THE ONLY HOUSE LEFT STANDING -

THE MIDDLE EAST JOURNALS OF TOM HURNDALL PANEL TALK TO LAUNCH FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN

FRIDAY 26TH NOVEMBER 2010
16.00-17.00 GMT (17h Central Europe, 11h East Coast US)

“What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want to be proud of myself. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven’t done.”
Tom Hurndall

“A brave man who stood alone. If only the world had listened to him… I wish I had met him because – looking back over the history of that terrible war – Hurndall’s journals (soon to be published) show a remarkable man of remarkable principle.”
Robert Fisk

Tom Hurndall, a young British photojournalist and peace worker, was shot in the head in Gaza in April 2003
whilst carrying Palestinian children to safety. He died nine months later in a London hospital. The book will
contain Tom’s photographs in the weeks running up to his shooting, as well as his personal writing from his
diaries and poems, and contains a preface by Robert Fisk.

Trolley are launching a crowdfunding campaign for our book ‘The Only House Left Standing – the Middle
East Journals of Tom Hurndall.’ The eight week campaign will launch on Friday 26th November, the day
before Tom’s birthday, with a panel talk commencing at 16.00 GMT. The panel includes:
• Tom’s parents Anthony and Jocelyn Hurndall
• John Sweeney – BBC Panorama journalist who did 2003 documentary ‘When Killing is Easy’ and Independent
article Silenced Witnesses
• Rowan Joffe and Simon Block – Director and Screenwriter of Channel 4 BAFTA-nominated film documentary
The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall
• Mohammed Qeshta – who was with Tom when we was shot and worked for the International Solidarity
Movement
• Gigi Giannuzzi - publisher and founder of Trolley Books
It will be an hour long panel discussion of people who know Tom’s story and will be filmed and streamed
live online to launch the fundraising campaign. The aim of this talk will be to engage the audience with
Tom’s work and the concept of the book, whilst encouraging people to donate money towards it.

The platform for the crowdfunding campaign will be Indiegogo, who support creative projects looking for much-needed financial support, especially those with a documentary basis. Please visit our page HERE for more updates and information shortly  on how to pledge and the rewards you will receive in return for doing so. Indiegogo is a pledge-for-reward social platform where supporters of our project will be able to pledge anything from £5 upwards. For example a pledge of £25 effectively pre-orders a copy of the book and supporters will be the first to receive it when it is printed. An edited version of the talk will afterwards be uploaded to our Indiegogo page online….

Thanks to Beth Evans, James Cunningham at Streamingwizard, James Irwin at Focus24, Igor Degtiarec at Agile Films

Gentlemen of Bacongo by Daniele Tamagni
@ Museum of Arts and Design

The Global Africa Project
November 17, 2010 – May 15, 2011
2 Columbus Circle, New York 10019

An unprecedented exhibition exploring the broad spectrum of contemporary African art, design, and craft worldwide. Featuring the work over 100 artists working in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean, The Global Africa Project surveys the rich pool of new talent emerging from the African continent and its influence on artists around the world.

Continue reading »

Monday 22nd November 2010

Publisher of Trolley Books Gigi Giannuzzi’s speech at opening ceremony:

I had the honour to meet Philip Jones Griffiths in 2002 after a common friend told me about his work on Agent Orange which no one was willing to publish. I knew of him after his milestone book Viet Nam Inc., the most important example of a photo-reportage publication which changed the public opinion towards war and, more in particular, made a difference to the public perception of the war in Viet Nam. Nervous and wary of what I was told could be a very difficult character, I contacted and met him in his flat in NY. You could immediately tell that this man loved life and in particular loved his work. His passion and dedication were palpable, the room full of computers, printers, photos, negatives and, on top of the table where he was sitting, his project for the book Agent Orange.

His stories were movie-like, his empathy towards his contemporaries instinctive, his knowledge impressive. Our understanding was instantaneous, no need for words. Within six months we had edited the book and published it in nine. The book has not ceased shocking people since, not only for the value and strength of the pictures, but also its documentation of the extent of the damage, in such a way never previously acknowledged.

Until his death in 2008, Philip and I shared an important part of our lives and we went on to publish two more books, one on the 25 years of life in Viet Nam after the war and one on his youthful years in the UK. Nowadays I continue to share an important part of my life with Philip’s two daughters, Fanny and Katherine, the Trustees of the Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation, who are with us today and to whom we are grateful for helping to make this event possible.

The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation is proud to offer this exhibition of 47 photographs to the War Remnants Museum and to the Vietnamese Nation as testimony to the horrors fellow humans are able to inflict upon each other. We hope Philip’s work may always remind the half a million people who pass through this museum every year of the effects these types of weapons have on both sides of any war. And in the case of Agent Orange, the effect it continues to have so many years after the war has ended.

Philip Jones Griffiths dedicated all his life to Viet Nam, its culture and traditions that he admired so much he came to value and recognise through his own experience of growing up in Wales, and the similar threat to Welsh culture and language from England. He was in Viet Nam during the war against the United States, and was the first Western journalist to enter the country when the war finished. He kept on coming back every year until he died, to enjoy the country he loved so much, but also to continue to document the aftermath of the war. In this period one of the most important contributions of his life’s work was to uncover the effects of Agent Orange that continue to afflict the Vietnamese people.

We feel the Agent Orange project is helping to achieve recognition of this problem and justice for the victims. There must be a reason why, after so many years of refusal to acknowledge the effects of Agent Orange, recently the US Congress pledged $300 million to start cleaning up the still dioxin-contaminated land and address health treatment in Viet Nam. It is not enough, but at least it is on the right path.

The Foundation is happy and honoured that once this exhibition closes, Philip’s pictures will be shown here on a permanent basis and we look forward to developing our partnership with the War Remnants museum.

Philip always thought that this would be a very difficult war to win, but he kept on fighting. It is a shame he could not see with his own eyes the results of his work today. He would be impressed to see things have moved so far and so fast. I know for sure he would be very happy and proud to have an exhibition today at the War Remnants Museum.

Trolley are launching a crowdfunding campaign for our book ‘The Only House Left Standing – the Middle East Journals of Tom Hurndall.’ Tom Hurndall, a young British photojournalist and peace worker, was shot in the head in Gaza in April 2003 whilst carrying Palestinian children to safety. He died nine months later in a London hospital. The book will contain Tom’s photographs in the weeks running up to his shooting, as well as his personal writing from his diaries and poems, and contains a preface by Robert Fisk.

The eight week campaign will launch on Friday 26th November, the day before Tom’s birthday, with a panel talk commencing at 16.00 GMT. The panel includes:

• Tom’s parents Anthony and Jocelyn Hurndall
• John Sweeney – BBC Panorama journalist who did 2003 documentary ‘When Killing is Easy’ and Independent article Silenced Witnesses
• Rowan Joffe and Simon Block – Director and Screenwriter of Channel 4 BAFTA-nominated film documentary The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall
• Mohammed Qeshta – who was with Tom when we was shot and worked for the International Solidarity Movement
• Gigi Giannuzzi – publisher and founder of Trolley Books

It will be an hour long panel discussion of people who know Tom’s story and will be filmed and streamed live online to launch the fundraising campaign. The aim of this talk will be to engage the audience with Tom’s work and the concept of the book, whilst encouraging people to donate money towards it. We are inviting participants to watch the online panel talk live, on your computer, ipad or iphone, simply by registering with your email in advance http://tomhurndalltrolleybooks.eventbrite.com/. We will then send you information on how to join us online live for the talk.

Wapping Project website

Open Shutters Iraq by Eugenie Dolberg was presented last Monday by the author Eugenie Dolberg, Maysoon Pachachi, film director and co-founder of Act Together: Women’s Action on Iraq, Nadje Al-Ali of the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies, and Trolley Books. Photographer Eugenie Dolberg ran the Open Shutters Iraq project in 2006 to give a voice to Iraqi women who too often silently bear the consequences of destruction and violence around them and their families.

For a month, a group of women of different ages and from different backgrounds lived and worked together in a courtyard house in the Old City in Damascus, Syria, where they learned about photography and shared their life stories, before going back to Iraq to shoot their photo-stories. Project manager Irada al Jabbouri travelled Iraq using different IDs and disguises to find women to participate in the project—all the more challenging considering that, as Eugenie explained, a lot of Iraqi passports have been invalidated in the past by making some of the digits illegible, to prevent people from leaving the country. Continue reading »