Images of Palestinian Pleasure Not Allowed

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/world/middleeast/images-of-palestinian-pleasure-not-allowed.html

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RAMALLAH, West Bank — Sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes it gets in the way. A little of both happened to Tanya Habjouqa, a photographer whose “Occupied Pleasures”— a series of everyday moments of Palestinian joy and light amid Israeli restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — was supposed to be celebrated at a book-launch party here the other night.

The books didn’t make it. They were, ahem, “detained” by the Israeli authorities: customs, in this case, at the Tel Aviv airport.

“Held hostage” is the way Ms. Habjouqa put it, something she called “no small irony.” But like the Palestinians who lift weights and do yoga and frolic by the Mediterranean Sea in her photographs, the party went on. Ms. Habjouqa raised a glass of wine from the steps of the Franco-German Cultural Institute and toasted: “To Palestine!”

With no books to sign or sell, Ms. Habjouqa floated among perhaps 100 guests and 20 poster-size photographs. Teenagers in tight dresses painting their nails and putting on music in a hot-pink room and children on amusement-park swings at night could have been anywhere. Then there was the man lighting a cigarette with a sheep in the front seat of his car, against the backdrop of Israel’s signature concrete separation barrier.

When some who saw her work said it was refreshing to see something apolitical about Palestinians, “I sort of laughed to myself,” Ms. Habjouqa recalled. “It is a political commentary, but it’s very subtly done,” she explained. “It seems so innocuous, but it is loaded.”

She is half-Texan and half-Jordanian, a photojournalist who came to document the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ended up inside it: married to a Palestinian, raising their two young children in Ramallah. Ms. Habjouqa, who is 40, said she wanted to get beyond stock images of the Palestinian as “either a violent terrorist or a victim,” but when she told people in the West Bank and, especially, Gaza, what she sought to show, they were suspicious.

“A lot of people would say, ‘Huh, pleasure, we don’t often talk about this,’ they feel almost a political obligation to talk about the suffering,” she said. “People needed to make sure that I wasn’t coming to render the occupation O.K., everything is fine. I would just explain the concept in a very basic level: Life continues, no matter what happens to you.”

What happened to Ms. Habjouqa was that she got a Magnum Foundation grant of about $12,000 that let her spend most of 2013 developing the series, then she won a World Press Photo contest that provided exhibits around the world. The $50 book, published by FotoEvidence with backing from $38,206 raised on Kickstarter, was an opportunity to frame the images with political context.

“A woman in Gaza, without a travel permit, passes through the silent dark of an underground tunnel on her way to a party in Egypt, carrying a bouquet of flowers,” reads the caption of one of Ms. Habjouqa’s favorites. Yoga on picturesque West Bank hilltops is called “inner resistance.” The sheep in the car is named Morsi, after the deposed president of Egypt, and the man with him is resting “after grueling traffic” at an Israeli checkpoint.

Julien Chiappone-Lucchesi, director of the cultural institute where the bookless book launch took place, said he had arranged for 48-hour shipping from a printing plant in Istanbul, five days out. The customs delay may well have been routine, he said, but still stung as part of the Palestinians’ struggle to move people and things. He recalled once having to transport instruments in diplomatic cars for a Palestinian orchestra concert in Jordan, lest it take two months.

“I’ve spent so much time with this kind of mobility problem, things that didn’t come,” he said with a sigh. Of the books’ delay, he added: “There was a tax to pay, or maybe not a tax, but it was not clear.”

Ms. Habjouqa noted that a much larger shipment of books sent the same day from Istanbul arrived in France without a problem. A book-launch event is scheduled for Thursday in Perpignan, as part of Visa Pour l’Image, an international photojournalism festival, she said, “with books this time.”