About the portfolio

Above: Nigel Parry,
Gaza Strip, 1996.

Portfolios are notoriously difficult to compile. So much to choose from and so much that must be discarded. Often, the context in which a photograph was taken - the story that went into getting it, if you like - for the photographer gives it worth beyond its capacity to stand alone as an image.

How much truer this seems when we are talking about photographing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Sometimes the situations I photographed were life threatening. As I lived in the Palestinian West Bank -- uncommon for international journalists who seem to almost exclusively prefer the Western-style amenities of Israeli-controlled Jerusalem -- sometimes the people I photographed included friends and sometimes the situations I photographed were ones that I was directly affected by. In a context like this, you can get very attached to your work.

The final destination of the photographs I took in the Palestinian West Bank between 1995 and 1998 was never the commercial media. My photographs were taken to illustrate a personal Web-based project, "A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict". This project was based on the premise that it is the reality of events that should 'edit' what is published - not the political worldviews of the handful of millionaires that own most of the planet's key media; nor their advertisers; nor the structural ignorance of news edited by people without any specialist knowledge of the situation and based in another country; nor the standpoint of an international news organisation's 'locally'-based journalists who do not live among the people they report on.

As I look back through my photographs from a perspective of having left Palestine at least for now, I realise that a sensitivity to - and often distaste for - this status quo helped to create coherant themes which give many of the photographs a different power when presented together.

The photographs in "This Side Of Paradise" are both figuratively and literally taken from 'the Palestinian side'. These are not photographs that were squeezed through the filters of a Western media that, for directly-related political and indirectly-related structural reasons, daily reproduces the Israeli worldview.

Looking at the unmistakable anger in some of these photographs, it seems as if the camera itself seeks to distance itself from the cooption of other cameras. In this respect, the personified camera closely mirrors the zeitgeist of these times, during which a 'peace' process actively corrupts the very meaning of the word to an entire generation of young Palestinians, out of which only a few rise to confront the contradiction, at considerable personal cost.

If news-by-satellite on demand removes distance as an obstacle to one's participation in an event, freezing a moment of an event with a camera forces us to meditate on the essence of the moment without the distractions that movement introduces. This is the real power of still photography. The continual stimulus that we are used to from television results in stress - a psychological overload that ironically hampers our capacity to effectively absorb the 'information' part from this manifestation of information technology.

If you consider that each of the twelve images that follow represents only a tiny fraction of a second, captured and preserved from reality -- and that the combined timespan of this entire portfolio probably does not exceed a single second -- you begin to understand why still photography has continued to flourish.

In an age of excesses, less is sometimes more.

Every time I hear the sound of the shutter, I hear a disturbing noise. What should be disturbing to you as you browse these twelve images is the mere fact of their existance. That a human being has very regular opportunities to witness these kinds of events in today's world is a testimony to the pervasiveness of human wrongdoing in the Palestinian West Bank. The noise of the shutter, therefore, is a sound that urges us not to rest...

...this side of paradise.