time, narrative and photography - iftikar
  Iftikar considers herself a workshop veteran. She told us that she always volunteers to join any workshop given by “foreigners” in the camp. She has taken workshops in theatre, film and photography. The first exercise we assigned to the group was to tell a story in ten pictures. Iftikar returned with her set of pictures, and said that she thought of them as a ‘storyboard' for a script. In Iftikar's pictures, three sisters go to school. One of the younger sisters does not want to go, and her older sister scolds her. Upset, she sneaks out of the school and hides from her family, who come looking for her. Iftikar said the most challenging aspect of taking these pictures was controlling her ‘actors'.
In the second triptych of her final project, Iftikar sought to represent one possible outcome of traveling away from home. The photograph representing the past is of a girl's obsession with French beauty products. The picture of the ‘present' shows the girl paying a fee for a visa to travel outside of the country, possibly to France (here a member of the group commented that it was almost impossible for a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon to be given a visa). In the third picture, Iftikar tried to show the loneliness this girl would feel once she was away from home and alone, cut off from friends and family. The girl is alone in the frame, Iftikar explained, and her vast surroundings seem to swallow her. She is out of focus.
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