PhotoBooks Palestine

A gripping eyewitness account of the palestinian plight.

At the height of the Palestinian intifada in 1993, Magnum photographer Larry Towell trained his lens on Israel's displaced Arab populations living under occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and documented Arab-Israeli relations there over a period of five years. Then Palestine includes verse by the exiled Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. French journalist Ren Backmann contributes a historical essay about an Israeli woman's poignant, strained relations with the former owners of her childhood home-Palestinians from whom the house was seized in 1948. Towell's Afterword includes excerpts from the journals he kept during his seven trips to the occupied territories between 1993 and 1997.

*Check prices and availability in:
UK, Canada, France, Germany or Japan

John Tordai has been photographing Palestinians (and Israelis) for close on 20 years. He was in Gaza in the early 1980s, before it became the fashionable haunt of journalists and TV crews. He returned during the exhilarating early years of the Palestinian intifada - when all seemed possible - and stuck around as the uprising sank into trench warfare of Israeli seige, Palestinian violence and political stalemate. And he was in place to watch the entree of the 'peace process' in 1994 and the birth of the Palestinian Authority.

*Check prices and availability in:
UK, Canada, France, Germany or Japan

Using first-hand narrative, reporting and black-and-white photography, this is a warmly personal account of daily life among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The focus is on Canada Camp, one of the poorest of the Middle East's 61 Palestinian refugee camps, and on the efforts of the authors to document daily life there in early 1993, the last and increasingly militant days of the Palestinian intifadah and the beginning of the Israeli policy of closure, a major feature of economic life in the Gaza Strip today. Photo interviews give camp residents a chance to comment on Doughty's photographs, which adds little-heard, grassroots voices to the book. An epilogue discusses the transition from direct Israeli occupation to limited self-rule under the 1993 Oslo Accords. Through the eyes of a compassionate but critical visitor, GAZA helps the reader understand the Palestinian experience in the Gaza Strip. 232 pp; 40 photos; 2 maps. Subjects: Palestine studies; visual studies; anthropology; journalism; cultural and media studies; images of the Middle East; Arabs; photojournalism; documentary.

*Check prices and availability in:
UK, Canada, France, Germany or Japan