I photographed this man on my first trip back to Libya after the February 17th Uprising, which blew a wind of unexpected change over my country. After months spent gazing at my computer screen, watching the news, and reading anything I could put my hands on related to this Revolution - I finally arrived in Benghazi on June 25th, 2011.
As cliché as it may sound, I could smell freedom as soon as my feet touched the tarmac - everything seemed somehow tainted by a palpable sense of rebirth and optimism, after 42 years spent under the rule of a brutal and repressive regime.
A couple of days later, I set out to the Mahkama (Courthouse) where it all started. On February 15th, families of Abu Saleem prisonners were protesting against the incarceration of their lawyer, Fathi Terbil. Two days later, lawyers and judges, soon joined by students and engineers, doctors and shopkeepers, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons gathered in the early days of the Uprising to claim back their dignity and their most basic human rights.
I stopped by a small crowd that had formed around a charismatic man with a book in his hands. He seemed to be holding on to it as though it were his most prized possession. As I was trying to figure out what was going on, he carefully unwrapped the book, presented it to me, and asked me to take a picture of him holding it. The book, titled "Gaddafi and the Politics of Contradiction” (written by Mansour el Kikhia, a Libyan political science professor exiled in the USA) had, like many others, been censored in Libya prior to the Uprising. Freedom of speech, of thought, of association, to participate in civil society, just to name a few, were simply inexistent under Gaddafi’s rule.
It was only later, when flipping through my pictures, that I noticed his gaze, full of pride and hope, encapsulating the Libyan people’s expectations and excitement as they face their future in Free Libya.
ccbg (Benghazi, September 2011)
