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 In September, Camera Obscura, a college for the arts, hosted
the graduation exhibit of its photography majors. Among them was one who did not actually
take the pictures she showed. Galit Hinon, 26, entitled her graduation project “Three
Photographers”. She exhibited fifty pictures shot by Jamila Abu Ayish and Khulud
Kharub, 13 years old, and Sabrin Safi, 11. The three are from Jaffa’s Ajami
neighborhood. For an entire year they photographed themselves, their relatives, friends,
surroundings, houses – whatever enabled them to get their feelings on film. Galit
Hinon accompanied them.
The three young photographers turned the gallery of
Camera Obscura into a distinct social reality, even – for a moment perhaps –
into part of Ajami itself. The eye was not coolly anthropological. They photographed
within the neighborhood and its houses. They created a living environment, composed of
their lives, as reflected in a well-kept living room or the schoolyard. This was their
album. In the text accompanying the exhibit, Galit Hinon wrote: “This is the
territory of the neighborhood, of the girls’ social class, of their age and
culture.”
Ajami is destitute. Within it, for the last eight years,
the Baqa Center (Baqa is Arabic for
“enduring”) has operated a project called “Art in the
Community”. Five days a week, the neighborhood children come to the Center to
play, get help with their homework and make art. To keep its universal perspective, the
Center remains independent of governmental budgets. Its project is directed toward the
neighborhood children, but it also educates, by a kind of ricochet, the artists and
volunteers who come to the Baqa Center to make a change.Eyal Danun, a teacher at Camera Obscura, arranged a
meeting with the Center, looking for ways in which the two institutions, one in Tel Aviv
and the other in Jaffa, could cooperate. Among the college students was Galit Hinon. Later
she reported: “The people of Baqa gave us a tour of Ajami. They suggested we might
make a graduation project in connection with the Center. That very weekend I saw a TV
documentary about the housing problem in Jaffa, especially in Ajami. Like many Israelis, I
had only seen Jaffa as a place to eat good humus. I decided that I was going to go there.
This was a gut decision. I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never been a
political person.”
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The camera changes hands 
When Galit Hinon arrived in Ajami, this time with a
camera, she saw the neglect and misery that blight the neighborhood. “I began to
photograph. I did mainly streets, yards, the fronts of houses. My first attempts were
empty of people, almost severe in their spareness.”
Then Hinon took part in a trip to the Negev with the
Baqa youth group. Here she first put her camera in the hands of the children. They shared
with each other, each taking the same number of shots. The next meeting took place at the
Center, where they looked at the photos from the trip. Hinon proposed that they make an
album. “I said we could cut up the pictures, draw on them, and write. At first they
were taken aback. The pictures are pretty, they said, so why cut them up, why draw on
them? I wanted them to understand that the photos could be raw material to work with. I
wanted to stress the process and not the result. We worked on the album together three
weeks, so that they could show it at their school.”
Eight children were involved. Of them, three girls
persisted.
Three photographers
“Each time,” says Hinon, “one of the
girls took charge of the camera for a week. She could photograph anything she wanted, and
the other two waited their turn. It’s very hard to wait. They were bursting with
curiosity about what would be in the pictures. Me too.
“When we’d look at the photos, there was of
course an initial excitement. But the purpose of the meeting was to talk with them about
why they chose to photograph what they did and why they preferred one picture to another.
I wanted to explain what the camera does to us, to show that it encloses the world in a
single frame, forcing us to concentrate. We talked about the need to think before
shooting.”
Not National Geographic
The three girls photographed their surroundings: the
street, the schoolyard, the little brother asleep in his parents’ bed, the sister
posing like a model. In one of Sabrin’s photos, she is the subject. She is sitting on
a green hill, and next to her is a baby looking off to the side. This is one of the few
pictures taken outside Jaffa.
Hinon: “Deciding where you place yourself is very
important. Sabrin chose to photograph herself outdoors in nature. The picture was taken in
the village near Ramallah where her mother was born. They were on a family visit. Sabrin
and her sister told me that while they were there, they heard cannon fire. At night
soldiers came and knocked on the door. She told me she was afraid, but she chose to focus
on the village and nature. She photographed the donkey, the goats, the hen and her eggs.
‘I took pictures of the eggs,’ she said, ‘and that night the chicks popped
out.’ That was her reality. On that same night, though, reality included soldiers and
shells – a different kind of shooting.”
For the graduation exhibit at Camera Obscura, Hinon
chose fifty pictures from among the hundreds the girls had taken. She kept them moderate
in size, printed on ordinary paper. Beside them she placed the portraits of the three
photographers, which she took herself. In the exhibit catalogue, the Chairperson of the
Photography Department, Yossi Nahmias, wrote as follows:
“The photographic images that I find most
interesting … are those that show their maker as one who sees himself less and less
as a ‘photographer’ in the narrow sense, whose aim is ‘to catch moments and
print pictures,’ and more as one who specializes in deciphering and mapping out a
given visual-cultural space, and who knows how to enter that space, in a well- informed
way, to influence it.” This definition would seem to fit Hinon’s work precisely.
She broadened the concepts of “photographer” and “artist” to the point
where she could let go of her tools almost entirely: to be a photographer without a
camera, to be part of the society, to act in it, without hesitations about being
influenced or influencing. She entitled her exhibit “Three Photographers”, but
she was a fourth, behind the scenes.
After the exhibit opened, the three girls were invited
to see their work on the wall. Hinon: “Before they arrived, I worried they’d say
about this or that picture, ‘Why’d you put that one? I don’t look
good.’ But not at all. They were in shock. I talked with them about the fact that
everyone who visits the exhibit sees their work and the process they have been going
through. After that I showed them the school.”
The camera is still in Jaffa, and the girls are using
it. Galit Hinon continues to volunteer at the Baqa Center, working with children.
One of the photographs at the exhibit shows a birdcage.
It is unclear whether it’s empty or there’s a bird inside. Hinon: “We spoke
about the fact that they can photograph things according to how they feel, just as they
would write in a diary. The camera can be a tool for expression. The birdcage is a picture
of this sort. In Jaffa children like to catch birds, put them in cages, and feed them. I
think they also let them go.”
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