Skip Schiel’s West Bank photos and reports
The Photography of Skip Schiel:
I join with others in various campaigns for peace, justice, reconciliation, and truth-telling. I play, experiment, and contemplate—might get arrested and imprisoned periodically. Maybe I join a pilgrimage, a vigil, a rally or a talk or an outing along a river; maybe I simply stay home and absorb the afternoon light.
I photograph. I am a socially engaged photographer.
I make photographs for you a viewer, for my family and friends that you and they might know me more intimately, for myself to remember where and when I existed, and for you not yet born.
Recent issues include prisons in the United States, environmental desecration, racial justice, pilgrimage, South Africa, poverty, American Indians, the US South, and resistance to oppressive regimes in the US and abroad. I am exploring digital technology, curious about its influence on photography–producing, consuming, and thinking about the photograph. I am currently making a series of photographs about Palestine and Israel– Levant, the Rising.
–Skip Schiel, June 2005
I met Skip Schiel a couple of weeks ago, shortly before he returned to the West Bank. On his website you can see photos from earlier visits there and elsewhere. You can also read his reports and subscribe to his email list.
His latest email describes last Friday’s weekly protest against the Separation Wall at Bil’in, which I’ve written about here before since visiting Bil’in more than a year ago. Skip begins:
A first for me: resistance to the Separation Barrier in the Palestinian village of Bil’in.
After reading so much about the villagers stalwart resistance to occupation—tearing down a part of the fence, placing a caravan (temporary dwelling, like what the Israeli settlers use to establish a new settlement, a fact on the ground) on Palestinian land, having it torn down by the military, then putting another up, this torn down, and now constructing a small one room concrete block building that will serve as a sort of organizational center, generally a continuing nonviolent defiance of authority, a peaceful resistance to the incursion of the apartheid wall so close to their village—I had the opportunity to observe and witness with my camera this exemplary group of people. I’d heard about the weekly action from Hisham at Faisal, contacted the International Solidarity Movement’s media center (conveniently for me) located in Ramallah, found the office in Ramallah’s Old City, and after waiting around the apartment for some 2 hours meeting people from the Philippines, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Australia, and the US, all younger than 30 years I’d estimate, we headed out in a jammed service taxi.
On the ride and in the village, several times people prepared us for the action: we must remain nonviolent, we will de-escalate any violence, you can pull back at any point if you are not comfortable with what is happening, usually there is an almost scripted sequence of events: a march thru the village to the fence, blocked by the army, push thru or go around, army pushes back, some might be arrested. Arrests is especially serious for Palestinians, then next for internationals, and least of all for our Israeli Jewish counterparts who are usually released after a short period of detention. Then the kids start throwing rocks at the soldiers and the soldiers fire back with tear gas and maybe rubber bullets. Or they might fire in the air. Rarely is anyone injured. Don’t worry; you’ll be all right.
For me, trepidation and excitement set in. How will I respond to tear gas, to rubber bullets flying my way, to rock throwing? Will I turn and run, or continue into the midst of the action? The renowned photographer, Robert Capa, always wisely said, if the photo is not good enough, the photographer was not close enough. A landmine blew him up during the last days of the French-led Indochinese War.
How will Bil’in resemble the arrest I was part of on the Cambridge Common last summer when the US Army put on a recruitment extravaganza and I was inadvertently arrested while photographing? What will be the demeanor of the soldiers? How might that compare to police action in the States?
This particular event was characterized by yet another brilliantly creative stratagem—a huge mock tombstone, made of fabric and wood, carried by villagers to the site, inscribed in Arabic, Hebrew and English with words, R.I.P. VICTIMS VILLAGES WHOS LAND WAS STOLEN—REASON THE WALL AND THE OCCUPATION—YEAR 2006
The march was festive, people were smiling and chanting, youth were in the forefront. All this apparently had been coordinated by the village’s popular committee, and supported by various internationals like the ISM, and by Israeli activists, often aligned with the anarchist movement. The festive tone continued even when the march front line encountered the soldiers. Soldiers blocked the procession. The leaders of the procession then pushed against the soldiers, trying to reach the fence. Soldiers shoved back, and in minutes the tombstone collapsed, a heap of white fabric and wooden sticks. Then a mixture of chaos and order ensued, rancor and succor, conversation with the soldiers and arrests. Eventually two young men were arrested, both Israeli. The army detained them behind the fence and I saw them both later in the village. There are virtually no ramifications from such arrests—Israel supposedly would rather duck the publicity, and the courts would most likely not convict. Or so I was told. ….
