Cold Mundaneness of Palestine

Cold acceptance of the mundaneness of Palestine

Palestine | Sunday, November 6, 2011 | 4 photos

Traveling for the past five months on sabbatical, a friend sent me the link for this scholarship. I chose to submit this set of photos from where I currently am in Palestine over many vivid shots of Eastern Europe in favor of what I thought was a more compelling story. What I saw here is the jarring contrast between the global narrative of the cold conflict between Israel and Palestine and the real events of daily life. Israeli policy in the West Bank is reminiscent of Manifest Destiny in the Americas, and on the ground it is not sensationalized but rather testimonies from locals say it is a very real inevitability. The strife has simmered into mundaneness. The overwhelming feeling is Israel will continue to expand towards the Jordanian border with the disposition that the West Bank Palestinians are simply negligible or non-existent. Hanna Safieh’s work from 1927-1967, a revolutionary Palestinian photographer, shows shots of Palestinian fishermen on the Mediterranean coast, a shot no one can take today. What I have to contrast it with are photos of my set mostly of a cold acceptance of the last 60 years’ events and outcomes.

My photographic philosophy is the idea that all photos and how they are shot are deep telling elements in the story of that person in that time that they shot that photo. The subject is equal in importance to the photographic decisions and circumstances under which the photo was taken. My passion in photography is to explore this idea further and with more experienced mentors under this opportunity I would want to absorb the experience and knowledge fully.