THE DEFIANT LIBRARY: GLOBAL LIBRARIES IN TIMES OF CONFLICT

Increasingly we seem to be entering a new culture of conflict. This book offers examples of how libraries in places of conflict have stood up to these challenges. The stories here draw from 30 years of photographing libraries from the infamous refugee camp “the Jungle” in Calais, France to Holocaust-haunted former synagogues turned into libraries in Poland to libraries close to the hot war in eastern Ukraine to a Russian State Library for young adults in an art-nouveau mansion in Moscow. The project also documented how libraries worked with immigrants and refugees throughout Greece, Italy, Israel and the Palestinian Territories on a six-month Fulbright Global Scholar Fellowship. Recent work captured stories from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, the United Kingdom as well as from intentionally destroyed libraries in Sarajevo. The project records the role that libraries and archives play in places of war and confrontation, and in regions that have experienced devastating natural disasters. We looked at libraries that straddle ethnic, political or cultural borders and how they can offer security and opportunity to marginalized or displaced communities. The threat to a library is often simply a lack of funds to protect their collections or just to stay open. These photographs demonstrate how libraries, large and small, urban and rural, public and private have defied the odds of their very existence by confronting these challenges in an uncertain world.

Our work has been influenced by many notable photographic surveys, specifically the nineteenth-century government surveys of the American West, the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, and the Seagram’s Courthouse project in the 1970s. In addition, the work of author Kenneth Helphand has provided clarity and focus to our own wide-ranging project. In his book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, Helphand proposes that tending gardens in conflict zones or struggling communities can become an act of resistance and resilience. Libraries, like gardens, can also be places of growth, but require our care and attention. Both offer nourishment, thrive in openness and die in darkness. New York Times writer David Brooks described a response to our contentious times as “Defiant Humanism”—defying division and despair by protecting our shared history, identity, and memory. These concepts have shaped and guided our photographic survey of libraries in times of conflict.

We dedicate this book to these defiant libraries.