Libya through a lens

What is it about sepia or black-and-white?  Instantly we’re transported back in time.

An archive of photographs of Libya, which went on show in London yesterday, conjures the Gaddafi and pre-Gaddafi eras. Here is the Queen in 1954, flowered dress cinched at the waist, white gloves to her elbows, with King Idris. They used to call him “the reluctant monarch” and he certainly looks uncertain, peering through pebble glasses, swathed in a white robe.

Then came Gaddafi. In 1970, less than a year after he seized power, we see him in military uniform, with clear skin, bright eyes, definite eyebrows and perfect teeth. How handsome and charismatic he looks, how far from the botoxed, bloated figure he became 40 years later. He’s pictured in dozens of different places: praying in the desert, with Brezhnev, on a trip to East Germany, embracing Yasser Arafat. There are intimate family snaps alongside the public events, and arrestingly strange reminders of the lives of others, including a set of mug-shots of military drivers. Few of these images have been displayed before.

The curator, Susan Glen, wanted to show the brutality of the Gaddafi era without using gratuitously bloody images. In a small room to the side of the main gallery, she has re-created a Libyan family living room of the 1970s, with a green curtain and green cushions to represent Gaddafi’s obsession with the colour. There you can sit on a bench and watch grainy footage of the hanging of Sadeq Shweidi, a young man who was condemned to death for opposing Gaddafi. His hanging was broadcast time and again on Libyan television in the late 1970s, usually in Ramadan, when families would gather round the TV after breaking their fast. By watching, we get a glimpse of what they had to endure, but the video cuts out before the bit every Libyan remembers, when a fanatical Gaddafi supporter, Huda ben Amr, swung on the young man’s legs to finish him off.

The photographs were collected by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, and re-photographed by several photographers, including Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros who were killed during the siege of Misrata last year. The exhibition is dedicated to them, to Anton Hammerl, a South African journalist who was also killed in Libya last year, and to all the Libyans who lost their lives in the revolution.

The original pictures remain with the authorities in Tripoli, but I can’t imagine such an exhibition being mounted in Libya. It’s hard for Libyans to look at their recent history dispassionately. Sepia and black- and-white conjures a time that most are struggling to forget. Yet, as the militia who spearheaded last year’s revolution carry out revenge killings, and illegally detain opponents, it’s good to recall the horrors of history, and the need to take a different path to the future.

You can follow Lindsey on Twitter @lindseyhilsum