Bereaved | Rina Castelnuovo | New York Times

Photo © Rina Castelnuovo -All Rights Reserved

For a while now, I had taken the decision not to feature work by conflict photographers.

The banality and superficiality of what was published led to a sort of tediousness...an intellectual and visual fatigue for such work. Comparing the conflict photographers of today with titans such as Don McCullin led me to abandon any interest in this type of photography.

But suddenly there appears work of such empathy...of such depth and of such impact, that I regained a bit faith again. No, it's not conflict photography per se... quite the opposite. However, it's photographed in a conflict area...and is of people involved in a 65+ years confrontation...often, violent and dehumanizing.

This compelling work was published by The New York Times (yes, the very same newspaper that sold us the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction lie, and now tries hard to convince us that the popular uprising in Egypt is a "coup", amongst other journalistic pearls), and is titled Bereaved by Rina Castelnuovo.

While I could easily distinguish the Palestinian women from the Israeli because of their dress, it was impossible to distinguish the men from each other....in line with many studies proving that Arabs and Jews are genetically a single population.

Rina Castelnuovo is an Israeli photographer, who has been documenting the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis for more than 30 years, 17 of them as a contract photographer for The New York Times based in Jerusalem.

You can read more about Bereaved here.