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 Photographs are not a universal language. That they may be so is a wishful mythology promoted, usually subconsciously, by the powerful and the credulous. The result is that viewers of images do not question the contexts that frame images, most importantly the words attached to them and the presuppositions that make them worth somebody bothering to disseminate them. When we are under the influence of the myth of a universal visual language, we do not think that these contexts matter at all, and thus our understanding of the people and things that are photographed are quite literally at the mercy of the individuals and institutions whose business it is to prepare contexts. Their interests become invisible, or "naturalized," as Roland Barthes would put it. Mohammed and I asked, "How can images from Gaza be made to have meaning not in terms of the viewer, editor or photographer, but in terms of the life experiences of the photographed subjects?" Visual social science has long used "photo elicitation" to create a non-threatening interview environment that encourages those who are photographed by outsiders to explain the images in their own terms. (We once thought of asking people to make the photographs themselves, but then rejected this as too dangerous under occupation.) Mohammed sets up, in a spontaneous kind of way, interviews with five men and four women of varying ages ... Each person then looks over 83 photographs edited from the nearly 80 rolls of film. Each person chooses 12 photos and arranges them in their own order from their most important image on down. At that point, Mohammed asks each person to talk about the pictures one by one. ...Months later we will edit what becomes two notebooks of transcripts. From our records of each person's ordering of his or her 12 pictures, we will assemble a composite sequence, allowing us to publish the photos, with the comments, in a sequence dictated not by editorial priorities, but rather by the group's own idea of what is significant to them. |  |