Homeland Lost is a photographic essay by Alan Gignoux that juxtaposes portraits of individual Palestinian exiles and their families with present day images of the places they left in 1948. The project took two years to complete and has entailed extensive work in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, along with painstaking research inside the Green Line to accurately identify the exact geographical location of the subjects’ homes or villages in 1948.
Decades of media reporting of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have emphasized political, military and terrorist events, largely ignoring the individual experiences of Palestinian exiles and Arabs living in Israel. Homeland Lost presents portraits of stateless Palestinians living in refugee camps, Palestinian exiles settled in Jordan and Lebanon and Palestinians living in the Israeli state. The subjects reflect the diversity of the diaspora population in gender, class, age and religion and the photographs as a group portray a society in exile.
The portraits in Homeland Lost are paired with landscapes showing the sites of the homes and villages from which the subjects originated. The act of pairing individual with place of origin is central to the exhibition concept. These images record the transformation of the former Palestinian landscape. Many of the houses, villages and agricultural lands have been allowed to fall into ruin, replaced by development, converted to new uses, and old names of places have been erased.
Homeland Lost records the disappearance of a particular historical landscape, thereby provoking discussion about the meaning of ‘homeland’ and ‘return’ for the Palestinian diaspora today. The project speaks of the heartbreaking difficulty of facing up to the impossibility of restoring a past that has ceased to exist and raises the question of imagining an alternative future.
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