Harmit Singh’s War

Harmit Singh was an Indian Photojournalist who joined Black Star, a photo agency founded by German Jewish refugees in 1935. Singh was trained as an architect but left transnational architecture projects in Kenya in the mid-60s to become a photojournalist in India. One of his most famous projects was on the “discovery” of Black Ethiopian Jews for National Geographic. This book will be a collection of Harmit Singh’s never-seen photographs along with paired chapters by myself and his daughter about the twinned crises of journalism and re-staging when audiences are numbed to the “pain of others” by their own contexts. Incomplete decolonization, accelerated by looming climate change, set the stage for low-level unending wars. This book lives at the conjuncture of two refugee eras (post-1945 and post-2001) and is on the cusp of a paradigm shift in photo ethics.