workshop: video letters

Media - polaroid photography and video
Date: March – May 2008
Location: Youth center, Baddawi Refugee Camp, Tripoli
Facilitator: Diana Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan

Videos will be available shortly

The idea behind the Video Letters workshop was to develop narrative tools using still photography and video. The workshop, which was held in the youth center in Baddawi, included ten participants - both male and female, aged between sixteen and twenty-five years old - all Palestinian refugees from the camp.

The workshop began with a series of exercises related to image making and addressed issues related to the process of representation. What do images reveal? What can they conceal? In trying to represent experience - personal and collective - what kinds of images can be symbolically potent? What can the act of framing reveal about the person taking the photo? Participants were also encouraged to think about the particular aesthetic of the media being used. For instance, what effects can be generated through Polaroid? How do Polaroid and digital images differ in terms of depth, color and texture? After a brief technical introduction, each participant was then given a Polaroid camera for two days and invited to take a series of images that revealed something about their lives and the social life of the camp. As part of this assignment, participants were asked to take a photo of an object, a place and a person.

The second workshop began with each participant laying out their photos on the table, arranging the images in such a way that they told a story. Each person was then asked to move one place to their right and to weave the sequence of images taken by their neighbor into a story. This exercise forced the group to imaginatively engage a series of photos taken by someone else and to weave a coherent narrative from them. Participants were then invited to address their own work - interpreting their selection of photos for the group.

The photos were then collectively edited down to three images per person, and during the second half of the workshop participants were told to select places in which to display these three images and to take a further set of photos recording this process. The idea behind this exercise was to find productive tensions between the original image and the setting - creating visual juxtapositions that would in turn generate new meanings.

Participants were then asked to imagine that these photos were found in a box that had recently been unearthed in the camp, along with a series of letters. Each person had to write one of the letters than would be found in this box developing a fictive persona. The letters were addressed to a series of people: to a loved one; a child; an old friend; a grandchild not yet born; to a politician; to lost land; a distant relative living abroad, and so on. Every letter therefore represented a different facet of life that was at once both highly personal and also spoke to the experiences of the collective. By adopting a fictive identity, participants were able to represent the experience of being a Palestinian refugee from Baddawi camp both in a literal vein - drawing on their own lives - and as metaphor, addressing camp life as it is collectively experienced and understood.

In the final stage of the workshop the group selected aspects from the identity of each fictive letter-writer to create a single composite identity. Passages from each letter were then chosen and edited into a single letter. This script was then read aloud, with each participant reading the part that they had composed. Finally, a visual track was created using the photographs and written letters, and edited together with the audio.

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