Photographer Skip Schiel keeps a photo of a boat full of refugees hanging on his wall in his home in Cambridge. It’s not a photo that he took, but one that was sent to him in a fundraising campaign.
“I’m looking at it right now,” he said during a phone call with the Sampan. “It was made by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It’s a boat full of people of different colors, maybe a 100 or more, looking up, smiling, mostly, at the camera.”
Their destination, a better life, somewhere else, probably in Europe.
For Schiel, an 83-year-old “socially engaged” photographer, the image serves as a reminder of the plight of refugees around the world – all of the people forced out of their homes because of war, poverty, repression, natural disasters.
“I have it above a doorway connecting my kitchen and bedroom. It’s just low enough so that each time I pass through it – like now – it hits my head,” he said of the picture. “It’s part of why I am doing what I’m doing.”
Over the past several decades, Schiel’s photographic journeys have taken him to places forever wounded by mass murder and war: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Vietnam. He has also retraced the Atlantic-African slave trade. For the past two-decades, he has focused mainly on his Nakba project about Palestinians who were forced from their homes.
This effort has taken Schiel – during the years most Americans settle into retirement – back and forth through Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, to document survivors of the Nakba of 1948 in which it’s estimated that more than 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees.a
But when Schiel attempted to present his works in the Newton Free Library last month, the reception for the exhibit, “The Ongoing and Relentless Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 to the Present,” was met with protesters who overwhelmed the event and effectively shut it down. A box truck circled around the library, with the faces and names of Newton’s mayor and library director displayed on the side, accusing them of “hosting an exhibit promoting a vicious blood libel against the Jewish community.”
A group of Palestinian American speakers at the reception were shouted down, as several protesters, according to Schiel and others, yelled words like “terrorist” and “anti-Semite.”
While Schiel acknowledged that the protesters were not violent, he did feel they were allowed to “in effect, deny the free speech rights of the presenters, including me … and any conversation we were going to have.”
The reception in Newton would have included talking with and hearing from the local Palestinian-Americans.
“Perhaps part of the opposition, and the attempt to shut it all down, was that people just did not want to hear that, because they would have to change their minds,” said Schiel. “If they could hear from a human being, who looks mostly like them, and in fact who sent their kids through the same school system, that itself might be too dangerous.”
Sampan spoke with Schiel by phone about topics including the reception that couldn’t go on as planned, his photography, and his Nakba project. The following has been edited and rearranged for readability, clarity and brevity.
Sampan: So you had portraits of people, families, and different historical sites in this exhibit…. Are you trying to put a human face on this, so that people see these Palestinians as themselves or their own family members?
Schiel: You’ve described one aspect very well: to humanize the story, so people can see directly into the faces, the homes, of what I call the Nakba survivors. But also (to see) their original homelands. … I have portraits in black and white and landscapes, or what I call “site photographs,” of a curious color. People call it sepia, but I call it a misty, cloudy look. I interview and photograph, and I learn where they are from. They are from locations, now in Israel, that are mostly unavailable to them. So, I have a privilege – from my passport, from my nationality – and I can go almost anywhere there. I can be a surrogate for them… I can go back to their original village, to their original town, their rural area and – if I can find it – I can photograph it. I can’t just photograph rubble or open space, or an Israeli settlement, I have to find something that points to, that indicates prior Arab or Palestinian habitation, like a destroyed mosque …. So that is the second half of my series.
What motivates me a lot is curiosity. … I was very curious about the survivors. How are they? How do they look? How do they gesture? What are their homes like? I make a point, if possible, to always include in my frame something in the background, a couch, a painting, a drawing, a photograph, to give some sense of where people live. I am very curious about who they are; I am very curious about where they are – mostly refugee camps – and then also, about their former homelands.
Sampan: …What are you thinking in terms of safety … are you worried for your safety?
Schiel: … This project I made under special conditions, which means I worked with a Palestinian; I have three or five different people that I work with – paid – and they would locate survivors, introduce me to them, gaining trust, and help with the translation. The most common case would be after the introductions, and a few starting questions from me that would be translated into Arabic by my assistant, the conversation would then be between my translator and the person, and that freed me up. I didn’t have to pay attention to the conversation, I could think about different angles, I could move around a lot.
…. In the case of the Nakba project, I rarely felt any danger, because I was with somebody, even though we were in refugee camps, which could be potentially dangerous. … But I’ve been in refugee camps repeatedly over 20 years without anyone else and I don’t ever remember feeling too much danger, unless there was a … threat from the Israeli military … As you might know the camps are attacked fairly regularly, some more than others … With that … exception, I rarely felt danger…. But on other occasions, like in Gaza, if it’s bombardment or drone attacks or something like that, I would feel the danger. If I’m photographing in the West Bank and the soldiers or the police are present … I have to be very careful. … But I had to make a decision early on, “Am I willing to die for this?” And I said, yes, this is a cause that matters so much to me.
Sampan: What did you think about the treatment of the library director – her face and name were on the truck?
Schiel: Right, the mayor was there, too, so it was a paired pictured on one of those illuminated sign trucks. It was the mayor and the main library director … The headline was “Shame” – I don’t remember the full text, but “shame” for allowing this exhibit to go ahead. The mayor had produced a statement earlier, that in effect said two things, that this is a very fraught moment in history and to have this exhibit at this particular time and at this particular location is unwise; I forget her words exactly. … But they shamed the (library director) who was a major part in allowing the exhibit to go ahead. She could have canceled it. And I was very worried about this around February and March that this could all be canceled or that this reception could be canceled.
