In 2022, my sister sent me a very large box. I found 10 picture albums, along with a tattered red jewelry box of documents. They now rest on a shelf, in my studio. 

 

The images I have chosen to show are those that my mother took in Palestine in the 1930’s, and my own photos from the 80’s and 90’s. Her images were taken before the 1948 Nakba, and mine during the first and second Intifada. 

 

It wasn’t until I was living on Kibbutz Kfar Haruv, in the Golan Heights in the early 70’s, that I saw we were living on occupied land. Finding a broken doll, then a child’s shoe, walking on a freshly plowed field…

 

Through all the horror of the past 9 months I’m finding some kind of comfort in seeing the past this way. The lightness of my mother’s photos, and the darkness of mine. The chain stitches around these cyanotypes, trying to hold on to a dream once told, of sweeter times under a pomegranate tree.