GUNS & ROSES
There is more to war than soldiers and death as Lalage Snow shows in her poignant images, writes
Refuges, sources of food, escapes into history and nostalgia, places of beauty amid the worst human horrors: in this book war photographer Lalage Snow juxtaposes green fingers and bomb blasts in a sometimes unbearably poignant record. Snow is best known for her project We Are Not The Dead, in which she took close-ups of soldiers before, during and after their time in Afghanistan — a wordless tally of trauma. Here she provides a record of ordinary people (although she reminds us that people living in extremis are extraordinary) responding to the pressure of life in war zones by continuing to garden and farm, or creating and recreating gardens.
Snow takes the pulse, without arrogance, of some of the world’s most troubled spots — contested areas in Palestine/Israel, Ukraine, with its chilly civil war, and she visits and revisits Afghanistan, where a gardener tells her: “Its shadow lasts all day long.” He is speaking of a plane tree, but also the succession of wars haunting his country.
This book reads easily, with graceful, often poetic, writing (“Our shadows are drawing long gills in the ground”), but the stories of the individuals who garden are complex and compelling. Snow challenged some of my romantic assumptions about war gardens, which are not simply oases of beauty and fragrance, retreats from death and destruction.
In Gaza (the “world’s largest jail”), although gardens are memorials, time capsules, shelters and more, they are also intensely practical: places to grow food. Nearly every gardener in Gaza is also a subsistence farmer — as are many living in the kibbutzim along the border. One strength of this collection is the presence and dignity Snow affords individuals on (literally) both sides.
And while in some war zones, the bullets fly over rich soil — as in parts of Afghanistan, where roses flourish in incongruously fairytale style — in others, the depredations of war (landmines, water shortages, phosphorus shelling, tanks growling across wheat fields and through orchards) make gardening and agriculture extremely difficult. Many told of replanting their destroyed gardens over and over.
At times distressing — Snow’s accounts of the impact of war on children are harrowing — she succeeds in humanising conflicts that often seem distant, intractable and endless. At first I thought that the format of a trade book reduced the impact of the photographs. However, their value lies in their portraiture: they present people doing whatever it takes to survive with a semblance of pride and agency.
War haunts the pictures: flowers grow amid sandbags, rusty razor-wire, collapsed buildings. And yet the way that detritus is recycled will be familiar to small farmers and eco-gardeners: the battered tools, the co-opting of metal scraps, piping, sacking into irrigation and terracing schemes.
But most moving are the words of the embattled describing their gardens, in simple yet resonant terms; the sense of connection with soil and roots, the healing power of green. For South Africans wrestling with questions of land, along with the reality of drought, there is much to recognise and ponder here.