These portraits highlight the enduring grief and strength that unite all survivors of war
As a photojournalist, I normally visit sites quickly to document for newspapers. I take pictures and leave — no lengthy interviews. But I often lose sleep over the stories I hear, and the people who tell them to me. In the midst of great loss — massacre, genocide, war — details of specific stories and lives haunt. I knew that in the depths of these details I might be able to find a wealth of perspectives, so in 2010, I started a project called Broken Souvenirs, looking for a way to portray the massive, destructive outcome of the war as it affects people over time.
By the time I made my first Broken Souvenirs portrait, it was almost a year and a half after the first war in Gaza — but it was clear in my talks with interviewees that they felt their losses as keenly as though they’d happened yesterday. For instance, during the first war on Gaza (December 2008 — January 2009), the mosque next to the house of Samira Balousha, the mother of five daughters, was targeted. The bomb landed on their house instead of the mosque, and all of the five girls died buried in their beds. At the moment Samira described the loss of her daughters to me, I took a portrait of her. You can see her sadness, her grief. But there was no other hint of her story in the image.
My vision for Broken Souvenirs is to create portraits like this, in black and white, with minimal visual indication of identity, region or conflict. My intent: to portray the human experience of living and struggling with the burden of loss as time passes. The details of my subjects’ stories in their own words — captured in captions, audio and video — are available if you look for them, but will be displayed away from the image when the portraits are exhibited. By creating distance between narrative and portrait, my subjects become more than witnesses to a particular tragedy. Instead, they become symbols of the human suffering incurred by the man-made disaster of war — suffering that doesn’t stop after a year or two.
“When I see the portraits I have taken so far all lined up, I see not individual stories and voices nor a critique of international politics. I see a universal commentary on the pain of humanity.”
Soon, I was wondering how might I connect people with Gaza to others in the world who have suffered from — or are still suffering — conflict? I applied the six degrees of separation theory to find war survivors who were connected to one another across time, genocides, geographical regions. For example, I found Native American Moses Brings Plenty, a famous public figure and actor, who in turn knew someone who had suffered from the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s fascinating to see how even survivors and victims of these seemingly disparate events are connected.
I am connected, too. In the eight years I spent covering the Israel-Gaza conflict as a photojournalist, I always tried to put myself in other people’s shoes to tell their stories. But I found out that, despite my firsthand experience behind the lens, I wasn’t even close to knowing how it feels to be directly affected.
During the protective edge war in June 2014, I came home from work to find the power off, my first daughter asleep next to her grandmother. But my younger daughter, a year and a half old at the time, was apparently missing from her crib, which was stained with blood. I found her looking lifeless at the bottom of the bed, eyes a strange pale blue color. In that terrible moment, I braced myself for the worst. Nothing prepares you to lose your own child — not having lived in a war zone your whole life, not even witnessing the deaths of other children. She survived what was later diagnosed as internal bleeding induced by pressure from bombs. But I now understand in a first-hand way that one never fully recovers from such an experience.
It has not been straightforward being a Palestinian doing this project. The Oklahoma bombing community, for example, rejected my advances completely. They asked, “Why the hell should we talk to someone who’s a Muslim from Gaza, not even an American? And why are you interested, why do you want to tell our story?” Finally, I found a mother who’d lost her daughter and her unborn child during that bombing. She would not give me her address or phone number at first — she was very careful in dealing with me. But because I had to drive for 10 hours to interview her, she could not get over the fact that I had made such an effort just to tell her story — and she completely opened up. With experiences like this, working on Broken Souvenirs has been a very human, bonding experience.
So far, I have taken 20 portraits of five different conflicts, war zones and genocides in three different countries. When I see the portraits I have taken so far all lined up, I see not individual stories and voices or a nor a critique of international politics. I see a universal commentary on the pain of humanity. I’m currently mapping part two of the project with research and detailed planning, to include more recent and ongoing conflicts and wars. I have mainly photographed survivors from Gaza thus far, but I am aiming to photograph people who have survived, among other conflicts, the Bosnian genocide, the Mamelukes massacres, the genocide of the European Roma, genocide in Rwanda, survivors of the Afghan and Iraqi wars, North Korea’s repressive regime, the Holocaust, and so on. Once I secure funding, the final outcome of the project will be a book and, ultimately, an exhibition.
I hope that once people see the portraits, they will want to dig deeper and know each subject’s full story. The stories I’ve collected so far have been priceless to me. Even in the faces marked with grief and trauma, you can see a glimpse of hope, of incredible strength.
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
