separation fence

A Birthright Trip for Photographers? “This Place” at the Brooklyn Museum

/ Margaret Olin / 2 Comments

I owe the comparison with Birthright to Abby Glogower, so this post is for Abby.

“I came to think that there was something very special in this land that a lot of people recognized and wanted to claim for their own.” Stephen Shore, about his contribution to This Place

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A pro-Palestinian, anti-gentrification protest. The protestors are standing in front of a projected photograph by Josef Koudelka, in the exhibition This Place, Brooklyn Museum, May 7, 2016.

It’s all about the land. The same land visited by young Jewish men and women in free trips organized by Taglit-Birthright with an eye to giving them a closer connection to that land and encouraging them to marry other Jews. Similarly, the project This Place brought twelve world-famous photographers to Israel and the West Bank for extended periods to offer them a chance to forge a visual relationship to “this historic and contested place.” The hope was that they would portray Israel in a “universalizing” way and transcend the “polarizing perceptions and familiar images of the region in the mainstream media.” Continue reading →

Conversations on the Periphery 1: Wall on Wall

/ Margaret Olin / Leave a comment

I began this post in November, on the anniversary of the end of the “Antifaschistischer Schutzwand” (“anti-fascist protective wall”) better known as the Berlin Wall. In the summer of 1980, during a research visit to East Berlin, I spent a great deal of time looking at the wall. Oddly I never photographed it, but it crept into some of my photographs anyway. A bit of blurry wall appears among the trees in the background of the Brandenburg Gate. The gate itself is behind a barrier patrolled by a soldier.

Borda Gdns Cuernavaca 1977After I crossed the checkpoint it took decades for me to look back. I don’t recall seeing the bright graffiti on the west side of the wall. Continue reading →