Photo: The Old City, Nablus – Palestinian Built-up Area.
The land of Palestine dates back to prehistoric times, riding across the Iron Age, through Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and British rule, which ended in 1947, when the United Nations took it upon themselves to create a Partition Plan for Palestine. This sparked a civil war that resulted in the state of Israel being established in 1948. That year, some 400 Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed, creating 750,000 refugees.
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Villages were renamed as history was erased—and so it is with great fortune that British photographer James Morris (b. 1936) has created a quiet triumph with his monograph Time & Remains of Palestine (Kehrer Verlag), an intimate journey to the sites of life, vibrant until the day that the land was taken from the people with such force that only a scar remains.
Qisarya, district of Haifa
Morris reveals, “The origins for these photographs lie in a pine forest, walked through at the start of my first visit to Israel when I came across the unexplained crumbling walls of seemingly ancient structures, a small stream running by. A plaque erected there in 2004 by the Jewish National Fund dedicates this setting to a couple from Canada, who declared it their “oasis,” “a recreation area, a place of water, of hope, of peace, of vision.” Later that day I found a film online depicting a recent visit to the same location by Israeli Palestinian citizens. Elderly men recalled that as children those remains had been their village, the terraces of their fields, the water their spring; they had been made I ternal refugees by the 1948 war during what they called their ‘Nakba’; their village flattened, their right of return refused, a planned forest of imported pines veiling their former world.”
Through extensive research using primarily Israeli historians and writers, Morris has created a landscape that is an epic scene of life after death, a place that feels haunted, as though we are walking on sacred land. Every site documented includes a history of the Nakba that befell the people that had been living free. The images are quietly haunting, as the facts often are, compounded by whitewashing of the historic record.
Lifta, district of Jerusalem
Morris goes beyond the boundaries into occupied lands, into the Israeli settlements, the refugee camps, and what remains of the West Bank, showing us the present state of affairs for the Palestinian people, some seven decades since they lost their nation and were forced to live as refugees on their own land. Morris observes, “In Israel’s landscape I had felt the presence of absence. In the occupied territories I saw the parallel worlds of parted peoples, each with their narratives in cruel variance to the other.”
Time & Remains of Palestine is a tremendous book, one that seeks to erase erasure and reveal the truth. Morris’s photographs are more than documents; they are elegies of life and death, reminding us how important it is to speak truth to power, by any mean necessary. Because if you don’t, it’s like Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
Abu Zurayq, district of Haifa
All photos: © James Morris, courtesy of Kehrer Verlag.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
