingly better quality film and photics as his photographs grew clearer and sharper and acquired halftones and more profound space. However, people's eyes are still full of pain. They seem to ask how long will they be able to endure this. Yet, they also express a faint but lasting hope for peace and tranquillity. People believe they will be eventually brought about in their countries for good.
This hope makes the photo exhibition particularly important today when the progressive-minded international community is taking yet another attempt, apparently not the last one, to join efforts against international terrorism, religious and ethnic radicalism. Jean Mohr and the International Committee of the Red Cross are thereby making an honourable contribution to global peace efforts.
Jean Mohr's photographs have already been displayed in Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus, Tel Aviv, Cairo and Geneva. They have also been exhibited in Kiev, Chisinau and Minsk. They will go further on to Western Europe after Moscow. Peace efforts in the Middle East are under way.
