Camera shyness

I'm trying to get people willing to appear on-camera briefly to talk about how they imagine/understand/picture Jerusalem and the people who live there.

But most of the people I have asked don't want to appear on-camera--mainly because, they say, they don't know anything about Jerusalem.

So I'm putting out an all-points bulletin; I need help. If you know anyone who would be willing to talk on-camera about Jerusalem for 60 seconds or so (and, importantly, have never been to Jerusalem themselves), please refer them to me or give me their contact info. We can do it on or near campus just about any weekday.

I'm even contemplating bribing... er, compensating people with food.

There's no avoiding it

While preparing my presentation for AAG next week, I ran across a photo I took in 2009 inside the Qalandia checkpoint. I didn't have time to do a great job composing the shot--I don't know how much the IDF allows inside the checkpoints, and the time prior to this, the IDF had given me a really rough time getting through. So I snapped a few quick shots, just so I could share what it's like trying to get from Palestinian areas into Israel proper.

The Qalandia checkpoint is the main transit point between Ram'allah and Jerusalem.

Everyone loves the Old City at night

I'm just warming up and trying to get back in the blogging mindset. I noticed on the Living Jerusalem 2011 blog there was a header photo of the Old City at night, taken from the Mount of Olives.

It just so happens that I took a nearly-identical shot back in 2009. It was an interesting evening, as while I was setting up my tripod and composing the shot, a local kid was trying to beg money from me. Either my Arabic was off (which is entirely possible, as at the time my colloquial was virtually nonexistent), or the kid wasn't Palestinian (also possible, given that there was a nearby apartment building that looked to be all Jewish settlers), but we were having communication difficulties. Eventually the kid got through to me that he was willing to stick olives up his nose for money. I politely declined, but he stuck the olives up his nose anyway. And then, of course, he wanted money for the show.

I should've taken a picture of him and given him a NIS or two, just for fun.

In any case, in the spirit of friendly competition with the Living Jerusalem blog, here's another look at one of the images from that night. It's a HDR composite of several exposures, with some
additional tweaking in Photoshop:



Looking at the image I've produced, the colors are a bit unrealistic (though that's one of the styles you can achieve with HDR photography). In the end, though, I think that it's a fitting metaphor for Jerusalem. No one can be objective when it comes to Jerusalem (being something of a post-structuralist, I'd argue against the notion of 'objectivity' in regards to anything, but that's another story), and so our personal histories, biases, and preconceptions color how we look at Jerusalem, and many people end up idealizing it.

I am not immune to this tendency--I just spent a good long while compositing the HDR image, and then playing around with it in Photoshop, all to produce a 'perfect' snapshot of the Temple Mount. A snapshot that doesn't reflect the reality one would see when standing on the Mount of Olives and looking at this very same scene with her/his eyes.

Monday (alternatively, "This Land is Not Your Land")

OK, blogspot is a pain in the neck for posting pictures, and when I tried to publish my last post, it lost the whole thing--pictures, text, and all. This annoyed me greatly, because I had spent a good amount of time writing up that post.

So I'm going to compose stuff offline, and then try to upload it later. If it doesn't work, I'll just go back to the livejournal blog I used in Damascus three years ago.

Here's my attempt at the post that blogspot vaporized.


Time is flying by, and I'm not getting stuff posted as quickly as I'd like. Of course, having taken over 300 photos so far is slowing me down--spending a few minutes editing each picture takes some time. But in someways, this is a good thing. After walking around on Monday, I saw somethings that got me really riled up, and had I posted to this blog right away, it probably would've come across as an angry political rant.

Instead, I've had some time to cool down, and reflect. So this won't be as emotionally-charged as it could have been. But to the point--Monday I took a long tour around Jerusalem. I saw lots of ancient buildings, religious landmarks, and Palestinians being routinely abused in a casual, careless way by Israelis. A few 'narrative' snapshots, followed by some photographic ones:

In the morning, I took a bus tour around Jerusalem. You get on the bus for the two-hour loop around the city, and they give you a pair of headphones you can plug in, to listen to a pre-recorded narration of the various points of interest--in your choice of eight different languages. The thing that struck me most about the narration was the complete erasure of Palestinians from the landscape. The narration at various points discussed cooperation and peace between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but never once did it mention Palestinians. Landmarks were noted as places captured by valiant IDF soldiers, or places where Arabs (or Jordanians) committed some murderous crime against peace-loving Jews/Israelis. A plot of land outside the Old City, purchased by a Jewish immigrant during the British Mandate period, was mentioned as the first site of Jewish residence outside of the Old City--but it was never mentioned that the Jew had purchased the land from its Palestinian owner. Over and over again, the presence of Palestinians was elided. The narrative established Jews/Israelis as heroic conquerors or liberators or entrepreneurs, and enemy Arab/Jordanian forces as the bad guys. But Palestinians? They didn't exist. I was tempted to switch to the Arabic version of the narration to hear how that represented things. The bus tour was very unfulfilling. There's that old saying about how history is written by the conquerors... I guess tour bus narration is the same way.

After the bus tour, I was walking through the David St. Market in the Old City, and I saw a Palestinian merchant being accosted by a trio of Israelis. Two of the Israelis were IDF soldiers, with automatic weapons and body armor; the third was an Israeli police commander--also with an automatic weapon and body armor. I wasn't entirely sure of what the dispute was, but it seemed that when the Palestinian had left for afternoon prayers, he had left something--trash, I'm guessing--outside his shuttered stall, and this apparently warranted the intervention by three heavily-armed Israelis to set this shopkeeper right.

Later, I saw this same trio outside another Palestinian merchant's stall--they were giving him a hard time because some of the scarves he had hanging up outside his store were low enough that a tall man might brush his head against the scarves as he walked past. Apparently, hanging your merchandise a few inches too low merits an angry berating from armed Israelis.

Then in a suq in another part of the Old City, I walked past an escalating argument between a Palestinian merchant (running some sort of clothing/tailor shop) and some IDF soldiers. Whatever the dispute was, an IDF officer had just gotten there as I was passing, and was intervening--on the soldiers' behalf, of course. I surreptitiously snapped a picture of the scene.

As my day was winding down and I was tiring out, I headed back to my hotel, going the long way around the city walls, through East Jerusalem. The Damascus Gate leads from the Old City to East Jerusalem (the Palestinian area of the metropolitan area), and outside the Gate is a taxi stand. As you progress east from the taxi stand, there are signs along the road that are either "no parking" or "no taxi idling" type of signs, and as I was walking along one of these areas, there were plenty of taxis pulled up alongside the roadside, looking for fares. Suddenly a teenager yells something in Arabic--all I caught was "yalla! yalla!" ("go! go!")--and a young Palestinian guy goes running past me and jumps into one of the parked cabs, quickly starting it up and trying to drive away. A white pickup truck with three Israeli police screeches up and boxes in the taxi. The driver tried to sneak the taxi past the truck, but an Israeli cop jumps out of the pickup and starts pointing and yelling at the driver, and then puts his hand on the pistol on his hip. The incident ended with the cops pulling the taxi driver out of the cab and taking him off to the side to write up some paperwork--a ticket, or a court summons. Again, I took some surreptitious pictures, but at the same time, there was an older tourist with a digital camera, brazenly taking pictures of the whole incident from just a few feet away. The Israeli cops didn't seem to care. They got their man: the parking ticket was issued and order was restored to East Jerusalem.

So I didn't go looking for it, but I got a very clear picture of what life can be like for Palestinians in Israel. The Israelis have the power and the guns, and I saw several exercises in authority that seemed quite arbitrary and petty. From the merchants whose zoning infractions were addressed by rifle-wielding soldiers, to the taxi driver who was nearly pulled from his cab at gunpoint for a parking ticket, to the erasure of Palestinian presence from narratives about Jerusalem's environs, it was pretty disturbing.

Sadly, the political realities stayed in my face the next day--which I'll post about tomorrow. Right now I've got to try to get this to work on blogspot. Pictures & captions below.

The Russian Orthodox church on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. This is a HDR (high dyanmic range) composite of three separate exposures.

From An American Geographer...

This is the inside of the Zion Gate on the south side of the Old City. The only post-production manipulation was my (partially successful) attempt to straighten out the perspective issues from shooting wide-angle--the woman in the foreground was sitting very still, so that the 1/15th-second exposure left her really sharp and distinct, while the woman walking through the arch was blurred. Kinda cool, eh?

From An American Geographer...

Looking east from the Jaffa Gate, into the David St. Market. No post-processing other than some minor contrast/brightness tweaks

From An American Geographer...

The Western Wall. Another HDR composite of three exposures, to bring out the details in the sky and the colors in the wall. The "ghosting" produced by compositing three images with moving people is intentional. Before Israel took this part of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Days' War, this entire area was Palestinian apartment buildings. The Israelis bulldozed the apartments to make the plaza.

From An American Geographer...

Another view of the Western Wall and the plaza. The golden dome in the background is the top of the Dome of the Rock--the third holiest site in Islam--and the wooden walkway is the Bab al-Maghariba, the entrance for non-Muslims to access the Temple Mount / Haram ash-Sharif.

From An American Geographer...

"This is Not Your Land" (part one). The IDF soldiers were arguing with the Palestinian merchant, and more IDF were coming to back them up in the argument. I snapped this picture from the hip, not wanting to draw attention to myself and make anything worse.

From An American Geographer...

"This is Not Your Land" (part two). Another quick shot of Palestinians at the mercy of the Israelis with guns. I didn't need to be so circumspect--another guy was openly taking pictures and the Israeli police didn't seem to care at all.

From An American Geographer...

P.S. Let me know if the pictures don't come through. I did something weird, and am hoping it works.

Day One

I've arrived in Israel. I've been catching up on my sleep--I typically am not able to sleep much on flights--and haven't done anything exciting yet. I've noticed some interesting sights, but have yet to use my camera a lot:

• Waiting for the bus from the airport to Jerusalem was a young Orthodox couple; the husband was dressed in dark khakis and a white button-down shirt, with his fringes hanging out and his kibbe on his head, he looked like a younger version of Joel Wainwright (well, the picture of Joel without the beard). The guy had some massive holes in the soles of his shoes, but his cell phone was quite spiffy.
• On the road down the Mount of Olives this morning, I noted pilgrims from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Canada, Korea, and India. Mobs and mobs of tourists, stomping down the road, crowding into the religious sites, haggling with the local Palestinians for souvenirs. One group couldn't read the English (or Hebrew) sign on the arch to the Jewish cemetery, and stomped in there to take unobstructed pictures of the Temple Mount.
• At nearly the top of the Mount of Olives, there is a block of apartments that looks relatively new. Certainly less than 30 years old. Before those apartment buildings was there, you could stand at the top of the Mount of Olives and look down on all of the Old City, including the Temple Mount. Now, if you stand at the top of the Mount of Olives, you get a marvelous view of these apartment buildings, one with a massive Israeli flag fluttering from the top of a 30-foot pole attached to the top of the building.

Many thanks to Michael Ewers, by the way, who just by hanging out with me in Damascus taught me some useful Arabic that I would've otherwise not picked up. I even avoided telling the desk clerk at the hotel that I had a "machine" instead of a "reservation."

I did take a couple photos today, and with one shot did some tricky photo manipulation. The picture below is a HDR composite of three separate exposures, tone-mapped and then manipulated in Photoshop to mimic the appearance of Fuji Velvia film. Turned out pretty good for a spontaneous shot that was fiddled around with in post-production. I need to figure out blogger a bit more so I can do fancier stuff with my photo-posting (right, Cheryl? I aspire to your level of blog-art).