PARIS: The Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris (MAM) is again embroiled in controversy. The institution is just recovering from censorship charges, after last month denying minors access to a photo exhibit on teen love, drugs, violence and sex.

Now an exhibition of photographs by award-winning German photojournalist Kai Wiedenhöfer has been strongly condemned by CRIF, the powerful Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions. Wiedenhöfer’s show, “Gaza 2010,” focuses on the destruction caused by Israel’s war on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009.

The pictures in the show emerged after Wiedenhöfer won 2009’s Carmignac Gestion Foundation photojournalism prize, the first, with its attendant 50,000-euro grant. The photographer’s winning proposal (made in early 2008) had simply been the Gaza Strip.

The Carmignac Gestion Foundation prize was created in 2009 to support the work of photojournalists. Wiedenhöfer’s proposal also benefitted from an exhibition and a book. An independent management company, Carmignac is also an important patron of MAM and the museum’s director, Fabrice Hergott, was on the jury that awarded Wiedenhöfer’s work.

The pictures in the exhibition are of two kinds: Panoramic photographs of gutted buildings and portraits of Palestinians who were seriously wounded in Israeli attacks.

A CRIF press release called the show anti-Israeli propaganda, adding that the photographer chose to ignore the numerous Israeli victims. This was an act of political militancy, said the CRIF, and should not be accepted by MAM, which is under the aegis of the city of Paris.

Hergott responded that the show was not part of the museum’s programmed events and that the exhibition hall had been lent to the Carmignac Foundation. Carmignac said it did not intend to take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no mention of the exhibition on the museum’s website.

In an interview shortly after the opening, Wiedenhöfer said reactions had been positive but he was “expecting problems. Of course people will ask me what about the Israeli victims.”

While at work on his project he had tracked down an Israeli doctor in Ashkelon who had been hit by a missile and had a limb amputated. “Of course it’s bad for her but it’s not possible to have one or two Israelis and 70 Palestinians. It’s simply too disproportionate.”

Wiedenhöfer, who has been photographing in Gaza for the past 20 years, was on assignment there for Stern magazine during the Israeli onslaught. Afterward, he set out to photograph what he said was his most difficult project ever.

“When you work in a war zone you are not really aware of what’s happening because everything is going so fast … But these people have all had their injuries for a year so they know what it means for their life and the everyday problems they have.

“When I’m in a conflict situation I have a good excuse to be there. But it’s a completely different thing when you say to people, ‘I want to come to your house and photograph your wounds.’ It’s a kind of voyeurism.”

Wiedenhöfer’s portraits are at once unbearable and utterly compelling.

One photo finds Wafa al-Raddiaa clutching her child; when she was on her way to give birth at the hospital in January 2009, she was hit by two missiles, lost a leg and was left for dead.

“Because these people’s injuries were so serious, I didn’t have to emphasize it,” Wiedenhöfer said. “I just said, ‘Please look straight into the camera’ and I tried to work with eye contact.”

Perhaps this is what makes the portraits so remarkable – with a complete absence of drama, the subjects lock eyes with the viewer, drawing them away from their horrific mutilations.

A hijab-clad woman has pulled up her dress to reveal the wounds on her leg. A bedouin without limbs stares solemnly at the camera – he lives in a sandy area where he can move about on his stumps.

Wiedenhöfer worked with a German-speaking fixer and a community worker called Um Walid. At first he thought he would spend half a day with each subject but it turned out to be much quicker.

“I realized that people say yes but they mean no at the same time. It’s not a nice experience for them. So you go. You interview them. You take the photographs and you leave very quickly. If you overdo it, people can get angry. No one got angry but you just feel it.”

Wiedenhöfer wrote the   captions accompanying his work, which are dispassionate and to the point.

Wiedenhöfer grew up in southern Germany near Stuttgart, the son and grandson of men who had fought in World Wars I and II. His father owned many books on Nazi history and the foundation of the state of Israel.

When, as a high school student in 1982, the nascent photographer was assigned to follow a political topic for a year, he chose the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shortly after he began, the Sabra and Shatila massacres took place. He travelled to the Middle East when he was 23 and lived in Gaza for 15 months in 1993-94 stopping in Damascus en route, to learn Arabic.

As a German, Wiedenhöfer’s focussing on Palestinians has been complicated.

“I don’t pay much attention to pressure put on me,” he said. “My father wasn’t a concentration camp commander or anything like that.

“There is always this legacy thing in Germany, but what I see as my heritage out of this [Nazi] period is to focus on international law. Today, with the knowledge I have, I would actually study international law rather than photography.”

Wiedenhöfer echoes what German jurist and writer Bernhard Schlink has often stressed – that the pursuit of justice is essential as a way to heal past atrocities.

“I used the Goldstone Report for this project,” he said. 

“I called people that I read about in the report. It’s really an amazing document.”

Judge Richard Goldstone’s September 2009 report to the UN urged the Human Rights Council and the international community to put an end to impunity with which international law is violated in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Wiedenhöfer is no stranger to conflict zones, having worked in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon among other countries.

Wiedenhöfer says he tried to sell his Gaza images to international magazines, where he often publishes his work, but no one would publish the portraits of injured people. “Without this grant, my project would not have existed,” he observed. “It shows what you can do when you have free reign. I just did what I wanted to and what I thought was good.”

He is now back in the Occupied Territories photographing the security wall for an upcoming book on barriers that will include, among others, pictures taken in Belfast, Berlin and between the US and Mexico.

The Gaza project has exhausted Wiedenhöfer and confirmed his thoughts on a desperate situation. “We’ve been talking about the same stuff for years,” he said.

He perks up when talking about “The Book of Destruction,” the photo collection that emerged from the Paris exhibit, just published by Steidl.

“We are going to ship 50 books to Jerusalem and get them into Gaza. I want every person to get a copy. I will get them in somehow.”

Kai Wiedenhöfer’s photographs are on exhibit at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris until 5 December. The exhibit will travel to London’s Qattan Foundation in in early 2011.