Seventy days after the October 7 massacre, Emmanuel Santos was on a plane to Israel, commissioned by the Sydney Jewish Museum to document the aftermath. The Melbourne-based photojournalist has been to Israel many times before, but what he was about to document was like nothing he had ever seen.
“I didn’t know what was really waiting for me, or what kind of the consciousness or state of feeling was in the collective community,” Santos told The AJN. “I went with the premise of a blank canvas, to absorb whatever there is to be absorbed from the stories, the visions, the noises. Everything.”
Santos said he had very few expectations of what would greet him upon arrival. He just knew he was arriving to a place that was no longer the same.
“I knew that I was arriving in a place that was broken. And I just had to encounter those broken pieces one by one,” he recalled.
The photographer described Israel as previously having a type of allure and attraction with energy. “Every day I knew that I could expect miracles, just conversing with people and encountering places I’d never encountered before. It’s a place full of enigmatic beauty, enigmatic energy, enigmatic inspiration and life. It’s life in its own form, in its own duality. The eccentricities and the chaos and the order, the colour of the culture. To me, there’s beauty in that,” he said. “Coming to these broken pieces, where all those ingredients have been broken, tampered upon, has been vandalised or antagonised. Where is that miracle? Where is that life? Where is the heart and soul of the people? Arriving there, to me, they were absent.”
Santos photographed what he saw, collecting stories to preserve. He collated 2650 photographs, capturing the trauma, memorials and the altered daily life of Israel. The images are now the subject of a powerful new feature exhibition called Into the Heartless Light of Darkness at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
The exhibition also includes an audiovisual component, with a selection of images displayed in a loop, narrated by Santos. It’s surreal walking through while listening to the photographer.
Preservation is incredibly important he told The AJN, especially as so many conflicting narratives have since appeared. He said his photographs capture the moments that he saw but also the history for future generations.
“It sums up the Alpha and Omega of everything, the beginning and the end, in one captured picture. They say an image may speak 1000 words. As much as I tried to create an image that would speak 1000 words, some of them may only speak one word or even a letter,” Santos said, before explaining that all the images put together portray the whole vocabulary of what he experienced.
One image that speaks thousands of words is of a wheatfield, eerily green despite the horror surrounding it. As Santos writes in the accompanying words, it is “a metaphor on the emotional, physical and spiritual resilience of Israel”.
Importantly, Santos said, the photographs are not a commentary about what happened. They are not wrapped up in the politics of anything going on. They are simply stories of humanity. And humanity is what he hopes visitors tap into when they view the exhibition.
“The feeling is touching each person’s humanity. Things are happening, whether it’s pain, sorrow, jubilation or joy. This is a core truth of an event that happened, and it could be you. It could be me, my sister, my neighbour. It could be anyone,” he said. “I want people to see that. To see that we are all in this. Not just the Israelis, not just the Jews, not just the Palestinians. We are part of the same mechanism, the same organism, the same universe that exists.”
Santos describes himself as a witness to his camera. And it all comes back to this concept of humanity. Even in the darkness, there is light.
While he says he witnessed a bit of desensitisation to the ‘bad news’ when he arrived in Israel, especially as there was very little ‘good news’ while he was there, he did observe the light – the resilience of the Israeli people and the fight to find a way through the darkness.
“What is the light? The light is the dream of having peace. No one was saying ‘I’m going to take revenge.’ Everyone was compassionate,” he said, before continuing with a cry to advocate for the light. “The dark forces are so strong. We need to believe in our own light, that it will prevail no matter what. Even at nighttime, the dawn comes in and the sun rises the next day.”
Into the Heartless Light of Darkness is now exhibiting at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
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