Skip Schiel - Ordinary Life in Occupied Palestine
A few weeks ago I referred to photojournalist Skip Schiel’s current trip to Palestine and Israel. His work is a fascinating blend of photographic images, political analysis, and personal narrative.
Today’s email from Skip to his subscriber list included a journal entry he wrote as his trip began in early March, titled Anticipating an ordinary life in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. He introduced the entry this way:
The two attached photos show a retired school teacher in his friends’ quilt and mattress shop in Ramallah, and returning spring birds in the tree outside my veranda, also in Ramallah. They are emblems of ordinary life, one of my themes (thanks to a suggestion from my friend, Sherif Fam, and a leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwich), but this is not to deny or discount the reality of harsh oppression most Palestinians experience minute by minute.
Darwich says, “All we [Palestinians] want is to be ordinary.”
I’m glad Skip is examining ordinary Palestinian life. Of course it’s important to document oppression, and photography is one of the best ways to show its consequences. Where oppression has obvious markers — walls, guns, funerals, hardships, soldiers, refugee camps, angry faces, dejected faces — photos, as well as journals and voice recordings and drawings and much more, can clarify what is happening. This work can arouse consciences, spur activism and resistance, and lead to justice. That is why I, too, on my own trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2004-2005, created galleries of my own portraying the separation barrier, checkpoints, militant youth, and so on.
On the other hand, like Skip I also made a point of photographing scenes of daily Palestinian life. I remember that when I took some of those photos, during a two-week political exploration organized by Faculty for Israeli Palestinian Peace, I explained to others on the tour who were skeptical that it was important to show everyday people doing everyday things. Depictions of oppression and victimhood are powerful and necessary, but, ironically and perhaps unfortunately, depictions of ordinary life are more likely to help people outside the region identify on a human-to-human level with those who are victimized.
This may be unfair. Oppression and hunger and poverty and humiliation should be enough of a spur. But I don’t think it usually is, at least in the mainstream middle-class American context where people who mean well are confronted with conflicting depictions and ideological justifications. People are less likely to accept explanations that make oppression seem necessary and legitimate when they realize the victims include ordinary people just like themselves doing what, to us, seems natural and comfortable rather than strange and alien — laugh and play, go to school or work, eat dinner or go to a movie with family or friends.
That’s why, during my own trip last year, I also took photos of mundane life. Ladders for sale in front of a Ramallah hardware store. A man fixing a light in front of a bank in Abu Dis. Construction workers. Street scenes remarkable only because they were unremarkable.
I did the same in Israel. Mutual humanization won’t resolve political differences under conditions of unequal power, but it’s worth attempting in any case.
