Healing in the Aftermath of a Massacre

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On a Friday afternoon in July 2011, Andrea Gjestvang was preparing to leave the offices of the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, where she was working as a temporary photo editor, when an enormous explosion shook the building, blowing out windows.

It wasn't immediately clear what had happened. As her colleagues screamed, Ms. Gjestvang fled down the fire escape and made her way to the site of the explosion. She wasn't prepared for the sight of eight dead bodies.

She also wasn't prepared to start taking photographs.

“It was absurd, because I was working as a picture editor and I didn't have my cameras,” she said. “I found myself in the middle of what happened, and I was very scared and almost paralyzed.”

After taking in the carnage for a few minutes, she sprinted nearly two miles home to get her gear and raced back to photograph the scene. For someone who had never covered war, it seemed impossible that anything worse could happen. But then news came that the Norwegian right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had bombed the government center in Oslo had then gone on a shooting rampage at an island summer camp for young members of the governing Labor Party. He killed 69 people, mostly youth. Another 500 survived the massacre, though many were badly wounded.

Ms. Gjestvang, 32, helped put out the newspaper from temporary offices. The next day, she photographed the scene at the hotel where uninjured camp survivors were being reunited with family members and examined by doctors.

“It was terrible to be there,” she said.

The following weeks were taken up with putting out the paper and photographing a seemingly endless wave of sadness. Norway was overwhelmed with grief. By September, it seemed that everything that could be said about the tragedy and what it meant for Norway had been said in the exhaustive news coverage. But Ms. Gjestvang decided to explore the nature of surviving such a catastrophic event.

“I was very moved by the incident, and I didn't feel that it was possible not to do the project,” she said.

Gingerly, she began reaching out to survivors and their families, but she didn't start photographing until after Christmas 2011 because, she said, she “wanted to wait to give the youth some time to recover.” She found that most of them “wanted to be able to tell the story differently than in media headlines.”

Andrea Gjestvang/Moment Adrian, 22, swam from the shore as the gunman charged at him. Instead of shooting, however, he walked away. Later, lying on the ground under a jacket, Adrian was struck by a bullet in the left shoulder.

Ms. Gjestvang interviewed each of her subjects to present their words next to her photos. Some wanted to show their physical scars, while others preferred not to. Each approached the recovery process, physical or emotional, differently. She describes their ordeal in an introduction to the project:

They have returned to their daily lives now. They go to school, they hang out with friends and they fall in love. They go to bed every night and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning. But something has changed. The young survivors will live on with their scars - both visible and mental - many of which may never fully heal.

Some have difficulties handling the easiest tasks, and many struggle to find meaning in life. On the other hand, some of the survivors have gained a stronger belief in themselves, and they appreciate being alive.

Around the time Ms. Gjestvang started her project, she learned that she was pregnant with her first child. That knowledge made the project all the more resonant for her and enabled her to empathize more deeply.

“I met so much death and suffering, and now I had this person growing inside me,” she said. “Of course, I was thinking about all these parents that had lost their child or got their child back with these unbelievable physical or psychological scars.”

Her daughter, Agnes, is now 6 months old. When she is older, she will be able to read her mother's book, “En Dag i Historien” (“A Day in History”), which was published in Norwegian this year.

While many photojournalists work in places where their subjects are unlikely to see their images, this was different.

“I had to be very aware of every little step in the process,” Ms. Gjestvang said, “because the 22nd of July is such a sensitive topic in Norway and everyone has an opinion.”

But even though so much has been written about the attacks, Ms. Gjestvang says she discovered that “a photographer can really contribute to history.”

“I think this has taught me to take my work even more seriously,” she said.

Andrea Gjestvang/Moment “I wear a mask. I wear a mask in school and among friends. I smile and I am happy. I'm laughing and joking. Many times it's straight from the heart. But often, too often, it is forced out. Sometimes I wonder if my classmates have heard my real laughter.” Cathrine, 17, swam away from the gunshots and was eventually rescued by volunteers in a boat.

Ms. Gjestvang's photographs of Greenland were featured on Lens in 2010. She recently won a FotoVisura Photography Grant, the l'Iris d'Or at the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards and first place in the portrait series category in the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism contest. She is represented by Moment photo agency.

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