Photo Switch

This: 

has been switched with the photo to the right, taken at a protest against the Gaza siege and a display of solidarity that took place in Nablus on November 30th, 2008. 

About Us

This entry is definitely still under construction. I need Ahmed Abu Salma's photo and statements from each photographer (including myself, oh lord), so this isn't the last time I'll edit this. In short though, we are all very different people from different backgrounds, with different equipment, visions and experience who have put our work together to tell a story that far exceeds ourselves. Everything else needed here is forthcoming.

Mohammed Farraj

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Zoriah Miller

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Ahmad Al-Nemer

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Lilith Antinori

I believe that the power of photography, when appropriately harnessed, is to incite a visceral need to understand in its audiences. Photography can create a discourse, and that is my aim here. The plight of the Palestinian people, a people who live daily under the illegal colonization of West Bank and in the open prison of the Gaza Strip, is one that is not heard enough in the very countries that are instrumental in providing Israel with the money and weapons to do these things.

When I walked into the West Bank, I saw hatred and terror as I had never encountered it before. Everyone I met, Palestinian or Israeli, had a reason to be afraid and a reason to hate. In my last week in Palestine, settler violence erupted and spread through the West Bank. I went to a village called Al-Funduq, a village surrounded by hostile settlements, to photograph settlers coming in. The army blockaded them, and there was no violence that afternoon. But, afterwards, as I walked away, a settler woman in a car called out “taal”, attempting to make me come to her in gender-confused and mispronounced Arabic spoken with a distinct American accent. The hatred in her voice stopped me dead in my tracks, and I realized that this woman, who is also American, would be ready to beat me to death with a rock if I went near her. It floored me. I walked away from her, my jaw clenched, fighting off that toxic hatred and fear that had so utterly consumed her and everyone that I had spent the afternoon photographing. It soaks through like the blood it spills, through the parents, through the soldiers, through the settlers, into their children. And those children, with their old, enraged or completely hollow eyes, are forgotten, abandoned and ignored by a world more concerned the ideology of freedom and purity than the life that ideology has cost us. When you meet them, those children hit you like a bullet. They deserve that. They deserve to haunt us, they deserve to deafen us with their screams. We should fall to our knees at their feet, but at the very least we can make the effort to understand and contest the circumstances that have so robbed them of the chance to have a life free of hatred and terror.

Shawn Duffy

I have two passions in life. The first, and oldest, is Palestine. My passion for understanding more about the Palestinian experience dates back to my early teens. While watching the news one night when I was around thirteen or fourteen, I asked my father why there always seemed to be fighting in the Middle East. I don't remember what his answer was but it obviously didn't satisfy me. I began voraciously consuming books about the Middle East. I even majored in Middle East Studies a few years later in college. Finally, in 2005, I had a chance to see Palestine with my own eyes. I was blown away by the incredible people and their seemingly impossible struggle. One thing stuck with me, though. I was constantly asking myself: "Why am I not seeing this in the news?" "Why don't Americans understand what is being done with their tax dollars?" When I returned to the United States, I began to search for ways to tell their story. It was an urgent and terrible story that not only affected the lives of the people I came to love and respect, but it affected the lives of the people in my own country in a way so deep and profound that it was actually invisible to most Americans.

Within a year of returning from Palestine in 2005, I discovered my second passion. Photography. It immediately became the perfect medium through which to speak to my fellow citizens. I eagerly anticipated the day when I could return to Palestine armed with nothing more than a burning desire to learn as much as I could and a Canon 5D. That day came in 2008. The photos you see here are from that trip in June 2008.

I am currently in the process of planning my next photo project in Palestine. And while I always look forward to visiting my second home, I am even more eager to tell the story of a free Palestine.

Nablus Invasion Photos

These photos were taking by another student of mine, who showed up for one class and then promptly disappeared forever. His first name was Nimer, but his last is still an ongoing investigative effort. The top photo and portrait on the right are of another student at An-Najah National University, Sa'eb, who volunteers for the Zajel Youth Exchange Organization that I was volunteering through. I'm going to try to have him write the caption for this.

These photos were taken when the IDF invaded a home in the old city of Nablus last year looking for the pictured militant. They broke through at least two apartments, shooting a 12 year-old boy dead in his bed and the finding and killing this man, who was with some fundamentalist group or another. The cookie-cutter shaped wounds you're seeing are the exit wounds of dum-dum bullets. Dum-dum bullets flatten and fragment on impact, causing maximum tissue damage. They're illegal under international law for being such an inhumane means to an end and are sold to the Israelis by the USA.

Exhibition Update and Mosaics

These are mosaics of the 75 photos that are planned for the exhibition thus far, pre any final edits. Captions and final edits are coming, as is a real web site for this exhibition. Obviously bigfunlabs managed to reorient some of these photos from vertical to horizontal without consulting me, if anyone's standing sideways there you go.

So far Mohammed and I have gotten in touch with and secured the interest The Wheels of Justice Organization, Harvard, Columbia, and the Students for Justice in Palestine Org. at Penn State and the UT Austin Palestine Solidarity Committee. 

Photos © 2008 Ahmad Al-Nimer, Mohammed Faraj, Ahmed Abu Salma, Lilith Antinori and Zoriah Miller. Taken in The West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Click the photo to enlarge.