Background

Between reading the news and talking to Max and other friends who have traveled to Israel, I feel like I know a lot about the Middle East. But I’ve never been there, I don’t study Middle Eastern history or politics, I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and I’m not even Jewish. (Of course, my religion–Christianity–has some investment in Jerusalem too.)

While I am in the Holy Land, my full time job will be to take pictures. I’ll take pictures all day, every day. Sometimes I’ll take them with my digital camera, and sometimes those pictures will end up on this blog. Sometimes I’ll take pictures with a 4×5 view camera, an apparatus that, due to its bulk and the cost of the film it requires, is generally reserved for photographers with a plan. I hope to be one of those photographers (the ones with plans) but right now what my photographic exploration will focus on is still up in the air.

I’m coming from an outsider perspective: a stranger in a strange and strangely pivotal land. The idea of going off to take pictures of an unfamiliar place, not to mention a place where so many of the world’s most pressing issues converge, is somewhat daunting. Who am I to go to Jerusalem and start taking pictures? A tourist? Yes. More than that? I hope so.

I usually take photos of the closest, most familiar spaces, and keep out all the people. My favorite subject is my home and the things that fill it. The Middle East, of course, is not quite my bedroom, but I think soon we will be intimately acquainted. I might even let some faces into the pictures.

Hanging around home, explaining to people what I’m doing this summer, all I hear about Jerusalem is something along the lines of “It’s not like any other place I’ve ever been.” I just smile and nod and say “Yep.” I certainly believe them, and I’m ready to see for myself