Photographer: Scott Lewis
Dates: During or immediately after the Second Intifada
Information about this project is sparse, but the overall arrangement of the portfolio offers some insights.
Scott Lewis is an American photojournalist who has spent many decades documenting life around him. The majority of his published works are colorful, bright, and light in emotion. Perhaps for his subjects, less is at stake and the setting is less charged. What therefore stands out from his work is his dark and brooding peek into the occupied West Bank and neighboring Israel.
Lewis titles this collection “Beyond the Bullets” and describes it as a personal exploration of the tensions of every day life for Israelis and Palestinians during and immediately after the Second Intifada. Very little is written about the project. Whatever else I can glean comes from reverse image searches and embedded EXIF data.
What initially drew me to Lewis’s work is his portrait of Helwa Farah, a pediatric nurse weighing three-month-old Shams Abu Qash at the Birzeit Women’s Charitable Society in the West Bank. The scene is overwhelmingly calm, light, and airy, a far cry from the way Palestinians are typically portrayed. I held on to the photograph for nearly a decade before discovering it was part of a collection.
Although the project is presented as a single unified body of work, there is a subtle but clear distinction between the two groups of subjects he encounters.
At first glance, this two-sides approach resembles the balancing acts typically seen from storytellers driven by a fear of being dismissed as partial or, perhaps, guided by a misplaced sense of equality over equity. If one person is suffering, his contemporary across the border must also be shown to suffer in the same way and to the same degree. Such false equivalences obscure reality and do the subjects — and even the viewers, I believe — a grave disservice.
But it is in the lack of commentary and information behind these photographs that the viewer is left to their own interpretations and appreciation of the different conditions in which Palestinians and Israelis live.
Aside from Nurse Helwa, the photographs of Palestinians are sullen, dark, deep. They are composed in ways that suggest stress. The subjects are uncomfortable; the viewer should be, too. Although Lewis does not explicitly mention Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, a few of his chosen photographs depict the occupation’s physical presence and Palestinians’ stressful and uncomfortable relationship with this manmade environment.
On the contrary, the photographs of Israelis are less brooding, less laden with stress. Instead, the subjective normalcy with which they carry on, living on the ruins of depopulated Palestinian towns, illustrates the twisted relationship many of these subjects have with their own environment.
One particular photograph captures young Israeli teenagers running down a beach into the Mediterranean Sea. Buried in the photograph’s EXIF data is the revelation that these youths are from the Israeli kibbutz of Nahsholim, built on the depopulated and destroyed Palestinian village of Al-Tantura in 1948. It is unclear how many Palestinians were killed during the Tantura massacre, but estimates range from dozens to two hundred.
Several analyses place mass graves beneath a nearby parking lot as well as along the beach captured in this photograph. It is highly likely Lewis was not aware of the chilling significance of the scene and the sand he stood on.
Visit his website to see the complete collection.
All the above photographs were taken by Scott Lewis.