Revisiting a resonation - it fits with my ‘Modernday Madonnas.’

https://www.manalmassalha.com/

I enjoyed and was moved by her lecture. I was impressed with her ability to deal with her naysayers, she called them out, and they let her finish her presentation. She spoke about community, communities under pressure, it may not have seemed important to some, but it is central to her practise. She makes those invisible few, visible to the larger communities surrounding them, she highlights our common need to be seen and valued.

I was hoping and expecting Wonder woman when I stopped to talk to her after her presentation. She was a strong, warm and very engaging, able to answer all my very odd questions, but she was just flesh and blood. She was very real she didn't try to be other than what she was, her strength which resonates though her work, is the passion she feels for her subject matter, it is very real. Her compassion is for people, her understanding of community, home and the everyday was evident in her photographs and films and I believe that is why they are so easy to connect with.

Though these photographs and films, she documents communities holding, them up as they are, what ever they are, though her sensitive insight we join them, we feel their loves, fears, joys and tears. We connect in the same way as we do with a Hopper painting, feeling the central subjects vulnerability feeling that moment of joy, fear, lust or anguish that also appears Picasso’s work. All document humanity and successfully elicit our emotional response. This respnse makes us think, savor and assess, we digest a residue and are changed. We have been forced to reflect and learn. By this process we have obtained knowledge.