In the summer of 2018, we gave disposable cameras to kids who lived in the Palestinian refugee camps of Qalandiya and Am’ari, located in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the occupied West Bank.
These children are the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who were violently displaced during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. A date Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba” or catastrophe.
Many of the Palestinians who were exiled were denied the right to return to historic Palestine, much of which is now the modern-day state of Israel. More than 70 years later, 5.4 million of their descendants live in dozens of refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and surrounding countries.
Simply to have a glimpse into their world, this is a collection of images several kids captured over a few days, tracing the narrow alleys of the camps. The (expired) 35mm film cameras were bought, developed and scanned in Ramallah, the scans keeping the imperfections that come with producing work in the field.
This series was the starting point for my PhD research which explores how collaborative photography could be reimagined and redeployed to document and communicate the domination and subjugation of subalterns in these lands, and (perhaps more importantly) their agency to resist, and their self-imag(in)ing of identity, self-determination, and emancipation.