 But this is not, we are not breaking the strike rules because this is a non-teaching event. It's an external, internal external event that we are hosting here to celebrate a very important book, the launch of Occupied Pleasures, which is a book by one of our alumni, alumni, alums, Tanya Habjuka. It's called Occupied Pleasures, and she has some copies of it if anyone would be interested in buying it. There is also a very interesting article that our other alumni, Dr. Tembi Mouche, has written in The Guardian about this event to bring the, you know, to talk about how Tanya began to think about this project, et cetera. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speakers. Tanya Habjuka is a photojournalist. She is an award-winning photographer, journalist and educator. Her practice links social documentary, collaborative portraiture, and participant observation, which is an approach to visual storytelling described as new documentary. Her principal interests include gender, representation of otherness, dispossession of human and human rights, and she has a particular concern for ever shifting socio-political dynamics in the Middle East and Palestine in particular. Trained in journalism and anthropology with an MA in global media and emphasis on Middle East politics from so has, Habjuka produces in-depth narratives that offer nuanced alternatives to mainstream media depictions of her subjects. She's based in East Jerusalem. She is half Texan, half Jordanian, with Circassian ancestry, and she possesses a diverse background that is rich in narrative folklore, black humor, and hospitality. So, our next speaker, Dr. Tembi Moch, who had her PhD at SOAS about a year ago, correct me if I'm wrong, is also an award-winning journalist, writer, trainer, and educator, who splits her time between England and Tanzania, where she spent time carrying fieldwork for her PhD on women, modernity, and media in Zanzibar. Tembi is interested in questions of trust, informal communities, and interesting ways to survive despite daily hardships, so there is kind of a synergy there. Originally trained as a community youth working in Whitechapel in London, she has combined journalism, reportage, documentary, and collaborative ethnography to tell the stories of groups of people who get left on the margins of the mainstream or who are displaced. She is interested in gender, land access, and human rights with a particular focus on East and Southern Africa. Besides her doctorate in media studies, which she completed at SOAS, she has training in journalism and anthropology at the London School of Economics and the University of Westminster, and she's also still a practicing journalist. Is that, you're not at rest, mister? You're, no, Sussex, huh? Sussex. Sussex. No, no, but you did do your anthropology at Sussex? Did anthropology LSE. Ah, okay, so there's some wrong stuff here. Anyway, she is, she has published in the Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian, British Journalism Review, Think Africa and the Telegraph. In 2006, as part of the True Vision TV Company, she was the researcher and producer of the Channel 4 program called World Without Water, which won the Prince Rainier Award for Environmental Investigative Journalism. She's currently teaching occasional courses at Sussex University and is completing a literary thriller called The Motorbike in Lobatsi, as well as several academic articles. Without further ado, I don't want to take more time. I just want to give you kind of the way that we're going to do this today. First of all, Tanya and Tembi, very convenient to have two teas. They're going to, we're going to have a conversation between them. And then afterwards, Tanya is going to give us a short presentation with photographs of her work in general, with a focus on the photographs taken for the book, Occupied Pleasures, and then we'll have questions and answers. We should be, you know, we should be on time, but if we are 10 minutes of, you know, more than the time, I hope you can all stay. Thank you so much for coming and please welcome our speakers with me. Thanks, Dina. So the main thing to say is that Tanya's book won the Time Book of the Year Award. It won the Smithsonian Book Award. Top book of the year. Not number one, but in the group. Tanya has, she's been a recipient of a Magnum Photo Award, which is the most prestigious photo award possible. She's exhibited around the world, including the Institute de Monde l'Arab, yes, in France, Berlin, Denmark, Dubai, where else? Everywhere, basically, New York. She's just come from New York. She's going to Denmark. And so what happens two years ago is that I'm sitting, I think probably in this room or over there, and up pops this picture of three women in the prayer position doing yoga. And it's a very powerful, resonant image. It's in a resistance. I remember it because it's quite a public image anyway. And a very earnest, lovely colleague from SOAS says in very intense terms, this is all about intersectionality. It's about complexity. It's about disrupting the understandings of gender. It's about disrupting the understandings of what it means to be a Palestinian. And I just piss myself laughing because what I remember from eight years, nine years ago, is sitting with this beautiful, wonderful, spirited, clever, funny, rebellious woman is how stroppy she was in the classes, always arguing, always challenging, always saying, no, I've been to Lebanon. I've been to Lebanon. It's not like that. This stuff is rubbish, taking everybody on with no fear. And I was terrified and inspired in equal measures. So to have her suddenly in the main, kind of being the main deal, and her photographs being a theoretical example of what it means to change how we think about Palestine-occupied territories, how we think about representation. For me, that was a very moving moment, actually. It was like, blind me. She's bloody done it. She's bloody done it. So I went home and I started Googling and I started looking up what Tanya was doing and where she was taking photos. We'd always been friends on Facebook, nothing huge. And I was literally blown away. So if you type in Tanya Abdukwa, do it because it's a very moving and interesting journey. And I began to see that what Tanya had done from those days in 2007-2008 is she'd taken the theory that we were learning and she'd put it right into practice. And she'd done it in little day-to-day ways with people, with real people. She'd taken the time to get to know people. She'd taken the time to pick apart things to not go for the obvious. And to find ways to talk, to think about the fact that we all have multiple identities. None of us are just Arabs, just Jews, just Muslims, just Buddhists, just secular, just women, just mummies, just aunties, just educators, just journalists, just friends. None of us are just those things. We're lots of things at the same time. And that's what I absolutely love about Tanya is her ability to see those complexities. And that, I think, is what, for me, peace and creativity and being a Jude journalist is all about. It's being able to understand those contradictions. It's by never letting ourselves descend into these ridiculous binaries, these ridiculous simplistic tropes. Because actually, I think that's how wars start, is when we stop empathising, we stop asking questions, we stop listening, we stop recognising that complexity is at the heart of it all, which doesn't mean there's some terrible travesties occurring or some terrible heinous human rights being abused. And it doesn't mean that we're all human and we all love each other and it's rainbow nation. I'm not saying those things and I don't think Tanya is either. But I think what she's saying as a female journalist is incredibly important. And as a feminist journalist, it's incredibly important. And for me as a journalist as well, who works in, I never do news unlike Tanya who does do news. And I don't do news because it is too simplistic and because your editors ask you to do stupid things which make me too angry. I do documentary and features and I take my time. Tanya takes her time. She gets under the surface, she stays, she keeps in contact, she shows of herself. She lets people in on Facebook, she lets people into her life. She's the warmest, most complimentary, most generous person. She's in a handful of up there with them all. And for me, also I think I perhaps understand some of the danger that she's had to go into. We do get trolled. We do get nasty, offensive. It would make you cringe some of the things that I've been sent on email and I know you have to. And they are about our gender and they are about taking it too far and they are about punishing us for being women who speak out. So that's important and probably for different reasons for both of us there are ways in which being a woman in the world of reporting on conflict or documentary works to our advantage. I think she should come up here and stay with us. Come back, come back, yeah. So I think what impresses me about Tanya's work is that she actively, every day, reinstates the narrative, has the permission to narrate, changes the way we think about things and ultimately humanises people because only by dehumanising them do we stop understanding and stop progressing and stop growing. I'd like to start with a quote from Professor Lalika Lil, who I know is an absolute heroine of yours and who wrote the preface for the book and then we can crack off with some questions. The quote is, when war, colonialism or extreme political violence become the scaffolding of everyday life, the obligation to remember our histories and our pasts can only be met if we have imagery with which we can narrate what has happened to us. And the work of photojournalists provides some of this imagery. We also need imagery that captures the poetry of everyday life and not only the prose of strife. So Tanya, why did you make this book? That's a loaded question. This was a long simmering project, a combination of years of innate dissatisfaction with the real practice, the real politic of covering journalism in the region, in the Middle East. On a personal note, I had grown up between Jordan and Texas and while not Palestinian, it's a narrative that one becomes very familiar with, particularly living in Jordan. And from a young age, I was always really innately bothered by how it was presented within mainstream US media. So at a young age, I just noted the problem and when I was 15, actually, I went to a rebellious stage in Texas and was sent to live in Jordan two weeks before the Gulf War. And it was amazing because we're talking about a pre-internet, pre-satellite world and literally in the coverage of that war, you really had access to Israeli news, Syrian news, Iraq news. And occasionally, I don't even remember where it came in from, but some American media and you would have, we've captured 22 Iraqi soldiers and then you would have the Iraqis. It's all a lie, it was untrue and it was almost comedic in its presentation. And so early on, the interest in narrative and counter-narrative began fostering. But on a personal level, it was actually what drew me back into Palestine. I would come in and out covering it as a freelancer. And one thing is there's a tendency in media to sort of trickle down and do the same story. You have the media that has money, the media that has power, the wire agencies, AFP, et cetera. But then you have it goes down to the freelancers and they tend to sort of chase and do the same story, which to me strategically was always been ludicrous because if you don't have a lot of funds, you should always try to find a different way in. And also on a deeper level, do you really just want to reiterate the same story or try to go find another angle? And so initially I approached trying to find new entry points into the Palestinian narrative because it was always grotesquely misrepresented, always. And initially there was a period in 2009 where there was a lively drag queen scene between Palestinians and Israelis. Of course, a minority group, but you had some Palestinians who would sneak across sadly illegally, it shouldn't have been, but into Jerusalem and you would have Israeli Jews dressing up like Um Kalfoum. It was a very special, shocking, beautiful scene. And initially when I approached it, on the surface it seemed like it's sort of a defiance of the conservatism of Jerusalem, of multiple sides, but the occupation informs every single element of life in Palestine. It doesn't matter if it's a cup of coffee. I mean, there's no way to avoid the politics. And so even within this, while it was beautiful and colorful on the surface, the power dynamic, you don't have at this point a thriving LGBT platform within the West Bank. You do have Palestinians with Israeli passports have it, but inside there's some amazing movements there. So there would be cases of an Israeli becoming jealous and denouncing his Palestinian lover to his family in the West Bank. So the power dynamics were always at play. But I think I went on along to bring it succinctly back to occupied pleasures. It was actually going into Gaza a few months after Operation Cast Lead. And I noticed another of these trends in society where everyone was describing, oh my God, women are losing their rights under Hamas. And I thought it was ludicrous. Everyone was talking about the same story, but we had just had this shocking event happen, Operation Cast Lead. And you were talking about the siege and you were talking about all of these elements affecting entire society. And I decided to sort of use women of Gaza as an entry point unpack this media trend. And it was while working on that story, I went to meet a couple that had just gotten married. The wife had just smuggled in from the tunnel. And when I showed up, unfortunately the wife was out, but for those who have been to the Middle East, you know the hospitality he invited me in. And we sat there having tea and he was a total romantic and he was describing how they fell madly in love on Skype. She was a distant cousin in Jordan. And it's many Gazans that I speak to always say, for us psychologically, since the siege, thank God for the sea and thank God for the internet. I mean, that's how we breathe. That's our access to the world. And apparently they had some really good Skype conversations and they fell in love. And of course, access, how do you get in? How do you get out? It's all controlled. And the Israelis refused her a visa. And at that point, Mubarak's Egypt refused her. So they brought her in from the tunnel. And as he's describing the story, his hands are flying in the air. He's so romantic and he's like, you know, there she was. I found her in her white dress, dust around her hair, trembling. It was like a Bollywood movie. I ran to her. I kissed her. And then he just became very somber. And he looked at me and he said, you know, no matter what this occupation does to us, no matter what they do to us, we will always find a way to live, to love, to more than survive, to laugh. And I remember when he said it, those words hit. And it was, I realized there was something there, but it took me a while to sort of unpack it and come back to it. That was the beginning, though. The title, Occupied Pleasures, was it an easy title to get to? Was it obvious? What's that about? Did it take, what's behind that story? I am an avid lover of titles. Titles get me extremely excited. Sometimes I get so excited that I read the text it was actually more disappointing than that the title was the gift. Occupied Pleasures, straddles, active and passive meaning. So, of course, it's a play on words, the literal occupation and then how you occupy your mind. So as I was gathering and trying to piece this together, it was when, I kept playing with variations and then it was when I put those two words together that I just said, ah, this is it. And suddenly it all came into play and the approach was very clear. Unfortunately, there was never a direct, and I asked some pretty, pretty high level Palestinian, Iraqi, various, various linguists, how can I literally translate with the same humor and nuance and play on words in Arabic and it didn't work. Somebody ran it, ran an Arabic article and they called it Forbidden Pleasures, which had other implications. But that's how the title came. Sir Tanya, tell me about when you first started taking photos and why are you taking photos and why are you making testimonies? Are you doing it for yourself? Are you doing it for a living? Are you doing it for your kids? I mean, it's multifaceted. I certainly, I mean, this is how I make my living. As such, I mean, nobody becomes a photographer for the money. That's certain. We call ourselves sort of the modern day jazz musicians. You do it because it's a compulsion because you, and the type of, I actually, and there's increasingly more photographers that are saying this, I don't see myself purely as a photographer, but as a storyteller and whatever medium is best utilized, whether it's audio, whether it's writing, I mean, it's exciting what's happening right now, not only in journalism, but in art. It's becoming, they're intersecting in really interesting ways, like recently I took a two month assignment for UNHCR to cover Syrian refugees in Jordan and I focused on the woman who, the angle they wanted was a woman left behind, the woman who had, you know, the men had crossed across the Mediterranean to come to Europe, and I was innately dissatisfied with the imagery that I would, I mean, they were perfectly fine, but they, images, but they weren't saying anything new and I really wanted to convey the hardships, the reality of what it was like on the ground for these women, and it was by chance one of the last days of my assignment, I saw a distraught baby and a mother was playing from a what's up message, an audio of the father singing a lullaby and I saw the baby that was just, just irate flailing hands just sooth and then I was fascinated and I started asking other families that I met oh, how do you have what's up recorded messages and they were like yeah so they started just sharing them with me and they put a video together and that was a way so again, it's not just photography, it's just whatever medium it is to put across an idea and in this video you had beautiful messages from the fathers talking directly to their wives I miss you, I know this is hard you had little little girls, ba-ba I want a pink dress I want, you know, and yeah so it's just about finding alternative ways, new ways fresh ways, just not to say the same tired story again and again and try to render some meaning into what you're saying so I mean the political environment that you work in is often very charged and then at a material level, physical level it's dangerous so how do you negotiate, how do you navigate representation and how do you do all of this while being ethical as well I'm actually not in a place where I have worked environments that are physically dangerous the elements within the occupied territories, it's primarily psychological as well as a lot of it is psychological, never knowing there's a personal antidote when I was first waiting when I first was getting married and I was literally terrified that I was not going to have my visa to stay and I woke up at two in the morning shaking and I woke up to be husband and I said what if the Israelis don't give me my visa what if this, what if this, what if this what if this, just manic and he said, don't ever bring the Israelis into my bed again but that's what it is so it's psychological and then unless you are a Palestinian journalist now that's another issue but for me, no I don't face physical but it's just so the question how do you negotiate the representation or how do you negotiate the representation you know it's just basic, I mean you don't have to be Palestinian, you don't even necessarily have to be an Arab but don't be a parachute journalist, don't come in trailing the same tired story use some imagination, use some, try to research, try to know what you're talking about, spend some time with the people that you're working on I mean do you get frustrated by the close parameters of the news industry or of the industry that you're in, do you get why is it so hard to get off the stereotype treadmill I think because certain stereotypes sell I mean the thing is, and I can't believe I'm the one who's mentioning Hijab but I'm going to mention Hijab as an example you even have in Iran and in the Middle East there are some artists who will come up with imagery not only artists, artists as well as journalists and they'll do this entire beyond the veil, I mean how many beyond the veils have we seen or you know there'll be a fine art piece of a woman with the blowing Hijab or niqab and it sells and so in these cases there's cases of people within the society selling it to the West because they're trying to get in they're trying to break in, it will sell that element some people sadly just have no imagination I remember a very troubling I won't mention who she is but she's a famous novelist and the daughter of a famous novelist that has covered North Africa and I was with her in Darfur and got to help her she actually required my Arabic to help her in a series of interviews and it was the height of the Darfur rape crisis well it was more than the rape crisis exactly, that was how it was being focused on purely as opposed to the environmental factors and the far more nuanced elements of the conflict and I watched how she approached the story it was the same set of few questions, it was the sort of false empathy oh what village were you from as if she knew oh what did you grow there what did your family grow and then two or three questions later were you raped you know because she was looking to fill the pattern and tell the same story that she was doing and again not all journalists are like that but it's difficult because I've had story I'm much more selective when you're young as well I've been guilty of this you know you want to get published I've handed over my entire edit here you know better than me you edit it you do what you want and then you learn especially from the Middle East because I have been misrepresented I use if I give an edit of 50 images and maybe there's 10 say 2 women in Nicaragua and 3 in Hijab they will ignore the diversity of other imagery it's always an agenda driven thing so as you learn how to deal with editors and sort of resist their agenda and I don't even know if it's an intentional agenda you know it's just that is how they see it and so it's just an enforced orientalism one last question and then we're going to open it up to the audience so now we're going to Tanya you're going to give us a presentation of your photo and talk I'm just going to go actually and if when I'm going through the slideshow I'd hope that it was going to be kind of like you know just going on its own but I'm going to be standing there and clicking it I'm just going to go through several images and I'll stop on ones that I feel have something to say but please very informally while I'm doing that if anyone has any question just you know shout it out or not shout but kind of hey you know yeah do we need to turn off the lights maybe is that okay to dim the lights you see okay yeah so I'm just not going to talk about every image this is from the inside cover of the book it's injustice I saw graffiti scribbled on a boy's school in the old city in Jerusalem this image was one of the first ones that I took that I felt if you just put a single image with the words occupied pleasure is it can you hear me if I stand here okay I feel that it's representative of the entire series this is from Gaza and the tunnel economy which right now has more has been completely shut down had changed between the last time I was there in 2009 where the ones that I went into you had to be lowered and it was very claustrophobic and it was for Gazans at that time the highest paid job that you had 17 year olds who would stay 15-17 hours in the tunnels and they were taking tramadol it was an over the counter drug to sort of calm them down because it was terrifying you were in this very claustrophobic space and at any given point you never knew if the Israeli Air Force would would you know just drop a bomb and then you collapse and you would die so when I went back in 2013 it had become much more institutionalized and I was quite shocked to see this and another change that had happened between 2009 it was quite ludicrous to focus on Hamas Hamas Hamas but what I saw in 2013 is in addition to obviously the Israeli siege and trauma of multiple wars and serious weaponry on the society Hamas was playing a much more invasive role in people's lives so people were just oppressed from within from without I mean psychologically and even now it's a whole another dark level but I'm not allowed to go anymore but that's another story in this image it had taken three days and I was pregnant and I had a two year old waiting for me back home so I really needed to use these days effectively but instead I had to spend two to three days visiting Hamas officials having tea to get permission to go to the tunnels and in the end they gave me 20 minutes and I thought I was screwed I just stood there I had a lot of time to get the focus just right because I was standing with nothing and then suddenly this woman appeared very casually in a sort of almost banal way just walking and I was so shocked I almost missed the picture I grabbed it and I asked incredulous where are you going and she said ah wedding party in Egypt and I was shocked but then at that level that that jarring realization I mean this is her everyday this is normal the fact that she's going through a bloody tunnel as if it's an airport terminal so Tojihi which is like high school examination in Jordan and across Palestine so this was the last day of Tojihi exams and the sea which plays a psychological role for many Gaussans they can't both in industry it's limited what they can fish and how far out they can go I think it always changes between five and seven excuse the English American terminologies nautical miles but so their big outing that day was a five minute boat ride they got to go you know the wind blowing out for five minutes then turn back around back to the coast but this is one of those moments little girl on the beach it's funny when this was one of the images that world press photo use they blew it up in an exhibit I was in in Russia and they did it without the caption which I always fight captions are where you can push back and fight back and get your nuance and it's essential that you take the time to do that and they didn't include the caption and so a lot of Russians in Moscow oh this poor child bride I I just kill me but anyway what it was in fact it was excuse me I forget which can't there's several on the sea there but sorry was it Zubalia there's another one not Zubalia I think that one I think that one anyway she she had gone to a wedding party the night before and it felt like a perfect princess and she begged her father the next day please please please let me wear this dress and so that's what that is from um speaks for itself this is the university in Abudis they have a javelin team men and women and of course the wall plays um right across on the other side is a beautiful view of Al Aqsa a dome of the rock and it used to be just a very short drive between the two so it's just this very I sort of see these as a Amazon woman you know just defiant but there's still this block of what they can access this is one of my greatest regrets in life I didn't follow him I have no idea why where he was going I asked people about him and they just kind of smirked and shrugged so I sort of got the idea that he's perhaps the village madman but I I don't know his story I can't tell you there's a place in Jericho called banana lands and there's this they have the wild animals inside they have parrots snakes and these fantastic backdrops and for many Palestinians who cannot afford because it is not easy to there is no there is no exit from the West Bank and certainly less so for Gaza and it's all is all exits are Israeli controlled and it's expensive and stressful to go and cross into Jordan so some people go and have these fantastic you know wild tropical journeys through the photography you have wedding people getting married coming and just it's almost like a honeymoon imaginary honeymoon backdrop situation fashion show Bethlehem this is a nice comment about obviously I have to comment about this one this is the most popular picture from the series this one is where I break rank from traditional journalism and the sense of I argue collaborative portraiture now there's a big debate and a big divide in journalism right now that's coming up where people are talking about staging staging staging for me outright this is not staged I did nothing to set this up what I did do is respectfully include a dialogue with the person that I was photographing I nurtured a longer term relationship I follow I met him a couple months before and he was just this character is from a small village outside of Ramallah and he wants to be an actor although he's a mechanic and he was just this wonderful character and as a as a storyteller or whatever you kind of identify early on who's going to be a good subject and we kept in touch and purely by chance from the last day of Ramadan 2013 I called him and I said hey what are you up to and he said gotta go buy a sheep you know for the family for upcoming Ayid and I was like oh my god please let me come with you and I lived that type very very short distance from the other side of the wall in Betanina which is sort of the last very much struggling but middle class neighborhood for Palestinians in East Jerusalem and of course it should be from my house it should have been a 10 minute drive but you've got a bottleneck situation very very militarized checkpoints and this is the last day of Ramadan people were jonesing for their cigarette their last meal I mean it was chaos so I kept calling him can you wait can you wait finally he said I'm sorry I have to go get the the sheep and I said please just when you have it call me if we can you know meet up in time he did very respectfully he did and as I crossed it was empty and this doesn't happen unless it's like two or three in the morning I mean this is just a busy damned stressful checkpoint where a lot of inspiration actually comes from my series just waiting and watching Kafka as symphony happen around me anyway so it was empty and the thing is is to get access these may seem like happy lighthearted images but to get the trust to get these pictures it took I mean some of it was just pure street photography it's a mix inside the book that I came took but some of it took negotiation took conversation in the sense of who am I what am I doing pleasure why do you want to talk to us about pleasure do I have a political agenda do I want to say look how good they are living they have no problems I mean they have the right to ask these questions especially as people who are consistently misrepresented so this in the case of this this would-be actor he loved the concept he has a wonderful humor so he had the sheep in the back in the back of the car which incidentally he initially named Haifa Wahbi oh okay so many of you know and then figured out and I never asked him how but he figured out that it was a it was a male so he said oh it's Morsi actually he named him Morsi and as I came towards the car he pulled the sheep in the front and because he was playing it was his humor it was his excuse my language here fuck you on occupation that's how I see it and at this point the light was going and I had one really inexpensive shitty lights and I had to decide oh god oh god I need to I need to light the situation man sheep man sheep fuck it I don't know row it in the middle and see what happens so I threw it in the middle and that in itself would have been a good portrait but I don't know I didn't mistrong him looking at I don't know but he gave me a gift which a good portrait is a gift because it's a dialogue he lit the cigarette before it was time to I might add and turned with that you know nudge nudge wink wink he turned to the sheep and that was his playfulness so that is how this picture came into existence can I just interrupt with it I don't know if any of you have seen the Guardian online there's a fantastic comment right at the bottom they say nothing wrong with a date with a sheep fair point fair point and as I'm going through if I don't comment on anything if anyone has a question please just this picture I put into the book more as when I went back in 2013 I wanted to find the man who had inadvertently put this into action at this point they had become a bit more conservative the family would have had the tunnel romance and they didn't want to be photographed but I kept explaining how much they'd inspired me and there was a negotiation and of course she didn't want a close up of her wedding picture and then it was a negotiation and I convinced them I said well what if we just put the pictures on the wall and I back up and I take and I show you and I keep back and deleting until you agree and so this was what we finally agreed upon as the so that's my reference along with dialogue which is in the back of the book to this amazing family so I'm just these two pictures go side by side and for those who can't read Arabic from beyond the bars I came despite the prisoner and the jailer so one of the most important stories that I wanted to somehow photograph was the at that point new phenomenon of smuggled sperm from the jails in Israeli jails they are and I wish I could remember the statistics on the top of my head but it's a shockingly large number of incarcerated men boys, teenagers husbands, some life sentences so of course they don't have conjugal rights despite the fact that the Israeli prisoners most of them do so there's a doctor in Nablus and a friend in the UK don't quote me on that and he he's phenomenal he does things in IVF with very limited resources that people cannot do in so many places and he said when I interviewed him that he doesn't see it as political but as feminist because he said that many of the women that let's say that the husband is serving 20 years she's not going to be able to have a child by the time that the men get out and then these men have had their life denied to them and so he wanted to help the woman and so the thing is they make a pact I interviewed so many women who were actually pregnant or had just given birth through this process wanted to find out how it was happening and for one the doctor says talk to your imam talk to you because a lot of these women are coming from villages outside so the imam would say tell the community what you're planning on doing so nobody makes any assumptions A and B so there's a whole process but as to how it happens that magical how the hell they get the sperm out of the jail they make a pact the prisoners and the women not to talk about it because they want to maximize how many people can do it however I did get one insight because the Israelis are they were not happy with this so they're monitoring it's constantly fluctuating but I did get one insight from a lab technician in Nablus because he was like oh man it was such a pain in the ass taking the sperm off of that date and I was the date I was just I was ah so think about that think about the folds of a date think about how difficult the extraction of the semen must have been from that but again how do you tell that story so I just tried to find a respectful way this is one of the first babies Majid born from this process he's now a Swarthi toddler I also love Lydia Ramawi as the mom I just loved her message I mean I loved just how poetic and simple and powerful this political message was on her these are these are her little baby what do you call it baby announcements I mean only in Palestine would there be such a political Dehesha refugee camp of course these camps while crowded are nothing compared to the Palestinian camps in Lebanon those are far more shocking but people do go up for air inside the camps oops Gaza this is another one of those funny I don't know the real story behind this I have my imagination that it's two secret lovers but nobody will know it's in this wide open space where there's no trees but they choose to sit exactly right there despite the view of the mosque in the background but it's just a nice scene there's not you know it was interesting Gaza the West Bank that was easier to photograph than East Jerusalem the tensions of East Jerusalem the racism of East Jerusalem it's really created a distrust and people are more paranoid of each other and it's actually very difficult to photograph in East Jerusalem in a very depressing place Gaza East Jerusalem their house was demolished and there was a cave underneath where they used to keep the animals and the family ended up for a long time having to move into the cave this is an old man and okay so wedding halls in Gaza they look like discos many of them and this was a new one so it was empty and so he had it open you know try hoping that people would meander in and want to book their weddings there and this was the father of the proprietor and he was so so old so sweet but he was just filled with not amnesia sorry Alzheimer's and he literally as a young child had been displaced from his village which was just on the other side of Erez so he was rendered a refugee from a young age miles away from his home and now in his old age just under siege so this is actually an image that just these are girls from high school girls from friend school in Ramallah and to get access in some situations especially girls you know they want to be careful like who are you what's your agenda where are you putting these pictures of me I mean that's the thing is selfies and sexy duck faces it's all the rage including in Gaza once you become friends with people and you become you've got access to their private accounts you've got girls in Gaza just endless sexy pictures of endless but I mean that's all set to private they have to be careful with so in the case of in certain cases they would say no and then I would just sit and hang out and then the you know do you have Facebook do you have Facebook so I would become friends with a lot of people and in some cases less so I'll admit teenage boys but my friends would be like you're going to let some horny teenage boy into your life and I was like well fair enough expecting to take from his life but so in this case they became friends with me these particular girls and kind of sussed me out on Facebook and then thought oh well she's okay and that's how I got this picture which now they love being in the book and they're amazing girls this it's hard to see on the screen but this this is a father and baby bottle and it's funny because I was pushing this image is sort of against the mainstream current of the Arab angry male so there was like a sweet papa but actually it could kind of backfire because certain mothers were like oh my god look at the babies without a helmet Jesus Christ you know but this is this is the Middle East last moment before last moment in her family home before the husband came Ramel the nursing nursing students there's a funny backstory on this one so in 2009 right before I left this massive story broke and actually I would have been guilty of being one of the journalists following the trend if I could have because it was such a telling story it was the case of donkeys that were being painted as zebras and I mean keep in mind that's where you're talking about people are trying to go on and live some semblance of a normal life and bloody hell I mean humans can't get out do you think they're going to be able to bring animals in I mean there was amazing cases there was an incident at eras where there was a woman in a long coat and she had things that looked bulky underneath and the Israelis freaked out and tackled her what the hell does she have underneath and it turned out it was baby crocodile that had been taped and so you know so anyway so I wanted to find out what happened to the donkey zebra and then it became this obsessive mission while I was there and at this point what Lale Khalili would refer to the politics of pleasure Hamas had gotten in on the game there were more theme parks that had opened up like they were trying to find ways of release and you had more zoos so every zoo that I would go to I would say what happened to the donkey zebra and everyone had this fantastic tale it was assassinated by the Israelis I was like okay okay so finally there was one zoo left in Rafa to go to at this point and I went in prepared for dejection and I asked the guy what happened and he said oh I know what happened I killed it and I said excuse me and he said yes yes and he saw the look of horror on my face he said no no no come come come and he goes do you see these two babies and he said their mother was hungry the donkey was diseased anyway so I fed the donkey to the mother line anyway so since since this picture there's been a couple more baby lions and Gaza but this particular zoo was decimated in the last bombardment funny backstory on this image I and I don't quote me I don't believe she's surfing anymore she finally became old enough that it wasn't as although I hope she pushes back I'm not I'm not completely sure if she's still surfing but at this point she was 13 so I forgot her last name right now but I really wanted to find her but I also wanted to photograph the surfers but I was very unlucky the entire month that I was there there was no surf the surfers weren't out so this was the one day the surf was there and I was wobbly and very pregnant and obviously not going to wear a bikini so I was went into the water wearing jeans and a long shirt and I went out out and the waves were high and so I was really focusing on not submerging below the camera to the water and as I'm standing like this trying to get pictures I felt this I didn't realize that a wave had come and lifted my entire shirt over my belly and so there was a group of gawking shocked teenage boys who were just and all of a sudden but I didn't know I'm just standing trying to get the picture and then right at that moment I felt this very soft small hand come and pull the shirt down and normally when someone touches you you might jump but it was strange like I just feel this was this was a kindly hand so I finished taking the picture and turned and there she was she had just come over to help me and that's how I actually ended up getting this portrait these women are going up to the Mount of Temptation this is the biblical site in Jericho and it's very exciting this is probably the most high level Palestinian you know touristic infrastructure that exists and of course the Mount of Temptation it seems very exciting but when you get to the top you can buy Coca-Cola pretty much but I wasn't tempted but let's see and Palestinians in Gaza in the West Bank wherever they are inside under the occupation they find any element of nature to enjoy that they can these women so basically yoga is becoming quite popular and not just among the bourgeoisie women of Ramallah and Jerusalem it's really I mean you've actually got men from villages young men who are learning to teach it I should full disclosure I actually dislike yoga immensely myself I'm not one of the yoga people but it's really really become a release for a lot of people and these two women in the front the one on the right she teaches Islam in high school and the one on the left early 20s and initially it started they got a trade session four or five women would come once a week and it was this small community center which was a teeny room with a giant 1970s elliptical so there was no space and then it just started growing and growing and it got so big that they started three classes a week and doing what they called nature walks and so they would go out in nature and there's fantastic I mean the West Bank Palestine it's beautiful I mean that's the thing and you don't get to see a lot of that beauty and these women sometimes not in this picture but they like to go to areas around settlements there's one area with some Roman ruins and they like to do the yoga there at the risk of being hassled because they said they see it as inner resistance and the woman on the right when I was watching her and I forgot what the position is called but it was a it's a standard yoga position anyway and I asked her after I said you know it's interesting when you were doing that it almost looked like you were in prayer that you weren't necessarily doing yoga and she said well yeah it's the same thing for me it feels the same prayer and what I feel in yoga this is a cover of the book and one of the last images in the book all of the nature reserve so if you do have open air spaces in nature there's very limited places in the West Bank that you can access that have not been co-opted either by intimidation by settlers or by the Israeli parks authority who are very kindly managing the nature for the West Bank but of course it's just straight up occupation this particular place is right outside of the Hizma checkpoint and the settlements nearby these are not let's say the rabid religious settlers so it's one of the less spots in nature if you go to Hebron any water areas there it can be really tense and intimidating and you'll have teenagers I don't know they look like machine guns I'm not sure what guns they are but just sort of strolling through nature with the guns and it can be intimidating for Palestinians this kid actually came from Hebron and he had driven quite a ways to access this so this particular nature reserve this is this freezing cold in the summer it's amazing pool that has fish in it and nobody, giant fish and nobody knows where they came from and then there's a stream and then there's actually a monastery in the back sometimes with actual monks inside I've been lazy I've never actually gone that far down but despite the fact that it's a more easy spot where you don't have as much tension you still have and again I come back to the earlier statement occupation informs everything you still have a disparity between how the Palestinian youth are treated versus the Israeli youth so if an Israeli father or teen jumps into the pool the Israeli referee or lifeguard says nothing but anytime that a father a teen any would be screamed at get out of the water would be so this kid he waited and waited and waited and we were all asked to leave the pool it was time for the park to close and this kid waited until the lifeguard was his back was turned and he was going down and he just ran and did this belly flop into the water and just floated there just this absolute beautiful peaceful freedom actually so I love this picture and I think I will see wrap up with that okay so thank you very much Tanya I have to say that I owe a lot to Tanya because she provided some pictures for my first book what it means to be Palestinian we didn't talk about that and also the cover of Gaza's metaphor which is one of the pictures that you've seen here but without further ado I'd like to invite you to ask questions and you could ask questions of both of them or of Tanya and of me if you want to but please just put your hand up we're happy to take questions we have time for quite a few come on so as exactly what's going on sorry about Rabia I think it's a new build a new Rwabi Rwabi yeah and do you know anything about Rwabi and is it likely to survive and is it likely to flourish and there seem to be some opposition amongst Palestinians which is understandable I guess those that couldn't afford it it's a kind of similarity with London which is not obvious at all but after eight years of austerity there's a big division in London or Britain itself of people who can afford new buyers and those who can't so it's kind of a few questions in one but I just wonder what you knew about it I've covered it Rwabi is actually one of those stories that's cyclical that every journalist does and I've been given five different assignments to photograph it I've got a photograph in my book I didn't show in the slide show that's kind of a sarcastic commentary on it it's in theory is a beautiful thing it should be a beautiful thing a new Palestinian city the first Palestinian city I remember on an assignment with the Wall Street Journal a lot of Palestinians dislike the architecture they say it looks like a settlement up on a hill it's a settlement and the woman she didn't last long in communications she wasn't as savvy but I actually thought her answer was fascinating she said and why not bravo they've taken how much of our land so we can learn from them great let's take our hilltops back which is interesting because Rwabi literally faces I think it's one or two settlements but on another hill and it's got this excuse my mouth I used to traumatize the students here it's got this huge f**k off flag this Palestinian flag giant and it's there waving right across from the Israeli settlements and it's been stolen two times and one time they did get them on film of course nobody was arrested but after that they stopped stealing it so on one hand it's positive it's more affordable than a majority of places I mean land is in Jerusalem forget it even in the West Bank it's quite expensive but the problem is the people who need it the most are the East Jerusalemites because it's just insanely expensive and they're literally the policies are pushing they want them out they want to make it so expensive that they'll go to Ramallah and then they'll get caught and people who need it are the East Jerusalemites but they can't risk losing their IDs so in some cases very poor families that I know one of them was a woman who used to watch my children she took a loan out and oh sorry she took a loan out and took the place but not to live in she's in this cramped place in the old city forget about it and not only are they piled into these old houses but if they rebuild them you've got neighbors that have been arrested and to get out of jail they have to inform I mean it's just incredibly complicated so people will buy it in Ruwabi as a summer home it's quite messed up and then on the other side of things people don't discuss the fact that there's some shady business dealings Palestinians who were maybe coerced to sell the land there's a lot of accusations but nobody ever has covered that because it's always the every narrative is wow the new Palestinian city I would love to see an investigative piece on it I don't have the time or the resources to do so I hope I answered your question can you raise your voice please can I say one quick thing and then I agree with you completely and I was terrified when this first project came out because that was my exact fear however it exists very grotesque horrific imagery of what happens not only in Gaza but in the West Bank and now with the kids being shot at checkpoints because they had a knife I mean no it's true and you have such a limited so it can't be either or and it can't simply be look we're fine you have to very carefully but I think there's something incredibly important to refuse the binary that's placed on all Palestinians not just in Gaza but lately especially in Gaza which you're a victim or you're a terrorist so I think you have to push back but very carefully but that's a very important question and it's heavy and it needs to be further examined I think the word resilient and resilience I think the word resilient and resilience is spectacularly problematic at the moment it's the language of neoliberal survivalist politics it's used to individualize things and it's used to to sort of undermine very real problems so somehow the individual is resilient against these and if the individual fails to be resilient then the individual has failed and so resilience is used in austerity politics here it's used in Palestine it's used in wars all over the place it's used in lots of different you'll please do contribute if you disagree I have a problem with the word resilience because how do we describe resistance, change, subversion adaptation, rewriting it all of it without kind of falling into this neoliberal nonsense of resilience and yet resilience is important so it's difficult well in the Palestinian context as well I mean some more this concept is part of our own narrative of survival so it's a heavy word and depressingly I just had a conversation with the head of someone I respect immensely he comes from a very political former PLFP and now he's very respected in fundraising for one of the UN organizations and he said right now there's no money for Palestine he said everything is going to Syria not that it's helping that much but he said he was meeting with donors from the Gulf and they were desperate for money so what's your approach going to be and he said resilience and he said what do you mean that's your new approach I mean that's our thing and he said that's all that I can sell that's all that I can sell to get money is hey we're still hanging on so yeah it's very problematic I mean I would love to know what you think about that further your ideas are you a student here? Can I intervene here I think one of the issues for us is that when we and we have to think of what they intend to say in a sense so I think in different ways we can label everything as resilience or as resistance or as a coping mechanism but it does give some agency to people I believe perhaps I'm wrong but I do believe that if we show them as human beings you know as normal human beings they are getting on with their lives the occupation is there you know we don't forget the occupation and we don't forget the Israeli practices but in a way it is a form of empowerment you know I always remember Edward Said's argument or statement in an article he wrote where he says the permission to narrate we have to give the Palestinians permission to narrate whatever we say many Palestinians haven't been given that much of a permission to narrate but we are narrating our stories in different ways and so it's interesting to think of the role and I think you started with that Tanya the role of photographs to tell a story to tell personal stories as well as a collective story so again what Tembi was saying about binaries it's not about national verses the personal they interact together in different ways and I hope that kind of explains so it's not a question of life goes on but of course life goes on and this is what is important as well as we are still there and it's as important as saying despite the occupation and I think that it's imperative because if I were just doing a series of look how resilient they are but actually I am literally resilient the written content is essential for this series and it goes it's actually using black humor to explain how fucked up what they have to go through the ludicrous situations that they have to go to so it's actually a very pointed but at the same time even with as much agency as I've had because this was released with the world press photo so I've pushed back but I was humiliated by the Guardian article a few days ago because when they ran it because I'd been covered in the Guardian before, respectfully and I was shocked when it was the headline was Palestine surfing pleasure seekers of the occupied territories and I was absolutely horrified it's an important issue and interestingly my Palestinian friends now I'm not talking about the new shooters but the filmmakers, the artists the intellectuals aren't even interested in imagery of the daily lived life or representation of Palestinians they're my good friends I go to them to make sure that I'm, is this fair is this correct I'm very careful with what I put out and very respectful but they say we love the work it's important that it's out there it has a role but we as storytellers like right now the more interesting storytelling that's coming from the Palestinian artists that I know they're so beyond documentary imagery because it's done them no good I mean there's just endless imagery and so they're going into like archival research and finding or for those who haven't seen the Mona Hattoum exhibit I went yesterday right when I landed and it it blew my mind I mean what level she's operating so they're going on a whole other level post post post because you can only get so sick of how your story is narrated and I'm sorry did you want to say something else from let's take some other questions and then we'll come back to you is that okay yeah autopilot right where are you from Ramallah or yeah absolutely and that's the thing is it's frustrating as well when you're hired as the photographer and you're working with a parachute journalist someone who comes in and like I did this week long investigation with NPR and I love NPR they're one of the better I guess it's like the BBC of the US and sorry but the questions that he asked and the responses that he got and it would and I wanted to sometimes intervene and say you just given you've just been given a patch at answer but you know so yeah you get it and if you're I think a good journalist you wait and you try another approach and then I think that you try you just have to sometimes accept this is what you're going to get and if it's actually correct you use it and it's difficult no it was so and that's the thing that frustrates me sometimes is because a journalist who haven't been there or journalists who are really more into the dazzling like the screaming child or the dramatic building in the background they have that oh well that's real journalism look what they did oh these are nice pretty pictures and I'm like oh my god if you knew how much it took to gain access and to gain the trust and rightly so because they do many people I don't want to say they collectively but many people feel even if they're tired as hell their child has just been killed I mean the poor woman the kid that was burned alive that mother was exhausted and yet she kept seeing every single journalist that came because she wanted hoping politically that something and she just kept so there's this obligation to talk about the suffering but you know to ask you know it's incredibly difficult I think that if you clearly state what you're doing and you clearly state this isn't journalism this isn't traditional documentary I mean it's interesting because this is the debate that's happening right now in photojournalism and if you've been following The World Press last year they had to take a prize back from this series and actually visually it was like wow everyone was freaking out he got first place in daily life and it was the series of this town in Belgium I can't remember the name of it but where economically it was going to shit and all of this depravity was happening and it was this whole photo series and it was this picture very well lit of a man having sex with a woman in the car and you could see it was very graphic part of a very and there was a woman in a cage she was like a sex worker the whole series was extremely and then the mayor of the town saw it as bad PR and he went attacking and then everyone descended upon this guy and initially The World Press because then it turned out that the picture of the guy having sex in the car was his cousin and initially journalists were like oh well you he has to lose the award now and World Press was like well he should have said that but at the same time if his cousin was gonna go have sex anyway blah blah blah blah but what ended up happening is that's the thing is you have to be so incredibly careful respectful and correct because if you the minute that one thing opens and this guy the cousin opened the door and people began dissecting everything and then it turned out that one of the pictures in the series was actually from a town five hours away so he had miscaptioned and he lost The World Press photo so it's like what is but there's a push back right now like Dominique Bracco just won the Tim Heatherington photo award and he's doing a whole approach mad it's on another level it's incorporating plays and theater and he did a fascinating article in the British Journal of Photography and he talked about how he lives with a community he waits till they care about him and he cares about them and he bleeds in collaboration and that's the thing that I say I mean some people got angry when I use the term collaborative portraiture oh well what's the difference between that and staging I'm like well a fuck load actually because I'm not setting anything up I'm simply being respectful and letting someone have some agency and how they do I know him better than he knows himself or what he wants to say so there is a push back and there's a some people are calling it new documentary and it's kind of like the way equate it would be the difference between hard news and an editorial so it's sort of like an editorial still news but you're sort of admitting that you're putting a say more in what's happening but staging photography I mean Cindy Sherman ah one of the most interesting works that I've seen recently is an Egyptian photographer Hiba Khalifa I think her last name is and if anybody wants to write me or ask for any information after please do I teach a workshop twice a year and then I mentor the six months in between and Beirut and this is an Egyptian photographer a single mother works at a newspaper job six days a week hardly makes any money and despite this uses one of her bedrooms as her studio and she did this project that was so unbelievable she would meet woman who had pain that whether it was they were abused by their husband or whether they felt insecure about their weight I mean whatever it was very universal problems that woman anywhere in the world would have suffered so she meets them she interviews them and then she thinks and thinks and thinks about how can she make a healing portrait combining fantasy talking about their pain but then have an element of release and so everyone was kind of like at the beginning when she presented what she wanted to people were like ah okay but when six months later she came she presented a work that half of the room started crying the other half started laughing and then they would switch to it was so fantastic and that was staging but it was so it was this bizarre it was this bizarre element of like art therapy and staging and Cindy Sherman but with far more depth and it was and I went to her afterwards and I said you know I want to go take a portrait in your studio I want to go get some art therapy and then this New York woman heard and she said oh isn't that crazy a westerner going to get healed but I mean that's the thing is I think that as storytellers we can keep creating the same tired shit but a good storyteller a good journalist a good artist filmmaker whatever you are you're going to push forward so so staging in journalism no bad but again there's just it's just if you state what your objective is I'd like to ask you a question Tanya oh sorry should we go to her after the question yeah sorry I didn't see you I know we've just discussed this at quite a fair amount one of the things I have experienced for example working in Kenya with tea workers is we ended I was supposed to be doing a story about union rights and it ended up being a story about rape and sexual favours where the women were being having to offer sexual favours to the foreman in order and in order to keep the conversation going we all ended up talking about our sex lives me included it was extremely uncomfortable there was a blurring of our private lives but I felt it was dignified and respectful if I was going to be asking people to talk about things that were difficult this was done over a week then it was only fair that I should also talk do you also get to that point that edge when you're thinking whoa these lines are super blurred this is uncomfortable this presents ethical problems for me to tell me about the thought processes that you have and I'm not forgetting your question it's interesting because it's just every photographer has their approach my ex-boyfriend he's two meters tall like six foot whatever and he can't ignore him but he's somehow his approach is he manages to disappear and he gets amazing access but the way that I get access is I connect with people so it just depends on the approach and I I'll do a short antidote in Gaza one of the refugee camps that I went to not on the sea I can't remember the name anyway I went to a women's therapy session and these were women who were just really traumatized and once a week they would come in the space they would either dance play drum tabla they would or talk it was just literally the therapy was that they had a room for themselves to do whatever they wanted they show up and I'm pregnant we're talking we're sharing of each other and then they're like oh so is it a boy or a girl and I said I don't know it's time probably I could find out I said I hope it's a boy because I already have a girl I just want to know what a boy is and they said oh well you know the doctors visiting this week because the doctor would visit the refugee camp that week and she said well the doctors here why don't you go see her and I was mortified I'm not going to take their resources and time and I said no no no and they said no and they literally hugged me by the hand and pulled me into the doctor and it turns out she was Russian she'd been married to a Palestinian for 20 years and she had this archaic sonogram that looked like it was from the 1970s so I get up on the table woman does the thing and I mean we're talking about seriously old equipment I don't even know how she saw what it was but she's like is boy and I'm like I didn't even believe her to be honest because I thought it was some shady equipment and then I go back to the room because all my equipment is there and I wanted to spend more time with the woman and they're genuinely they were like so what was it was it a boy or girl and I said it's a boy and they were like they started clapping and singing and I just was shocked that they could still they cared enough about me I'm coming to take from them I'm coming to take their story and they cared enough to know who I was so it just depends on the approach that you want to take yes I think if you're taking you give but then again sometimes people don't want to you're talking to someone in grief and they don't give a shit about your story just be respectful essentially but what was your question are you studying law or are you a lawyer attorney my husband actually he's a lawyer and he works closely with various Palestinian political institutions from the negotiation support unit and onwards that is fascinating and I actually hadn't even considered that that movement was happening and how imperative it is I mean for me well I know someone that you need to talk to and she's a lawyer as well and she's fantastic and she's pushing but she just she studied at oh god it was one of the first black universities in the US Howard she was head hunted to go to like full scholarship Harvard and she chose Howard specifically because of their civil rights and she's doing things she showed up on the scene in Ramallah and she's unbelievable and actually I think you too should connect I have to be careful because ironically despite getting a world press photo which is the honestly I never thought that this work would get there or that I would but already ironically so I had this but in some circles I am seen as unhireable to tell the Palestinian story because I have made a stand even though I did it very carefully I see this as I call it quiet fuck you it was a smart critique it was a quiet critique I had too because my goal was to get this narrative out so I'm not trying to appease the west there's a lot of Palestinian intellectuals right now angry feminists who are like fuck the west I don't give a damn I'm not here to justify who I am but at the same time I think there's an important role in journalism that's what I can do as an individual but at the same time I have to be careful not to be rendered an activist journalist because then you're suddenly diminished and you're less so I wouldn't personally get involved but I would document the hell out of it if somebody and do a proper photo essay as to the other question it's tricky because right now I'm working on a really fascinating project that I can't go into too many details but it's specifically tackling Nakba in 48 for next year and I'm working with some top academics and it's going to be explosive when it comes out and it's tackling because this project I got funding 67 nobody can talk about 48 and one of the professors working on it is a professor at Columbia who has not been tenured yet and in the US it's a very different climate to discuss Palestine and so why did I go down that ramble? because I was hired as one of the Palestinian photographers on the project and I'm always very clear I am not Palestinian and they decided to make an exemption because I gave two demographic threats to the existence I have two Palestinian children but because I am not Palestinian and because of my anthropological training I'm very careful with how I handle the narrative of anyone that I'm dealing with I just did an assignment on American settlers in the West Bank the kid picked up a plastic machine gun and before the father even said anything he put the camera down I'm respectful of whoever I'm documenting and the father said oh please don't take pictures of that I said of course not I wouldn't do that to a I wouldn't you have to be respectful so in the Palestinian narrative I run everything that I do there's two one of them is a Palestinian filmmaker one of them and I run everything by them is this problematic how is this how is that I try to be as careful as I can but people are angry and people are tired of journalists it's a minefield I don't know for sure I mean I'll just do a quick funny story and then get to the serious breadth of your question I move around first of all the fact that my visa is through my husband and my husband is Palestinian with an Israeli passport so I already have more agency than the majority of Palestinians that I know but the fact that I don't look Arab the fact that I and in fact in Israel in particular because I'm Circassian some people would think that I look Russian and there's obviously a lot of Russian Israeli Russian Jews so I get through checkpoints pretty easily I remember this is the funny story we were running desperately late to the airport and there's various checkpoints or checks and I always get screwed when I travel because in my American it says born in Jordan and my middle name is A what is your father's name? what is your grandfather's name? go sit down but this one time if you get stopped at the outside checkpoint and you're running late you're screwed you're gonna miss your flight and as we're pulling up he screams look Russian and I'm like literally I just quickly I pull red lipstick out and as we're driving to the checkpoint I'm like and they let us go by I so the duality yeah I get access I can do stories of settlers I can do stories that other Palestinian colleagues cannot do but I can also screw myself in situations like I didn't realize with the Orthodox Jews that they also as well as some very religious Muslims that they don't shake the woman's hand I offered my hand the guy looked offended he said where are you oh no no no I offered my hand he said no no no and instinct as I would with a conservative Muslim man I went like this but when I did that he looked terrified and he's like where are you from where did you say you were from I had to sidestep Texas I'm from Texas it's difficult so the difficulty I can navigate inside almost seamlessly but in terms of how I am labeled and how I am seen yeah it can be it can be reductive and frustrating and I I don't want to name the publication but that I recently found out that a publication that has published my work that is sort of a publication a journalist would dream of of working for and I'm in a position where I would be the natural choice to hire and they won't hire me because they don't want to be seen as because the writer is already Arab so the idea of having an Arab writer and an Arab woman sorry photographer so yeah it's difficult any other questions you took one of the flotillas oh oh okay I was like holy shit I researched thoroughly before I go into these situations so in some cases I know what I'm looking for in some cases then in other cases I find something I catch it and then I analyze it later but it's interesting because one of the divisive you know very British colonial divide and conquer approach in the Palestinian context as you know I don't want to preach to the Palestinians here but for those who don't by making the suffering and restriction and reality difference you have people who kind of stop looking at the resistance and struggle for human rights collectively it becomes instead this village I'm focusing against the wall and this village I'm focusing in and the 48 Palestinian is focusing on and while so it's just a matter I mean the best that you can do again there's only so much but it's just context, context, nuance nuance and so in Gaza you have to be very specific about but at the same time you have to be careful because if you say Ghazan right purely Ghazan then they're not Palestinian there's something so and again how you get around it you become incredibly verbose like Palestinian Ghazan and then editors are like oh god this woman you know winches on and they'll just cut you and reduce you again to Ghazan or Jerusalemite but that's the thing so what is fascinating right now is the movement it's connecting in a way that it hasn't in a long time through social media and through very educated Palestinians and so in 48 Palestine for example I mean Israelis do not you know some people say where's your husband sent from and I'll say oh he's Palestinian oh where are you know I'm talking about of course Israelis who ask me and I'll say from Tarsiha they don't know Tarsiha then I have to say Malo Tarsiha the Jewish village with the oh oh he's Arab and I'm like no he's Palestinian they try to take that word away so you just you need to so it's this balance on one hand you want to talk about the specific conditions that the Ghazan is suffering but then you don't want to remove his identity as a Palestinian so it's just a tricky terrain so you just try to be as respectful in the terminology as you can but what's happening right now in 48 Palestine is you have like there's the Mahattah that's just opened up in downtown Haifa and you have the youth who are using what they call the tool of citizenship to resist and they're using like cultural activities and then they're going to it may seem on one hand they're going to go party in Ramallah but no they're reconnecting and so there's some fascinating movement happening forward on that terrain maybe if we don't have any more questions Tempe has one question then we have time if you want to buy the book you can have a signed copy but just drawing it round so the kind of original idea that you know what we're looking at is the permission to narrate the permission to let people call the shots at some level I'm thinking about when I was doing a documentary and one of the things that became clear when we were talking was that people kept using they would put their phones out on the table in this really sort of ostentatious and then they would look at mine and say you're a westerner you come from Europe you've got the cheapest phone what's that about like are you trying to do some kind of you know some statement and so the phones would come and phones were this took quite a long time for people to admit what they were doing they were flirting these are younger women you know 17, 18 they're having little numbers going on with their texts and their little little flirts because it's absolutely not okay for them to be flirting in public so I just I found you know kind of like exploring the humour of that exploring what they were flirting about what people wanted to talk about that was like a really it became really funny it became a kind of then they were asking me like why do westerners divorce so much why are they so unfaithful why are they so crap at keeping their pants on like which to me was hilarious like it's actually really funny to have the thing thrown back at me and I think that the media can be very transformative it can give people agency and I'd like to know about how you view that transformative power if you like of your photography of giving people agency what have you seen that's changed your conversation I can't say that I've given anyone agency I can't say that I can say that after the project came out I would receive emails sometimes just one word emails that would say thank you or thank you for letting us be seen as we are thank you a lot of them were Palestinians in diaspora who can't access Palestine I think what I can do is open up the space if that's agency I don't know but I can open up the space for conversation in places I mean I've discussed Palestine in places you wouldn't expect but what I think is interesting that is happening is because of social media again I remember the first time I heard these words were from Dr. Dina top down the traditional top down approach in journalism is being countered because people can talk back and they can critique and I refer to a world press win in 2006 where the image of the year was an image from the war in Lebanon in 2006 and it was this image that was initially problematic how it was captioned it was this image of a very attractive Lebanese woman blonde blonde tight white shirt very and they're in a red orange convertible it was too very attractive woman and a man and the woman is sort of leaning out like this and it was initially there wasn't enough context and it came across as wealthy warriors coming to look at the damage from the war and what ended up happening was the photographer in question won the world press and it is a very striking image but at the same time you have a political obligation and an ethical obligation to give as much context as you can and so the people actually wrote back and it went very public and social media played a role in this and they were like hey oh hey no that's not what happened we were in and out of uh why am I blinking dahia we were in and out my aunt an old woman refused to leave we kept risking and going in under bombs to give her food and to help anyone that we could we're part of the community how dare you reduce us and it ended up creating this massive dialogue so I don't know if you can give agency but you can open up dialogue and I think the agency is being taken you're seeing a rise in some phenomenal Arab Iranian Arab filmmaking uh arts journalism people are taking their narrative back and that's exciting and also on another note you know this this whole and I'm going on a little side diversion but this whole Shia Sunni divide that's being shit stirred I mean when I when I first went into Iraq people journalists around me at the beginning of the occupation were saying are you Sunni are you Shia they were asking everything and people were taking it back initially because you didn't ask that question and I actually had a friend who was like you know when my aunt was visiting in Europe a great aunt and she died the Imam asked us which she was because apparently there's slight different burial rituals and literally didn't know we had to call and check with this you know so so it's been it's being fostered but interestingly enough like I just got an invite to go to the Iran Iran by an ally so so there's some interesting dialogue happening that's there's a form of agency in that I don't know if there are there any journalists or wannabe journalists in this room yeah good nobody wants to be nobody you're with that amazing magazine right oh I'll just zero I mean I don't why would say if you want to be a journalist if you could be a journalist if you know journalists if you want to be a blah blah blah blah blah there's a big backstory to this to this thing that you know Tanya and I've been working on with The Guardian which we're not going to go into it's been a very it's been very hard work to get to change the story and I think it's just I think the difficulty is I mean Tanya's at a level where you can probably call the shots to a to some degree but there's still a lot of haggling horse trading fighting there's still an element of you know I've been doing this job for 30 years now I still am worried about not getting the next call I'm still worried about the thing that you've talked about which is the person saying we're not going to we're not going to hire her she's too activist she's too political she's too difficult she's too emotional she's too what what what what and the thing is that you have to still find ways to say I will tell this in this way because this person 3,000 miles away I owe it to them I've got an ethical intellectual duty to say it in a way that works for them and not for Tristram in the news agency in Britain who has never stepped out of Chiswick and that is a real for me that's the battle that you know of kind of I am not going to let my fucking world be defined by somebody whose parameters are this big and who speaks one language and I speak four and you speak three etc etc etc right so that in a sense it is quite ongoing and it's active and it's not the big moves it's the little moves it's the little fights I think if anybody wanted to sorry yeah actually the Guardian article I almost didn't want to come to so as because first of all that headline and second of all they literally took one of my quotes where I talked about how when covering Palestine they never put enough context of the militarized checkpoints and limited and they changed it to say they focus too much on the checkpoints they literally changed my quote I'm not going to so as so as to change it to the quality that's my point as long as I was like that is humiliating and it took a lot to get them to correct but they did make a correction but for the staging question we actually have a photo industry person here from Panos which is one of the most kick ass photo agencies of all of the photo agencies they really have an ethical humanitarian agenda and like the others if you wanted to say anything about your take on staging you could does anyone have the microphone where's it going can you in that staging photography come from the statement that photography is true and I would disagree with that I think it gives too much power to the photographer and it cannot blur the line and make people forget that actually the photographer is framing a situation and he's taking the decision in that moment of excluding things out of that frame and that can't be a truth because it's just a representation of his vision so I think this is like often this is the start of people that are really against staging in photography that are saying that they don't lie to the viewers and I really agree with that it's really about being open but it cannot make people forget that the photographer from the beginning is telling us his point of view and the way he's seen the situation and I think in that sense if you open about the fact that you are staging you may be more true to the viewers because they will know from the beginning that they put you in theatrical environments they bring you into their imagination and their own interpretation of the situation and maybe that leads more way and space for yourself to think about what you're looking at rather than taking it for granted and thinking that's the truth viewers that is really good and I'm going to say thank you, I'm so proud of our two alumni correct? ducklings they're more than ducklings and I'm really proud that some of our current students are here so maybe you have learned some more what happens to you could I say one quick thing? you have a degree from SOAS Dina and SOAS and the endless reads and all theory and it was agonizing and there were times I question why but I have to say that yes the time here allowed me to feel confident in deconstructing and actually having my own voice so thank you SOAS definitely played a role thank you very much I interrupted, I'm sorry how many books do you have? I think like 10 52 if anybody wants to buy the books they're also available can you buy them on Amazon? unfortunately Amazon and the US only so you could order Amazon but it has to be Amazon US so if you want to go through Amazon or the 10 copies I have here thank you so much for coming on a lovely day and in the middle of the day so thanks