I was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother from New York. Raised in the US, I learned the Western canon, but I returned to Palestine annually. As a teenager, I noticed a dissonance between how the West conceived of Palestine on the one hand, and Palestinian collective-consciousness on the other.
This body of work is called Before Freedom — it looks at the current moment in Palestine — the moment before we are free from Israeli Apartheid.
Fundamentally, my goal through these images is to re-appropriate representations of Palestine from Western description. Throughout the past century, the Palestinian narrative has been written by foreign actors through orientalist eyes, primarily with the objective of colonizing our homeland. This work is a new interpretation of orientalism as a narrative gestalt — a philological reconstruction of images and politics that are reimagined through a redistribution of geopolitical, socio-cultural, and historical awareness into aesthetic form.
I believe that by decolonizing photography of Palestine through the internalization of indigenous image-making, we can decolonize our minds and achieve a more nuanced understanding of Palestinian reality. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge outlines how systems of thought and knowledge are delineated by cognitive formations operating beneath individual consciousness. These formations work beyond the rules of rational logic and instead define the system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
Robert Capa knew this well when he said “The truth is the best picture…” In Regarding the Pain of Suffering, Susan Sontag confirmed this philosophy when she wrote “Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes…Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about.”
The Israeli settler colonial narrative, which is embedded in Western discourse, attempts to erase and dehumanize Palestinian identity.
My photography works in opposition to that force of erasure.
