 Good afternoon and welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. I'm Cora Michael, Associate Curator of Exhibitions, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to our final program in our four-part conversation series, pairing artists from the exhibition This Place with notable writers. We are thrilled to have photographer Wendy Ewald and author Luke Saunt with us today to speak about Ewald's experiences in Israel and Palestine, as well as their shared interests in vernacular photography and the social and cultural significance of everyday images. For the past four decades, artist Wendy Ewald has been working with children and adults around the world using her unique form of collaborative picture making. Rather than photographing her subjects, Ewald hands out cameras to the people she works with and allows them to photograph themselves, their families, and their communities. At other times, she invites the people she photographs to mark or write on the negatives she has made, thus complicating the notion of authorship. A key part of her mission as an artist is educational, and in 1989, she helped create Literacy Through Photography, a program at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. For this place, an exhibition exploring Israel and the West Bank through the eyes of 12 international photographers, Ewald worked with 14 different communities in the region, including Drew's middle school students, Stahl owners in Jerusalem's Mahoney Yehuda Market, Bedwin sixth grade students, Palestinian women elders, and workers in Tel Aviv's high tech industry. The extraordinary results can be seen in our galleries until June 5th, as well as in her beautiful book titled This Is Where I Live. Over the years, Ewald has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She is a visiting artist in residence at Amherst College. Reiter Luc Sainte has chronicled the seedy underbellies and rich countercultures of cities like New York and Paris in such works as Low Life, Lures and Snares of Old New York from 1991, and The Other Paris, published in 2015 by Ferrar Strauss and Giroux. These books, along with his entertaining and elegiac 2003 essay My Lost City, serve to remind us of the fact that all the cities in the world were at one time unstable, freaky, and colossally sorted, as Sainte said in an interview in the Paris Review. Sainte also has a special fascination for such low art forms as postcards, family snapshots, and crime scene photographs, as he explored in his books Evidence and Folk Photography, the American real photo postcard 1905 to 1930. He has also written numerous articles on art, music, film, and photography for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Art Forum, and many other publications. His book of a collection of his essays, which he wrote between 1990 and 2005, is Kill All Your Darlings, published in 2007. He is the recipient of a Waiting Writers Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy for album notes he wrote for the 1997 reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music, an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Coleman Fellowships. Sainte is visiting professor of Writing and Photography at Bard College, where he has taught since 1999, and he is currently at work on a biography of Lou Reed. Please join me in welcoming Wendy Ewald and Luke Sainte. Thank you all for coming. So Wendy, this is an amazing project of yours. I think I'm supposed to put, oh, no, wait a minute. Okay, all right. There we go. Well, let's start from scratch. So you... So this is a group of kids in Nazareth, and each of the projects that I did, I worked in different communities, but there were different populations of people in every place, and this was a sixth grade group, and this is a picture of us on a community walk, and it's the outskirts of Nazareth, and one of the things, at a certain point that I do, is walk with my students to see how they're seeing, to see what they're photographing, how they're photographing. How did this particular project begin? Well, it began with a commission that, to be able to photograph or work for two years, over a period of two years in Israel and Palestine, and I was very dubious about it in the beginning because I really didn't feel like I had anything, particularly to add to the conversation. There were a lot of interesting Israeli and Palestinian photographers, and also with such a polarized situation, I really, that doesn't really interest me that much. I'm much more interested in what's sort of in-between things, and so I went and tried to see if I thought I had something to say there, and at first it was very uncomfortable, but then eventually, I picked one place to go to see how it would work, and that was Nazareth in the two Israeli communities, and that was a place that I really felt was, it was of both worlds, but something unto its own, and then people started asking me to do projects. So this is a classroom in a village school, an Arab-Israeli village school, and a translator, the translator that the kids worked with, so she would translate from the Arabic to English for me, and then eventually, like for example, this project was with stall owners in Jerusalem in the Mahana Yudah market, who were very orthodox, I guess, that's what their reputation was, and we would meet once a week, and they would bring food from their stalls, and it was kind of like a party class, and they were very serious about their work, and they called me the professor, and here they're learning about perspective and testing out different perspectives. So had they ever photographed before? Were these people new to photography? Well, there were some who hadn't, and some who had. By and large, the Jewish people had photographed more, I'd say, than the Arabs or the Palestinians. That's a gross generalization, but in a way it was a, they were doing it in a much more conscious way, I guess, than they ever. And then over a period of two years, you ultimately had 14 groups going. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is a group of army boys in the military academy, this is Dolev, who's learning how a large format camera works, and I also photographed them with the large format camera, so he's shooting himself in this picture. But yeah, there was, I had a friend who's a head of social work in East Jerusalem, and so she suggested that I work with elderly Palestinian women and gypsies, and a filmmaker was working with the market people, so he wanted me to work with them as well, so I wasn't planning on doing a sort of global look, but then I felt like this was what was presenting itself, and I should follow. Yeah, it's remarkable how it seems, I mean, as somebody who really doesn't know much about Israel, I confess, it does seem like you've got so many of the possible situations, ethnically, et cetera. Were you or your assistant searching precisely to fill in all the corners, or did it just happen? Well, at a certain point, I mean, in the beginning, I just thought, well, that I wanted to work in the army because it was so different than working with the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian kids, so that was obvious, but then as I followed people's suggestions, then I became conscious, and there are six Jewish projects and six Arabic or Palestinian projects, and then also I was being asked to work with people who weren't children, which is, I've worked with children a lot, so then that became more interesting to figure out different, that it was important to have different ages and people in different stages of their lives and the photographs to them at that point was interesting. Yeah. How much time did you spend teaching them photography before setting the loose? Well, generally, we spent maybe a couple of weeks and maybe a couple of weeks or something like that, talking about what photographs they'd taken, what was their experience with photographs, what they wanted to do, why did they want to do this, looking through a camera, what is framing, what you would sort of do with anybody, and then would ask them to go out and shoot and see what was happening and kind of go from there what they were doing. But I never worked with digital before, so it was kind of a new experience. So that must have meant a lot more exposures than you're normally used to, yeah. Yeah, it was, yeah, and it's saying number of photographs, but something like 100,000 or something like that because there were so many places and then each person took a lot of photographs. It's not like they did it for a month or something. A lot of them, some of them did it for up to two years and probably the shortest group, the last one I did, maybe did it for four months, but so they were shooting a lot and it was interesting. Yeah, because every single one of these groups produced remarkable pictures. There are snapshotty kind of pictures, but there's at least like one incredible kind of museum quality picture in every single one of these 14 groups and that just seems miraculous. I mean, do you think that ultimately everybody is capable of being a wonderful photographer? Do you think it's a matter of chance? Do you think some people are better than others in these groups or, you know? Yeah, I think all, yes to all of those things. But yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time, or not a lot of time, but I really think about what equipment to use and how to teach them how to use it and what's the best way for them to use it so they get the best results in a way and tell them things like, you're not allowed to low zoom was something I said all the time. So that you have the possibility of like blowing them up or doing different things. But they were teaching me about, you know, how the camera worked and what were the limits of it and also how things looked so different in a digital situation. I was afraid it was gonna be very kind of cold and like, you know, without sort of imperfection and then I had grown to love a lot with black and white and developing and all that. But that wasn't the case. It was just, it was a different language. And they knew, you know, they really learned how to use it and play with it a lot. So yeah, so here are the elderly women. And so what we would do is when they would bring back, I would, when I was there, I wasn't there all the time, but I would be there for three or four weeks and we would meet all the time and then I would go away, come back and they would have shot more pictures. And they would bring their cameras and we would download and then look at everything together and, you know, do a little critique session. And you can see how serious they are. You know, I mean, they're really looking at them and they worked very hard and they're still photographing now. And in a way, for me, this was the most successful project because it was something very different than I had done before, but also it meant a lot to them, I think, because they're in a situation where there is a lot going on. And it's one of the most contested places right now. And they didn't know what they would be able to photograph when they started, but they learned that, or some of them particularly, that they could photograph what was going on. And also there were other women who were much more involved in photographic domestic things or traveling, but they had the time to work on it, that some other people wouldn't have had. Are they the only group where they traveled outside their immediate area? Yeah, yeah, for the most part. They also belong to a women's group and so sometimes they would go together. And so these are the 14, oh, maybe we could turn the lights down a little bit. The 14 groups, and it's hard to see the map of Israel to the right. But that's where they all are, and this is from the book. But maybe we could turn the lights down a little bit more anyway. So I don't know if you can read these titles, but they're titles that they put on the photographs later after I had done the first edit, then I would bring them back with sort of in contact sheet form and then they would write the titles that they wanted on the photograph with the idea that something we talked about that if you want to direct people to what it is you wanted to photograph the text is a way to do that. So this is prepared to receive their released relatives outside OFRA prison. So this was one of the big prison releases while I was there. It's interesting, when I saw this picture, when I first saw this picture, I thought they've looked at Gilles Paras. That's right, that's right, especially when you go and see his insulation. It's like diffused focus. Yeah. I know there's a lot of re-photographing of photographs. Is that the thing you encouraged or did they come up with that on their own? Yeah, they came up with that on their own. I think it's a way of extending what they can photograph. It's a way they can photograph history. And it's powerful the way that they've learned how to photograph it, so it doesn't look cheesy. And studio photography in the Middle East is a thing of wonder anyway. Yeah, yeah, yes, in so many different forms. Is that still, I mean, is it still, this is just kind of a semi-relevant question, but I'm curious because studio photography comes so close to disappearing in the West. Is it still vigorous over there? Yes, in comparison to other places I've been, or maybe like Africa is. But also the thing is that you can get things made out of photographs. And I mean, I became close friends with a studio photographer in Nazareth and used his studio, and which was great because he had the backdrops, tulips of Holland, he had an English cottage. Oh, man, man. And everybody loved it. And then of course you go to the other extreme and you go to places where they'll actually do your suicide portrait. Oh, right, of course. Yeah, and so they're, yeah, you can order what you want. Yep. Anyway, this to me was an amazing group of pictures of this swimming pool, which is something, I would have never, A, thought existed and B would never have been able to photograph. And a lot of these photographs are the colors are just astonishing to me too. So one of the women that I worked with was Nadia. And Nadia particularly asked me the first day, she said, I don't know what I can photograph. I wanna photograph the demonstrations because where she lived is Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, which was a particular, I'm sure it still is hotspot. And Settlers had taken over her, a house that she had built for her son behind her. And so she was living right next to these, that's the house and they had a dog. And there was constant harassment. So she, at first she didn't understand that she could photograph it. And I didn't wanna push her. I said, well, you could do something metaphorical. Don't worry, I don't want you to put yourself in harm's way. But she started really photographing what was happening at that next house. Which seemed, and people told me, gave her a lot of strength. So this is the surveillance monitor inside of her house. And you can see where one of the cameras has been busted on the top by the Settler neighbors. And by the time I'd left there was two more busted. Oh my God. Yeah, these elders produce some of the nerviest pictures. Yeah, I mean they could also get that close and you know, someone's not gonna be afraid of them. That's right, yeah. In the same way. Protection of age. Yeah, which even I find which is great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so these guys just hung out there really basically during the day. And then next to where, which was like over to that wall I guess to where Nadia was. And then people who were observers, peace observers would sit in front of her house. So it was a pretty wild situation. And there she's actually photographed the guy. This is one instance where she did use the zoom. So it was a very rewarding project I think for all of us and the women actually wanted to start teaching other women. So I think it's something that actually could be very useful. And that's something worth pointing out. You haven't mentioned I think is that your projects just keep going. I mean, they don't stop once you've left. So potentially there's years even generations to come. Yeah, it was interesting. I went back to Tel Aviv. Well, this show opened in Tel Aviv. And so I visited or people came to the show, all the people that I worked with. And the women didn't feel right about going to the museum in Tel Aviv. So I went to see them and took them the book, which I encourage you guys to look at because there's a lot more stuff in the book. And I'm always nervous when that happens because here they are all these different people in the same book. And I mean, they know it. We've talked about everything, but it's different to see it. And so I was particularly worried about what they were gonna say. But I think a couple of them said, this is really important. Now we will be remembered. Now we, our lives have been recorded and it was quite meaningful. I mean, it's quite moving for me to hear that. And it's almost like inviting, almost like inviting all of them to a dinner party. Being in all under the same covers. Yeah, yes, yes. Right, which is a radical thing, I guess. I mean, people have told me that. But I'm going into another group. So this is one of the things that I've done to help people try to think about how to photograph their community, which of course is an abstract notion pretty hard to come up with ideas at first if you're not used to it. And so I just ask them things they like and they don't like. And we write them down and then take something that they pick out that they don't like. In this case, it was shooting and killing. And so then they listed all the things, images that they could see in their mind that had to do with shooting. And in this case, I didn't realize that their lives were as sort of fraught with danger as they were until we started doing this. Because it seemed like such an open and warm place in a lot of ways. And then they would take something like police and then what photographs would you make? And then as I said, I would take things back home after a trip and then I would do a gross edit and then make these contact sheets for all the kids and bring them back and then ask them to write on them any titles that they wanted. So it was a series of edits over edits and I would bring them back or if they didn't want to use something then they would exit out. So you yourself went through all these hundreds of thousands? Yeah, it was like a dream. It was really, I loved it because it wasn't only, it was getting into the culture's head in a way but it was also getting into every single person's head. The way that they were seeing and it was really exciting. And I'd have to do it a few times before I sort of got a rhythm of what they were looking at and how they were composing. That was interesting when in the book you mentioned that when you were working, when you first started working with the kids in Nazareth you showed them Helen Leavage photographs and they had them pick out everything that was going on. That's, yeah, it seems to filter through. Yeah, so they became pretty conscious that they were all, you had to do a good read of what was in a photograph and then you could sort of be conscious about making a photograph in a way. And also how complex they are and Helen Levage is so great because there's so many layers, I guess, to one of her photographs, especially the ones on the street, which are most of them, but. Did you show the other groups famous photographs? The same thing, I showed everybody the same thing. Oh yeah, oh wow. Yeah, yeah. Is that Helen Leavage, just perfect example. Yeah, I mean it doesn't matter that it's a kids, that it's kids because everybody's been a kid and everybody remembers their childhood. Yeah. Yeah, it was actually, I did a project last fall in a prison in Massachusetts and they used some Helen Levage photographs and it was powerful. You know, just the memories they had of like being in the street and how they could totally relate to them. So this is one of the students, on that walk, we went in the community in Nazareth, one of the places they wanted to photograph was in this monument that had been, it was a monument to martyrs who died during, right before the Second Intifada in Arab-Israeli communities, I mean some in Nazareth, but, and so this is the first place that the kids actually wanted to go to photograph but it was closed so they were doing it through the gate and they're, yeah, so this is one of the photographs taken by one of the kids of the city. And what's remarkable about these digital cameras, probably a lot of this you know, but you can blow these things up, like this big and they looked like they were shot with a four by five. If you know, you know, if you're careful. I want to take a picture of a helicopter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is Isra's family and my grandfather Mohammed and his Quran books. So one thing is that the Arabs, really kids, they made a lot of still lives in their homes and I've never really seen that, but they're, I think they're beautiful, amazingly composed and the things that they're photographing are really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know it's, I forget what they call that process, but I guess it hung on in the Middle East a lot longer than it did in the West. Trying to turn a photograph into a drawing. It's called, I don't know what it's called. I don't forget, but yeah, it's very fragile actually. Yeah, yeah, because you can see where it's peeling off, but beautiful and he's got a kind of, importance with the image, but then with the books underneath and it all works together. Right, yes, absolutely. Yeah, the composition is fantastic. Yeah, and yeah, I mean, this is crazy, but really great. And there were to answer your questions, there were some really good photographers, like Malik was one of them. Uh huh, yeah. And I think in each group, you know, they were like gifts. Right, sure. And, but then everybody made interesting pictures, but yeah, some of them were just, and I guess when I started the project, when I started seeing the pictures, the first time I started seeing the pictures, I realized I could do the work because there was something there in the pictures that I hadn't understood before, I hadn't seen before, and you know, so that was it. I thought okay, this is gonna work somehow or another. And so that's Aya, that's going to the party by Aya, and so that's Aya, so you know, it's another way of them photographing themselves, you know, at different times. I actually wasn't sure if that was a commercial photograph. Yeah, well it may be, you know, it may have been, I mean they may have taken her to the studio, and. Yeah, that's remarkable. Yeah, and then, and it's really sharp all the way into the, into the rows. And the black background, you know. Yeah, yeah, so the, you know, the downloading of the pictures was just like, it was such a wonderful experience, you know, you just didn't, it's so exciting, you didn't know what was gonna be there next. This is one of my favorite ones. And again, another one by Malik, and you know, it's his little brother sitting on the fish tank. Oh, I didn't realize that. So all these pictures have these little things in them, you know, that. Yeah, is it a corner of the room, or is it set up like this, you know? Because it does look like a certain kind of studio setup, right, with the flowers. Yeah, yeah, and that's what their houses are like. They are like studio setups, you know? I mean, that's, and, but I love the idea that this one is called the traditional costume, because for so, you know, for a lot of people who look at that, you know, their association is like with Yasser Arafat, or the PLO, or whatever, but you know, this is what his father and grandfather wore, and, you know, it's the way he wanted his little brother to look. That's right. So. The social media agency in Tel Aviv. Yeah, so this is somebody's desk, Anat's desk. And they were the first social, Blink was the first social media agency in Israel. And, you know, so this was a conscious idea on my part of wanting to see another part of Israel, because these offices and these companies that are all right together, it's called Silicone Wadi, so Silicone Valley is really in Hebrew. And so they agreed to all the designers. These do seem like the most self-consciously arty of the picture. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's many, you know, many more of them that are very self-conscious. Right. So the screen eyes are watching, that's a pretty self-conscious title. They're also, they also do still lives though, yeah. Yeah, okay, so this is, yeah, this is the Cisco's office and the title is my favorite client and it's by Hagar who she designed their social media campaign for Israel. And she was probably the best photographer in that group. She just, when she started, she just photographed everything. So here's their board meeting and this is called Empty Chairs at a Cisco conference. Do you think there's any significance to the chairs being empty? Probably, I don't know, but I didn't ask her. You know, one thing about these things is that there's so much happening and things happen so fast. There's a lot of things I'd like to know that I don't. And then this is her too and there she is, our orthodox neighbor through the hole in the door. You know, so she's just looking and her house is made as a set. There's this incredible wallpaper and she goes and finds things on the street and constructs these insulations. And so I find that a lot of times that the people who are really good photographers are arranging their lives in really interesting ways. Their houses, what they wear, even little kids, her husband's cousin. Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of Philip de Corsche, I think, sure. I was thinking Nan Golden. Or Nan Golden, yeah, yes. So, oh, this is the army. I started working with these boys in a military academy. It's in the Dead Sea area, in a Kibbutz. And some of them stayed with me or we kept working following their graduation from the military academy and then when they went into army training and then in the army. And it's a school for military academy for at risk boys. And some, I mean, the military really sees it sees itself as a place that homogenizes the country. So in this case, there were kids from Ethiopia, from Russia, immigrants. And there were kids who were having a hard time socially. And really a military academy in Israel is started with Orthodox Jews who wanted to prepare their kids for the army so that they could keep their faith during that time when they were mixed up with everybody. This is way earlier. And so, they're really supposed to be the elite, you know, by going through these academies. And so, these guys, were with me for, we were with each other for like six months when they were in the academy. Then I tried to get permission for them to keep shooting in the army. But I couldn't get it. And so, but we just said, okay, if you wanna keep shooting, keep shooting. And so that's what some of them did. And then so I was able to, you know, we could see their photographs for over like two and a half years or something like that. You have, in the book, you have another military academy group, which is the women. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that they were generally from more prosperous backgrounds than the guys were. Yeah, I think that that's true. But, and they were from Orthodox families. So most of them had, were going against their, you know, their family culture to even join the army. And so these girls decided, found the place and decided to go on their own. So it's quite a really interesting group of people. And also they were very, you know, feminist. Right. So, so this is, this is once, once Avyaad was in the army. This is called observation stand. And then this is, this is their field training, which is right in the beginning. And this is the most secret, I guess. And they're really not supposed to photograph this, but I haven't been any repercussions. And they're out of the army now, so I don't have to worry about it. They didn't give away any state secrets. Yeah. So training in the desert. And I don't know, this one is very poignant to me that, that, you know, this guy is out there all by himself in the, in the desert. And, you know, this kid is looking at him and, you know, you know, he's, what is he doing there? And I'm sure he probably feels that. Yeah. And in wearing very, very hot clothing in this incredibly hot place. And also, I was wondering if there was something about, you know, the, the air, because it happened to me at least three times, I looked at this picture and I first had the impression of the camel being a miniature. It doesn't look like it's far away. It looks like it's just very small. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's the tractor that does this. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is by Mulk Khan, who was one of the Ethiopian kids who also really liked to photograph. And, and you know, I don't, I think what they're doing here is, is, you know, learning how to do things, you know, while they're blindfolded. I see, right. Like field strip of buildings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cause you can see the other kids doing it in the back too. But these kids also were really conscious of the fact that they were being stigmatized outside of Israel. I see. And they were really interested in, in saying this as an opportunity to talk about who they were and what they thought. And so we had some pretty interesting conversations. And there were some things that happened while I was there. It was a massacre of a settler family. And they had, you know, sat with the family and the media really focused on them. So there were all these opportunities to talk about, you know, what the media means, what photographs mean, you know, if they were to take their photographs, what did they want them to say? Yeah, yeah. And this is a reconciliation ceremony between Dolev, who you saw earlier with the four by five and Adir. And I for a long time just thought it was a, you know, a meaningful meeting. And I didn't realize that there was actually something institutionalized to, you know, to deal with any conflicts. Oh, so it's, yeah, I wondered about the word ceremony. It seemed a little, but I see. Yeah, I think it was really a ceremony. Yeah, yeah. First person camera. Yeah, yeah. But very, yeah, this is what happens a lot. Yeah. A lot of, when they're around. And they were living in this really beautiful kaboots on the Dead Sea and there was a hotel there and a swimming pool and that they could use. So for a lot of them, it was kind of really a very idealistic place that they had, and they had come from different, you know, circumstances to this place. Yeah, I think this is the last one. Slides, Praying in the Dark by Avyaad. And it's amazing what these cameras can do. I mean, you don't need much light, you know, to draw something out of a situation that's pretty complicated. So that's for, you know, four of the groups. But they're also the Gypsies, the Bedouins, the Druze, yeah, the Kaboots. I always would forget all the 14. Yeah, right here. The Elders' Kaboots. You have, oh yeah, that's right. You have a mixed school in Lod. Oh yeah. Yeah, that was. I didn't know such a thing existed. Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, there's quite a few, but Lod is a mixed city. I mean, it was an Arabic city and was, I can't remember, maybe it was 67. A lot of the Arabs were moved out and people were settled there from Russia, India. Jews were settled there. And so it was a predominantly Jewish, well, the kids, the classroom I worked with was predominantly Jewish, but there were Arab kids. And they were wonderful to work with. They were very excited about it. And they took a lot of pictures. But when I came to interview them, because I interviewed people in all the different communities to sort of have a, for the book, to have a context. You know, because I wanted to kind of make it like an atlas in a way. And so I guess consciously, I interviewed different groups of kids, you know, I had a Jewish group, an Arabic group, et cetera. And, you know, whereas the Arabic kids talked about how they thought it was really great to be in this mixed school and were very positive, the Jewish, many of the Jewish kids said, you know, they didn't really, you know, they thought it was great to be in a mixed school and they liked their classmates, but they didn't like the Arabs and the Arabs were breaking things and making things dangerous. And when it is a dangerous area. And as long as there were no, who had Arabs in their building and who didn't have Arabs, and so it was much more idealistic than I thought. That was very moved by the Gypsies. I mean, the most excluded group in the world. And I didn't even know there was a significant Gypsy population in Israel. Yeah. They say they came with Salahuddin, or my son, I always call it Salahuddin when he was a little Salahuddin or Saladin from Saudi Arabia. But that's not the, you know, everybody's supposed to have come from India. So, I don't know. But it's interesting also talking to people because I realized that so much of what it really, all their lives, all the community's lives were about were moving. You know, whether it's over 500 years or, you know, 40 years or, but everybody has an exodus story. Wow, you know. Basically. Also, there was the Christians, that's you. Yeah, yeah. And then that Haifa, you know, was in an Arab city. And there were Christians living there then as well as Muslims. And then when most of the Arabs moved out and during 48, the school where the, where I worked with the kids, which was a French school started in 1850 or something like that by nuns from France. And it was a beautiful school. And these kids were more economically stable than a lot of the other kids I worked with. And the nuns during 48 hid, you know, Palestinians. So, now it's much more of a mix of all different populations in the school, but. So, do you have another project that you're thinking about these days? Well, I'd love to, this idea of, you know, working over this broad of space with one, you know, this either situation, country, idea, whatever. I would really like to do it with indigenous people or the idea of what does, I think we were talking about this, what does indigenous mean over the world or within a smaller situation or what does it mean, you know, if you're indigenous in prison or if you're, you know, a businessman or, you know, there's all these different. And I guess the reason why maybe I'm interested in it is that the first project I did was with indigenous people in Canada in 1969. And, you know, it's something that I've been thinking about. That's the first time you handed out cameras. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, yeah, I just graduated from high school and I went up there for a summer to work with kids. So, and I just learned how to use my four by five sort of. And so, I thought it would be interesting to do because in those days, Polaroid, the Polaroid Foundation gave cameras and films to people who were working in education as Susan Mizellis knows. And she did a beautiful book of all the projects that are a lot of projects that teachers had done in the 60s. Wow, yeah. So, wow. One of those 60s things that comes back around. It sure does, and with digital cameras, I mean, the possibilities just expand so much, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's not so expensive and in some ways. I mean, I could work so fast and I could never have done that project with film. Oh, yeah. And the expense is so much reduced. Yeah. Yeah, and just like Polaroid, you could see it right away and you can edit and all these. And some of the kids have become, from your past projects, have become professional photographers, right? Yeah, well, yeah, not a lot, but yeah. And also, I'm working on a film of the students I worked with in Appalachia in the early to mid-70s or mid-70s and seeing who they are now and what that experience meant to them and are they shooting and what they're shooting and how they see that as part of their lives. So that's been really, really interesting and kind of touching in ways that I wouldn't have understood. Well, we're almost at the end of our time here. Is there anything else that I haven't asked? I'm sure there's a million things I haven't asked. No, I don't know. There's so many bits and pieces, but... Any good stories you haven't told us? Any good stories? I guess it just, what was so remarkable to me is how complicated things were, how complex and also how easy it was to work in all the communities. I mean, I think people think maybe it's hard, but I felt everybody welcoming and everybody wanting to tell a story in one way or the other. I think maybe the only group that I couldn't work with were the ultra-orthodox and I did try to... I worked or talked to a school for girls and I really would have liked to have worked there, but they said no. But other than that, people didn't say no. So the complexity came from the bureaucracy? No, I'm saying that... No, sorry, the complexity of what's going on. Oh, I see, of course, you know. How many stories there are. I mean, a lot of them are overlapping, but they all have their own specifics and it's all very nuanced, it's not the news. Right, yeah. And to say it again, you really have to look at the book and it's very, very rich and so many labyrinths within it. Yeah, I try to make it as contextual as possible by having ephemera from the different projects in there as well as me photographing the people who photographed. And the interviews. It's particularly moved by the elders from the first group who had her library burned. There's just a fragment of the English language page from obviously very serious work of history. Yeah. So it's downstairs, look at it. Alrighty, well, thank you all for coming. I just want to say thank you to Wendy and Luke. It was wonderful to hear you speak. Thank you so much. And also to let everyone know on May 12th at 7.30 we're doing a special food and film program here. We'll be screening a documentary about the Israeli food scene and we'll be offering a tasting menu of Israeli food. So we hope you can join us then too. Thank you.