time, narrative and photography - ammar

Ammar works at the Beddawi cultural center. Throughout the duration of our workshop, Ammar would frequently disappear from the room for five-minute intervals and return with tales of splitting and mounting wires in order to restore the electricity in the building. Before we started our work one day I saw him ask a group of children where they were from. When they said “Beddawi” Ammar responded “no, where are you from in Palestine?” Before I could hear their answer we started our work for the day. During our break I went to find Ammar and ask him a question. I found him inside a classroom with that same group of children, drawing for them a map of Palestine.

Ammar is a photographer. He was hoping that the workshop would be an opportunity to refine his already impressive technical and artistic skills. He was initially disappointed to learn that the objective of our workshop was to explore the relationship between narrative and photography. Despite this, he decided to stay with us, and was soon using his photographic talent to express ideas that were important to him, and he believed, to the Palestinian refugee population of Lebanon.

Ammar's triptych representing “loss” is centered, like Basma's, on nature. When reviewing his photographs, we could understand that it was nature that was being “lost” but none of us could decipher the significance of the picture of the future. Ammar finally grew impatient and told us to examine what was written on the papers in the picture. They were prices, and Ammar was trying to express that in the future, we would all have to pay for oxygen and clean air. Like all commodities, in Ammar's vision of the future clean air would be unequally distributed between rich and poor.

Ammar's final project documents three possible ways of expressing the history and future of the Palestinian people. The nine photographs, split into three triptychs each representing an alternative expression of the past, present and future, also represent three different possible ways of keeping the goal of a return to Palestine alive, and not merely a dream.

The first way of doing so, represented by the first triptych, is through sacrifice.

The second way, as shown in the next set of pictures, is through the inheritance of the Palestinian cause, memories, culture and education from generation to generation.

Ammar explained that in the final triptych the photograph of the past, that of darkness, represents the Nakba. In the picture expressing the present, Ammar wanted to show that in all of this darkness, there is bound to be one source of hope that can be found. The final picture opens into a future - one in Palestine - that will unfold if we remain steadfast and follow that light in the present.

			Past present future - "loss"
			Final project

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