With clasped hands and sandalled feet, two young girls stroll
down a dusty road in the West Bank. Their shadow looks like one
person, and their eyes squint to avoid the sun as a truck trails
behind them.
“These images are my remnants of hope,” explained
photographer Shelley Gazin.
Gazin’s black and white portrait of young girls walking on
the road is just one of the photographs featured in her exhibit
opening today at UCLA’s Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for
Jewish Life. “Reconstructing the West Bank” documents
her road trip during a day of apparent peace in the West Bank.
The gallery is introduced by way of an essay written by
Professor David Myers, vice chair of UCLA’s history
department. According to Myers, Gazin’s photography calls to
mind not just black and white, but a wider realm of colors, images,
expressions and possibilities.
Gazin took the photos one ominous day in May of 1983, when she
was offered a tour of the West Bank from the Technion,
Israel’s Institute of Technology.
“The tension in the air was palpable,” said Gazin.
“But I trusted that I was in safe keeping, and I was having
an opportunity to travel throughout the entire area.”
This was a unique window of time. A month before her visit, the
Palestine Liberation Organization blew up the U.S. Embassy in
Beirut, and two months after her project, a Yeshiva student was
stabbed to death by Arab youths in Hebron.
The exhibit is digitally transmitted on paper and canvas in pale
hues and sepia. The absence of color urges viewers to focus on the
people and the land, both inspiring and unsettling.
“(The subjects of the photos) appeared vulnerable, whether
serving tea in a two-story stone house or bearing an AK-47 on the
road to Emmanuel,” said Gazin.
What is striking about the images is their surface simplicity
and the questions they evoke.
“(The images) are just people doing the job of living.
They are so small against the desert. Perhaps that’s why
I’ve printed the portraits as large as possible for this
exhibition space,” said Gazin.
A cheerful-looking young man on the side of the road looks so
familiar, and yet he bears a machine gun. The pregnant woman could
be a neighbor, but one cannot help but wonder about the course of
her child’s life.
Gazin’s portraits compel viewers to wonder which subjects
are Jewish and which are Arabic. And most of all, do they both want
peace?
Stirring questions like these are the goal of the exhibit.
“I want to open up dialogue. The time to show these
pictures is now,” said Gazin. “How can we separate art
from politics here?”
The exhibit dares viewers to revisit the site of conflict and
imagine peace.
“It shows what appears to be a message of hope, and if you
lose hope there is no solution,” said Gazin.
“Reconstructing the West Bank” runs now through
Dec. 4 at the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA.
The exhibit is free to the public.