10 years of Palestine
I've been going back through some of my older pictures of my time living in Palestine, and here are some of my favorites. A few of these I took with my old point-and-shoot, I think it was a Panasonic or something. But I remember my uncle, Tom, recommending it for the Leica lens it came with. Most of these were taken with my first DSLR. I went with Nikon, also on my uncle's recommendation. That must have been in 2008. Only a few pictures here are with the new D750. Obviously, I talked this one over with Tom as well.
These pictures are all intertwined with various family visits, jobs, and events. The politics, at least, have been consistent since 2008: from the Ramallah memorial for George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to the young people trying to emulate the Egyptian uprising in Ramallah, I was always around the leftists. There are the trips to the Hirbawi textile factory in Hebron, the soap factory in Nablus, the abandoned amusement park on the outskirts of the same city, and to the Golan (where the "smallest settlement in Israel" had set-up these tipi's – with no hint of irony – for tourists to stay in). At one point I was teaching high-school students in East Jerusalem, and I stumbled across some old pictures of a Halloween costume party they did. Other pictures are from work: the funeral of Jawaher Abu Rahmeh and the kids in al-Nabi Saleh who, as a result of being shot at on a regular basis, knew way too much about different types of ammunition. And then the plants and the landscapes, usually part of some group BBQ. I would even go to Jerusalem for religious holidays to try to capture some of the chaos (I had more energy for that in my 20s). The last large batch of pictures is of the real estate boom and the new suburban developments around Ramallah, which still take up way too much of my time and thinking.